Put your face on it.
Be more you.
Use the words you’d use if you were talking to a friend.
Chances are if you have or are starting a business, you’ve heard these things before.
You might even have a personal brand.
And that’s all good!
Brands with a personality are more relatable and can connect with individuals faster than faceless, lack lustre brands.
Typically brands with more personality gain awareness and popularity faster than those that don’t.
Not to mention, no one can ever “do” you so this is a fabulous way to go!! Bringing yourself to your brand makes it next to impossible for anyone else to try to copy you.
However, (you knew there was a but coming, right? ;)), with so much you in your brand, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking your brand is all about you.
The next thing you know it becomes the <Insert Your Name Here> show 24/7 and people aren’t able to figure out where they fit in.
Your personal brand isn’t all about you. If you want to be a real leader and the CEO of You, Inc. you need to change the E in CEO from executive to experience.
Creating a brand that stands out and truly lasts is dependent on the experience you deliver every time someone engaged with you and your company. From the second someone discovers you to when they become your loyal fan for life, the customer experience or “CX,” matters.
Before you dismiss CX as the territory of big brands, I challenge you to reframe that entirely. If you’ve ever worked in a big business, you know how slow things can move. Being small you have a distinct advantage – You can be agile.
Create Experiences in Your Brand
By creating experiences, you move away from you being the focal point of your business to putting your community, prospects and customers at the centre of everything you do.
CX doesn’t happen by accident, but by design.
So, where do you start?
One of the simplest ways is to understand exactly how people experience your brand. For example, when they first discover you on a social channel, what type of content do they receive? Does it serve them and add value?
A great example of this in action is inbound sales and marketing software provider Hubspot. They don’t just blog, they’ve created a series of blogs geared to the specific needs of each of their ideal clients.
Instead of just having one blog, they have five different blogs. They’re able to best serve their audience by connecting with them around their pain points and providing practical, applicable information. The end result is a superior experience that makes the company a go-to provider of marketing and sales information, which I’m sure drives readers into the next step in the process.
When a Prospect Raises Their Hand
If you have done your CX right and nurtured your community, you’ll have people interested in working with you and they’ll raise their hand.
I can’t tell you how many times I see small businesses drop the ball at this point. The goal here should be to make engaging with you painless. This may be providing a simple way to contact you, to book a consult or to try your product. The little extras here matter immensely so think about what you can do to enhance your CX here.
One of my friends just signed up for the CRM system Contactually. She’s pretty tech savvy so she signed up for the free trial and was trying to decide if it was a good fit. Then she got a call from Cameron on their team. Yes, an old-fashioned phone call. He’d been assigned as her customer success support person.
You want to bet that they now had her attention. She’d not even purchased and they gave her a success consultant? Rock on! (Clearly they had her interested as she shared this experience with me.)
Last week, she signed up for Contactually. Talk about CX done right because they made it next to impossible for her to fail so making the sale was so much easier.
Once the Customer Walks Through Your Door
You’ve got the sale! Awesome…now what? The hard work starts now, because it should be your goal to do more than have one sale, you want to have them purchase from you again and again, and be an ambassador for your brand.
Sounds easy, but this can be a hard one. For services-based businesses it could be a lack of follow through or poor communication, or for product businesses it might be making it difficult to return a product.
It’s understandable in a lot of ways, because we’re not perfect as CEOs, but it’s up to us to do everything we can to bake CX into what we do every day. Don’t get so focused on what serves you that you totally miss out on what it’s going to take to wow your customers.
If you need a bit of inspiration look to retail stores. Nordstroms’ is famous for it’s no questions asked return policy. They will take products back any time, with or without a receipt.
The Nordstrom’s great CX doesn’t stop there. There’s no returns counter as any sales associate can process the return. (Unless it’s a special occasion dress, that’s the one thing they’re sticklers on.)
A favorite example of mine is Zappos. They will let you return shoes for up to 365 days and they pay the shipping. It’s genius, because it completely removes the risk of buying shoes online, and this is the key to their success.
Maybe there’s nothing you need a return policy on, but think about how to create an experience that becomes a cornerstone of how you do business.
Alright CEO, are you ready to design a customer experience? Remember that E stands for experience. Focus on it and your personal brand will thank you for it!
