Content You Create Is About Them, Not You with Tara Horstmeyer

Foreign.

Welcome to the live Better Sell Better podcast with your host, Kevin Dorsey of Inside Sales Excellence, the number one Patreon group and YouTube channel for tech sellers and tech sales leaders, where we dive in deep for tactical advice on how to book more meetings, close more deals faster, and lead sales teams to success. But we don't stop there. We also focus on the person in salesperson. We talk about mindset goals, time management, and so much more. So thank you for listening and if you're interested, head on over to patreon.com InsideSalesExcellence now with that, grab a notepad, get ready, and let's dive into the good stuff. But first, a quick shout out to today's sponsor, Chili Piper. Plain and simple. If you book meetings, you need Chili Piper. I have been using them for years, personally and for my own teams, and I don't know how I'd function without it. I Chili Piper helps you book more meetings by increasing your conversion rates on your websites and your emails. By making it easier for your prospects to book meetings with you. Puts a meeting time right in front of them when they are most likely to book, but also handles all the handoff in the scheduling, making sure the meetings go to the right people at the right time, making sure the round robin actually works. And it helps meetings show up through dynamic reminders, customizable reminders. We already booked the meeting, now it's time to make sure they show. So if you book meetings, Chili Piper makes meetings happen and you need to have it for you and your team as well. And with that, let's get back to the show. What up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the live Better Sell Better podcast. This is your host, Kevin Dorsey, AKA kd. And we're going to go deep on branding today because building a personal brand is a hot topic on LinkedIn. Everyone talks about build a brand, build a brand this, build a brand that, you can build a business if you build a brand. Like everything talks about building, but very few people are talking about how. Because in order to build a brand, you need to be known for something. In order to build a brand, you need to be able to connect with people, drive a community, drive engagement. And that is why I'm so excited to have Tara Horsemeyer on the show today. She's the founder of Happy Words, right? Truly helping executives write better copy, build a brand, build a presence on LinkedIn. And she's going to dive in deep on how to actually do this, because if you do this right, it can literally change your life and your career. Tara, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

This is going to be a good one. We've been connected for a long time on LinkedIn. A lot of back and forth, and I love a lot of the things that you are putting out there. And so people love this show because we get right into it. No backstories, none of the fluff there. And so I want to talk about this idea of branding, right? Like, when you are working with these executives to, you know, build a brand, like, what does that mean to you? When you hear, like, branding or to build a brand, like, what. What do you hear there? What does that mean?

So a lot of times when that's such a buzzword for people because they're like, I don't want a personal brand, or how do I build a personal brand? And they think it's something almost external to them, like, hey, I've got to go achieve this thing or create this thing or make up this thing. And that's going to solve, you know, all of my needs, or it's gonna. It's gonna lead to all of these business decision. And what I love to do is I love to start with mindset. So I love that we're starting here. And I love to say, hey, you know what? Whether you know it or not, whether you think it or not, you already have a personal brand. You already have a presence. And so really, my job in working with executives and really just working with people every day is to bring out what's already in them and then to help them see, hey, this is just an extension of me in a different way. But it's not something that needs to actually be manufactured or created or something that's not genuine or inauthentic to them. And so once we start there and once we start, you know, bringing in the examples of, hey, who are you? When you're with your friends, you know, you're different than when you're with your family. You're different than when you're with your coworkers or your, you know, your team. Those are all parts of you, but those are all essentially a brand that you have internally or externally, just depending on the circumstances. So what I love to do is just kind of start there, remind them, and then that I found just. It breaks down a lot of the walls or a lot of. Kind of the preconceived notions that we have around building a personal brand. They realize, oh, my gosh, this is actually who I already am, and this is something I already do. I just want to put a little more intentionality around it and a little more framework and strategy around it.

I love that, that call out because especially, I mean LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, whatever. It's like the brands that people tend to try to push out aren't them, like they're not authentic. Especially like on LinkedIn, right? It's like, oh, well, that's the professional platform. So I need to be professional in this brand, but then I'm going to be different in this brand. So you kind of hinted at this a little bit, like, how do you help people, I guess discover that voice or to understand like this is what my brand is going to be. Right? Because I love you said intention, the extension of me. Like, how do you help people? Kind of pull that out and like, all right, where am I starting with my brand?

Yeah, it's so smart just to, just to kind of remember that this is again, this is an extension of you. It is a part of you, but it's also going to be just a certain part of you, you know, so still going to be authentic, it's still going to be who you're going to show up to be. But I always start with, okay, what are your goals? Like, what do you actually want to accomplish? Because so many times people come in and it's that whole kind of like random act of marketing. There's random acts of content, there's random acts of LinkedIn and they're like, it's not working. And I'm like, well, what are you actually trying to accomplish? I don't know, I just want to build brands. And so that's why really working with someone just like in any capacity of like, okay, let's hone this in, let's rein this. And what do you actually want? Okay, what do you actually want that you want that you want? You know, and so peeling back all of those layers and then just getting down to kind of those one or two things of, you know, I don't want to do everything or I don't need to accomplish everything via my personal brand. But here's one or two things at least to start out with. Here are kind of some baby steps, here's some, you know, three months goals that I would like. And then once we hone in on that, as we know, we kind of get rid of all the extra fluff, all the extra shoulds, or this person's doing that or that person's doing that. So I have to want to do that. And so once we Start small, achievable, and then set up, you know, strategies and effective content around those to just achieve minor goals at first, not try to, you know, build Roman a day. And then people just start to relax more, start to build more sustainable and then they allow themselves to say, okay, I'm going to show up more as me, because I'm not trying to close 50 deals off of two LinkedIn posts.

Right. And I'd love that. Now we're starting to get into some expectation settings here because I think a lot of times people like, all right, I'm gonna start and I make a few posts and like you said, it didn't work. Well, first of all, what were you even trying to do with those posts? But then second, like, expectations around kind of timing, right? So like, if you think about this, if people are listening, like, yes, I want to build a brand, like, what sort of expectations would you set for them in terms of like, here's a realistic timeline, right? Because you got to do this for a while for it to build up and get the momentum. So like kind of, how do you plant that seed of kind of the timeline of this?

Yeah, so that's probably one of my favorite conversations to have because that's when I get to the real real of what somebody actually wants. And then once they have expectations aligned of like, hey, just like content, just like anything else, it's going to take time. But you don't walk into a cocktail party or you don't walk into, you know, a first meeting with someone and automatically expect to, you know, build a relationship, close the deal, do all that anyway, you know, like, we don't do that in real life, so why the heck are we trying to do that on LinkedIn? And so once people start to see this is a relational platform, this is a way to connect, this is networking at scale. This is not, I'm going to this, you know, XYZ event and then I'm going to close the deal and move on. And it's not transactional. And so once we start to see, oh my gosh, this is a long game, it can be a little bit of a wake up call because so often people are looking at the big names, the people who have been doing it for so long and they're taking that snapshot and saying, oh, well, they put out a post about a new course and all of a sudden they've got 400 likes, you know, have sold 800 products or count or all this, and they're looking at that like, wait, I want that And I'm like, yeah, well, they've been doing this for five years. They have been depositing and now they're seeking those withdrawals. And it's natural and it's going to happen because they built the community. So I don't like to say, hey, good luck, we'll see you in five years. But there are ways that you can say, look, this is going to be a longer slow burn play, just like in real life, just like in the relationships, just like in what you're doing on business. This is just a way to do it at scale in a different way. And so once I start drawing those parallel, you know, parallelisms of like, hey, this is basically what you're doing already networking. You're just doing it in a different way, then they start to honestly take a breath and relax and say, okay, this is going to be fun now. Because I'm not looking at it so transactionally, I'm looking at it relationally, just like I do in my business.

I like that. I think that's a good transition then to start talking strategies. Right? Because there also is a right way and a wrong way to do some of this. And I think that's also where people, they're one, they don't think the long game, but then they. Some people do, they do it for four months, six months, but they're not doing it the right way. And then they do they give up? Because, like, well, I have been putting in the time, I have been kind of doing this where I'm still not getting any sort of return back. So let's start talking into the strategies now. So you've set expectations, right? You've kind of pulled out or maybe done a deep dive to find out, like their voice, what are some of the tactics that you see? And let's start with content first, right? Like, what type of content, you know, should people be focused on producing? And like, what are some of the things, I guess, that make it quote, unquote. Again, I don't want to use the word work, but you get what I'm saying of like to get engagement to pull people in. So let's talk content strategies first.

Yeah. And really by work, I think we all say it makes it worth our while, you know, whatever that is, whatever you're receiving from it. But I really try to help them see that just like in anything else, people buy from, they know like and trust people, they know like and trust. So your content has got to reflect a side of you where they feel like.