The Brand Called YOU

The Brand Called You
by Peter Montoya

The Difference between Branding, Marketing, and Sales

Sales is Convincing …
Sales are the words you say to overcome objections, negotiate a deal, and persuade clients to view a situation your way. You can identify sales activities by the fact that your lips are moving.

Marketing is Generating Business …
Every activity that directly generates revenue is marketing; direct mail, seminars, and even referrals are marketing. You can easily identify marketing because it highlights a specific product or service, a price, and directs prospects to purchase.

Branding is Influencing …
Branding appeals to our desires and touches our emotions. It has one goal: to emotionally predispose consumers into entering a business relationship. The goal of branding is to position a product or service in such a way that people feel an irresistible urge to purchase that product or service.

Nothing Ever Happens until a Product is Branded. Today, Branding comes first. We live in a skeptical culture - a culture that doesn’t want to be sold anything. Rather, we want to know the company story - who they are, where they are based, and what do they do - before anything else. The real fact is that nothing is sold until it is branded. When your “personal brand” is crafted correctly, the sale is made virtually without effort. Prospects arrive “pre-sold.”

Perception Becomes Reality

Perception is Greater than Reality …
Our perceptions define our choice of products and services. We select these products and services oftentimes without real evidence - we buy in response to branding.

Differentiation …
Differentiation is the most important tenet in branding, and it is the critical key to rising above the marketing noise.

Your Most Important Product …
In a world of look-alike products and services, in which all competitors have equal access, what is your most important product? The answer: your personal brand.

Emotion Forges Perception …
Most Branding attempts to win people over logically. But as logical as we like to believe we are, we make decisions emotionally and justify them with logic.

Did you get that?… “Nothing Ever Happens until a Product is Branded.”

With our simple invitational approach, you DO NOT have to sell. In fact, if you try to sell too early… your attempt will likely fail. Why? Because you have not branded yourself yet.

Automated emails sent out begin the process of branding and combined with the web site does most of the marketing. If done correctly, your initial phone call will cement the power of branding in your prospects mind.

Notice this simple statement you might make when you phone somebody, “… this is (your full name) - you may recognize my name from the Internet or from the emails I’ve been sending you…” This is a powerful branding statement. You are engaging your prospect into connecting YOUR name with the emails they have been receiving.

Simply “invite” your prospect to attend one of our webinar trainings and our website where the “selling” will take place.

Another important thing happens when you pick up the telephone to call your prospects… it’s called “differentiation”. You are probably the ONLY person that has called this prospect in response to their searching for a home-based business. Their email in-boxes are probably overflowing with opportunity emails — and yours are lost somewhere in there. When you make that personal contact on the phone - or even a voice message - you are doing that something extra that none of the others are doing and in the process are differenting yourself from all the marketing “noise.” Your prospect will now be more likely to open your email and consider your message. You have created brand awareness!

I’ve heard person after person comment that they have made some calls but have not been getting results. What results are they looking for?

If they define results as a signup… well they’ve got the process all WRONG and have mistaken expectations.

Let me repeat… “Nothing Ever Happens until a Product is Branded.”

I would suggest that if you pick up the telephone and complete a conversation following the “branding” model - your result is positive. You will have successfully accomplished what you should be doing. The call was a success!

You’re branding — not selling.

Again, let me repeat what Peter Montoya writes… “We live in a skeptical culture - a culture that doesn’t want to be sold anything. Rather, we want to know the company story - who they are, where they are based, and what do they do - before anything else. The real fact is that nothing is sold until it is branded. When your “personal brand” is crafted correctly, the sale is made virtually without effort. Prospects arrive “pre-sold.”

Let the process work for you and keep things in the correct sequence.