In consulting, project business and many other areas, it is common to have sales experts who provides clients with comprehensive solutions according to their requirements. For example, not only recommend certain software to the customer, but also help implement it. This approach requires establishing deeper connections with the client, the ability to position your agency as a team of experts, which is very difficult to do when personal contacts are limited.

Today I will tell you how our bpo agency was able to increase sales in its dealerships and two other agencies by creating personal brands for employees and improving their satisfaction from effectively performing their duties.

Many managers sincerely do not understand why they should promote the growth of their employees' reputation, let alone invest the company’s time and effort into this. They are afraid that a popular employee will quickly leave for a place where he will be offered better conditions; others believe that fame should remain something reserved for the elite.

No, it's not like that at all. Using the examples of myself and two communication agencies, Checkerboard in Minnesota and Blurbpoint in Wyoming, I want to show how can improve sales lead generation by developing and implementing a program to promote the employees’ personal brands.

Market research suggests that content inspires trust in more readers – an average of 77% when it's backed by statistics. Here, I provide some specific numbers:

• The SurveyMonkey platform released a report according to which 68% of respondents confirmed that they value the professionalism of their published colleagues more highly. That is, a person’s desire to share knowledge with the target audience helps strengthen his reputation as an expert.
• According to the same source, 62% of respondents indicated that they consider the emergence of expert articles as a good basis for b2b lead generation.
• According to TrustRadius, the appearance of expert publications increases user trust in B2B products by 21%.
• And LinkedIn and Edelman estimate that nearly half of clients at companies outside the market leaders decided to make a deal when they were convinced of the expertise of employees through their publications. In short, when employees demonstrate themselves as experts in their field, trust in the company and the services it provides increases.

And this is especially true in the B2B sphere, where sales are strongly influenced by reputation and a developed network of personal contacts.

I am sure that only an active employee who invests energy in his development and follows news and trends can increase inbound leads. He brings more benefits to the company and better contributes to its promotion in the market than someone who quietly carries out his duties, without any spark in his soul nor having ambitions.

When we at Againagain.agency decided to promote our employees’ personal brands, we initially did not understand whether it was worth getting everyone involved in the process. The matter was complicated by the fact that not every person wanted to write something for social networks or media, not seeing it as having much significance for their career. They would be more willing to engage in cold calling lead generation, sending letters, etc. Then we decided to connect the personal goals of the employees with the global goals of the agency.

After conducting several strategic sessions, we found out that most of our colleagues would like to be part of the team of a well-promoted agency that is at the top of industry ratings. We have determined that one of the keys to achieving this goal could be an increase in the information field of materials authored by our employees. Therefore, it is necessary to ensure that the number of publications and performances under the Againagain.agency brand grows steadily - this is where the very merging of personal and business goals will occur.

It is logical that the accounting and back-office spheres remained not involved in the process of creating and distributing expert content, but in less than a year, 60% of employees, the core of which were specialized employees, including even the chief lawyer, were involved in it. It turned out that for the most part, people who are capable of writing competent articles and making reports are not at all opposed to publicity; some simply lack courage, perseverance and only focus on the task.

A system of incentives for those willing to develop their personal brand and the popularity of the company helped us solve this problem – a kind of audience engagement, although not in the classical sense. In addition, we used a support system, the main element of which was a content plan, where we entered topics and timing of publications selected in accordance with the preferences of employees. This streamlined the process and made it manageable.

The content matrix for publication topics looked something like this.

It is important that we did not take topics out of thin air, but selected them according to client requests. In the same way, we selected media platforms for publications that were interesting to potential customers.

List of target media we worked with during that period:

• Tech Crunch – https://techcrunch.com
• Harvard Business Review – https://hbr.org
• Inc – https://www.inc.com
• Wired – https://www.wired.com
• Quora – https://www.quora.com
• Bloomberg – https://www.bloomberg.com/europe
• The Economist – https://www.economist.com
• Reuters – https://www.reuters.com
• Business Community – https://www.business2community.com
• Adweek – https://www.adweek.com
• The Drum – https://www.thedrum.com
• Martech Series – https://martechseries.com

All this gives us the right to confidently include the personal brand development in the list of sales development services in particular and the reparative growth of the company in general.

Additionally, we:

• Created a database in which we included brief information about each employee’s biography, career and his press photo;
• Used Buzzstream and Muck Rack to streamline our media relations;
• Created a list of specialized events that could be used as a platform for performances;
• Hired an editor from Againagain.agency, who began to help his colleagues polish their proposed abstracts in order to turn them into compelling content;
• Started sending out announcements of publications in the internal chat, emphasizing that the work put in by employees in their preparation is as important as lead sourcing; Introduced a reward system for those who actively participated in creating the agency’s image in the mass media field.

Here are a few events our employees were scheduled to speak:

• Recruiting Blogs – https://recruitingblogs.com
• Sirona Says – https://www.sironaconsulting.com
• SourceCon – https://www.sourcecon.com
• ERE – https://www.ere.net
• Conference in Europe – https://conferenceineurope.net

And this is a clear demonstration of the results of our work.

Thus, promoting the personal brand of employees brought very tangible positive results both to each of them personally and to the company as a whole.

Many colleagues willingly joined the program we proposed to promote their personal brand and began to look for publication sites themselves and suggest topics.

A year later, we made it to the industry rankings. Of course, it is not just because of our new outreach strategy and the increased number of publications. The main reason was the comprehensive work of all agency employees, and not less important contribution of the expert content. At the same time, the number of incoming leads increased by 55%, although we did not engage in cold sales. Every fifth of our clients, when concluding transactions, said that they read publications by Againagain.agency employees in the media. I think this sufficiently proves that we have chosen the right path.

In short:

• Employees who demonstrate themselves in the information field are beneficial to the company, despite the risk of competitors trying to lure them away.
• Expert content can actively increase the growth of qualified b2b leads.
• Specialized content production by company employees can and should be stimulated.
• The activity can be motivated in different ways, and not only financially.
• Your own strategy for promoting the personal brand of employees can streamline and improve this process.
• We have proven in practice that this approach really brings results. This applies to our agency and the two agencies that contacted us.

And on a personal note, I advise business leaders not to fear that people will make a name for themselves and leave, but to worry that they will sluggishly perform their duties without ambition, motivation and growth.