Improving Your Companys Bottom Line: The Power of Personal Branding

Let’s face it: There are never enough hours in the day to get everything done – especially when you’re running a business. So, focusing on a topic like personal branding may end up at the bottom of your “To Do List.” Just how important is personal branding to the success of your overall business anyway?

The truth is that whether or not we focus on personal branding, every single one of us already has a personal brand – whether we like it or not. That’s right – you and every member of your team has a personal brand, even if you’ve never thought about it before. That’s because your personal brands exist in the minds of your customers or clients. Everyone you meet forms an impression of who you are and what your company can do. They will know very quickly if they trust you and want to do business with you. That’s the power of personal branding.

But when you own a business, your company’s success isn’t built just on your company’s brand and your individual personal brand. It’s also built on the personal brands of everyone who represents your business in the marketplace. So, how do you know if your team is presenting your company in the best possible light? Well, if they’re not creating their personal brands consciously, they may be inadvertently leaving negative impressions about your company wherever they go. Only through controlling their individual personal brands can your team reach their full potential and contribute to your company at the maximum level.

When people make the commitment to define and communicate their personal brands in the work place, they begin to focus on their strengths and diminish their weaknesses. They think specifically about how they can distinguish themselves. They become more aware of how they are perceived by others and make adjustments to be the best they can be.

Personal branding not only helps your employees excel in their jobs and represent you in a positive way, but it also gives them a sense of purpose and pride in their work. Pause for a second to envision a workplace where every member of your team is acutely aware of how customers perceive, think, and feel about them. Imagine that they consciously focus on presenting their personal brands every time they attend a meeting or make a sales call. When people know how to achieve or exceed their goals, they’re more willing to go that extra mile because they are fulfilled in their jobs. They know they’re making a contribution to your company, and they feel a sense of accomplishment.

The world would be a very different place if everyone accomplished a lot at work and felt a sense of fulfillment, wouldn’t it? So, how do you bring personal branding to your team?

First of all, dispel the myth that personal branding is all about how you look. No matter how beautiful the suits or uniforms your employees may wear, if talent and integrity is missing, your customers won’t be fooled for long.

No, personal branding is about much, much more than just how you look. When you do it right, your personal brand expresses who you are at your very best – or perhaps I should say, who “YOU™” are. That’s right – the trademarked, branded you – which is a brand just like your favorite toothpaste. And YOU™, as well as each and every member of your team, have the ability to inspire the same trust and loyalty from employees, clients, and customers that you have for that favorite brand of toothpaste. It’s simply a matter of learning how to carefully craft, communicate and master an ownable and powerful personal brand.

A Simple, Step-By-Step System

When you’re running a business, you don’t have time to read a lot of theory. You need frameworks and systems spelled out for you in no-nonsense terms so that you can get on with the brass tacks of the process and reap the benefits of your efforts. This is why I developed a clear-cut personal branding system that walks you and your team through each step of the personal-brand-building process. This system, adapted from the same marketing framework that has created every top-selling corporate brand we know, is a proven method for success. Indeed, if it works for your favorite brand of car or computer, why shouldn’t it work for YOU™?

The system, which was formed through years of training, speaking and coaching on the topic of corporate and personal branding across multiple countries, is spelled out in my recently-released book, How YOU™ Are Like Shampoo: The Breakthrough Personal Branding System Based on Proven Big-Brand Marketing Methods to Help You Earn More, Do More, and Be More at Work.

The first step – defining your personal brand – involves carefully crafting the six elements that blend together to create what I call your “Personal Brand Positioning Statement.’ The system gives you and your team an easy-to-follow framework to determine your current personal brand (the one you may not have even known you had), compared with the personal brand you would like to create in order to achieve your highest goals. Utilizing the Personal Brand Positioning Statement allows you to see exactly where your current brand may fall short and where you need to improve to achieve optimal success. To give you a glimpse, the six elements are:

1. Audience: Who are you trying to impact or influence with your personal brand?

2. Need: What are the needs of your Audience, and how can you fill those needs?

3. Comparative Framework: Who else might your Audience consider to meet their needs?

4. Unique Strengths: What are the strongest talents you can offer your Audience to respond to their Needs?

5. Reasons Why: What credentials prove to your Audience that you can actually deliver your Unique Strengths?

6. Brand Character: What is the personality or overriding temperament of your individual brand?

The resulting Personal Brand Positioning Statement guides you through specific questions to ask yourself about each of these elements until you have defined a crystal clear picture of where you and your team members are with your current personal brands, as well as where you want to be with your desired personal brands.

Of course, defining your personal brand isn’t enough. After all, if you and your teams simply stick your well-defined Personal Brand Positioning Statements into desk drawers and leave them there, what good will that do? You have to move on to Step 2 – effectively communicating your personal brand to others - in order to become known for what you alone can bring to your Audience. There are clear and specific ways to let others know your personal brand without promoting yourself in an overbearing way. Corporate branders work hard to communicate their brands via packaging labels, commercials, and print advertising. But, personal branding is more subtle and doesn’t involve commercials and advertising. You still have to take specific steps to communicate your brand in order for it to have an effect on your Audience, and the system shares five specific activities we all do each and every day at work that most effectively communicate your personal brand.

The third and last step of the How YOU™ are like Shampoo personal branding system involves avoiding Personal Brand Busters™ – mistakes that can consciously or unconsciously damage the personal brand you’ve worked so hard to define and communicate in the workplace. Personal Brand Busters™ offers you and your team members the chance to learn from the career mistakes of others so you can steer clear of those same mistakes yourselves.

In the end, if you and your team aren’t in control of your personal brands, how will you know your collective current personal brands aren’t actually wreaking havoc, preventing your company from increasing its bottom line and reaching the best possible market place positioning? Personal branding is a sure-fire way to solidify your company’s bottom-line growth… and that’s just too important to leave to chance.

About the Author

Brenda Bence is the author of How YOU™ are like Shampoo: The breakthrough Personal Branding System based on proven big-brand marketing methods to help you earn more, do more, and be more at work. See http://www.HowYOUAreLikeShampoo.com or http://www.BDA-Intl.com or http://www.BrendaBence.com for more information.

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Military Planning Procedure For Your Dental Practice Marketing

With 2008 half-way over, it is time to start planning for 2009. Planning in any business is an essential function that all too many times gets overlooked. Lack of planning leads to playing defense for a whole year and being reactive, not proactive in your success.

Think about it this way: When you go into a dental procedure, you have all your tools laid out on the tray ready to go. Why not start the year with all your marketing tools laid out ready to go, and knowing exactly when you want and need to use them?

In my four years as an active duty Marine, I learned time and time again that planning would lead to success. We even had a saying "proper prior planning prevents poor performance," and we were given an acronym, B.A.M.C.I.S., to help plan missions...

B.A.M.C.I.S. (pronounced bam-sis) has to do with leading Marines on the battlefield and is used to plan for every mission. B.A.M.C.I.S. stands for Begin the planning, Arrange for reconnaissance, Make reconnaissance, Complete the plan, Issue the order, and Supervise. These simple six steps apply to any task or operation you will take on...

Before you start the B.A.M.C.I.S. process, you will need a mission. For the sake of example, your goal or mission is to increase gross revenue by 10% in 2009. It's a little vague, but it will work for our purposes. Now, let's go step by step through the B.A.M.C.I.S. process...

1. Begin the planning: The first step is actually beginning the planning (duh). You will approach your goal, and figure out the methods to best accomplish it. In this case, to increase your gross revenues by 10%, you can either find new patients, or, you can do more dentistry on your current patients, or a combination of both...

Also, you need to do is take a quick inventory of your available resources like staff, equipment, and old marketing (brochures, business cards, etc). This will let you know what you can include in your plan, and will help in the next step...

2. Arrange For Reconnaissance: In the second step you arrange for your information gathering. In the Marines, this may include requesting maps, video surveillance, or even planning another mission to gather information on the terrain and enemy positions...

For your practice, it means taking an information inventory. Do you have production reports and patient reports by month for 2007 and 2008 to date? Where do you find marketing results? What do you need to do to get those reports? Gather as much information on the last 12 months as possible, and then move on to the next step. Check also with local government, competitors, and local media to see what events are coming (Wal-mart, parades, dentist down the street retiring)...

3. Make Reconnaissance: Now that you have all of your information, you have to sort through it. Figure out your worst month and your best month, what marketing was out those months, and how many new patients resulted from the marketing. What is coming up this next year (anniversaries, trade shows, community events)? This is an information finding step, not a planning step. If there are months where incomplete data was kept, recreate those months in this step...

Create your 2007-08 report with all the numbers you need for 2009. Include production by month, new patient flow, cancelled appointments, average production per patient, new and current, and completed treatment plans. These numbers will all be great when it comes to the next step. Many times your practice management software can pull these numbers just by clicking the mouse a few times...

4. Complete the Plan: Now, apply all of the information you have gathered and create your plan. Take your monthly reports and use them to figure out when to up your marketing. If you know July is slow, pump up the marketing in June. If there is a big anniversary for your practice in the summer, plan a patient event...

Hint: Use reverse planning. If you need patients calling by August 1st, subtract 3 days for mailing, 5 days for fulfillment, and 5 days for printing. If you want calls in your office on August 1st, you need to have the project to the printer by July 14th at the latest. Plan all marketing projects like this. If you need patients on August 1st, July 30th is not the time to start the project...

Don't forget a contingency plan for emergencies... flood, fire, theft, etc. These things happen, and it helps if there is a plan just in case they do...

5. Issue The Order: Have a meeting and lay out your plan to your team. This serves as an "order" for them, to let them know exactly who, what, when, where, and why you are doing this. Make sure to leave out no details. If Jane at the front desk needs to be in charge of postage purchasing, tell her how many stamps you need and when to get them. Lay out the year for them, so there will be no surprises when you announce the need to sign Thanksgiving cards for your patients...

Then, in your daily/weekly huddles, you can lay out what needs to happen that week/day. Who needs to call the marketing company? Who is working on the copy for the newsletter, and deadlines for each project? This goes back to reverse planning. Give yourself and your team notice of any problems, and what you need to do to get them handled. How do you know when there are problems? Check the next step...

Supervise: I cannot stress this enough. Supervising is the most important step to your planning since the plan is useless without implementation. This does not mean just supervising people, but also processes, situations, and external vendors. This allows you to know if things are going according to the plan, as well as when to take action steps to fix a problem. Look over your weekly plan and make sure things are on time, what needs to be ready for next week, and who is in charge of doing what. Do not micro-manage this step. Trust your staff and external vendors to get things done (they should be trustworthy, you hired them)...

If there is a problem, use another military acronym, OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act). As you supervise or observe the implementation of your plan, you will notice problems here and there. Orient yourself to these problems. What needs to be adjusted or changed? Make a swift, firm decision, keeping the mission in mind, and acting on that decision. The Marine saying is, the quicker you act, the less time the opposition has to prepare defense...

If you supervise correctly, you will catch all problems early. This makes them easier to solve, and makes certain they have less effect on your mission. Rather than walls, they appear more as speed bumps. There are few problems that prior planning could not resolve...

Planning can and will help your practice run smoother. It is often ignored in business today, and comes to haunt many business owners. If you lay out a proper plan using the information you have gathered over the last year, you will surely create a smoother running practice. Remember, proper prior planning prevents poor performance.

About the Author

James Erickson is the President of EMC Dental Marketing which gives Dentists a resource for turn-key dental marketing programs and dental practice marketing education including new patient attraction, and internal marketing systems. Visit www.EMCdental.com and get a free practice
building kit sent directly to your home or office.<

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