A manager of mine asked me to be prepared to talk about my personal brand at the next team meeting. It’s rare I at this point in my career I feel like I am a deer in the headlights, but he obviously picked up on my facial expression and being the good, solid confident sales leader I am, I told him I would be ready. I thought, to myself “Personal Brand”, eh? Well, I’ve done work or worked for some of the world’s most recognizable, successful brands on the planet. IBM, Coca Cola, UPS, GE, Merck, BMW, Ford, Cisco to name a few. When we see a logo it stirs emotion that can be positive or negative and that in essences is your brand. To prepare for the team meeting, I went into LinkedIn and surveyed about 150 people I did business with over the past 10 years and took a sampling of those I worked for, those who worked for me and people I did business with. (IE: Customers, Vendors and Partners, etc. ) My survey was a one simple question: “When you received my email, from a business perspective, what was the one word that popped into your head when you saw my name and can please email it back to me?” I received multiple responses of the same word which I entered into a word cloud maker to create my logo. Hence some of the words are larger than the others as they came back multiple times. A millennial I am mentoring recently asked me what the wallpaper was on my smartphone (This Wordle) and she suggested I tell this story on LinkedIn.
Listed skills include Saas, Salesforce.Com, Unified Communications, Call Center, and 46 others.