Reputation management

Dave Harries: Grant, in this brave new digital world, one of the things I know people worry about with their online profiles and their online brand and so on, is reputation. How do you control that? How do you deal with that?

Grant Leboff: I’m very strong in this, people will have to make their own luck in many ways. One of the things is the biggest thing online it’s social proof, is what other people say and do. It’s word of month is going online now. You need to make sure you illicit as much of it as you can. One of the things I say to sales people, and actually marketing departments as well, is every time you interact with a customer who’s happy with what you’ve done, who’s had a great meeting with you, who you’ve done a good job for, ask them for a testimonial but not where they email you what a lovely job you did.

Although it’s nice, it’s gratifying, it doesn’t do anything for you. You need these testimonials in public places. You need to be asking customers, “Would you tweet about that? Would you put it on Facebook?” It doesn’t really matter the platform that it’s on, but that is in a public place. On it’s own it’s not going to make any differences, someone puts a nice message on Facebook about you or a nice message on Twitter about you or something. As a one-off it makes no difference to you at all, but it’s cumulative.

If every time as almost as a matter of process you do a good job for a customer, you just say to him, “Please, if you’re happy with what I’ve done please put something on Twitter or LinkedIn or wherever you want to put it.” Over the months, the years, whatever else, as these add up, you end up with an awful a lot of social proof online which helps build your reputation, helps with trust and credibility. It’s very, very important that people listen to stuff all the time.

Dave Harries: Connected to reputation as well, I want to talk a little bit about trust, because we all know the stories, the traditional stories of the salesman as the shark. The sharp suited guy who comes in and sells you something you don’t really need or want because they’re just really good at it. Then they disappear and you’re left with a product that perhaps doesn’t work or doesn’t do what you thought it would, and that sort of thing. Are those days gone now because of this online reputation and the fact that you have to agenda this trust?

Grant Leboff: I think so. There will always be unscrupulous people that get away with it sometimes. That’s just the nature of life and we get that in all walks of life, not just sales. I think yes, we live in a much more open and transparent world. It’s much easier for people to check stories out, to find out who people are, to see who their connections are. Thankfully, I wouldn’t say it’s completely gone, but it’s diminishing and it doesn’t work for most people. It’s not good practice anyway but it’s not good business practice even commercially now either, which is great.

I think sales people as well enlisting testimonials and that proves a social proof and that credibility and trust. The other thing to make sure is be authentic. Be who you are. Really, we’ve all got great facets of personalities which we can utilize so we can become attractive, but attractive based on some semblance of truth in who we really are. The other thing to make sure that you do online which is very, very important is social media with social. What that means is that it’s 2-way. One of the things sales people must make sure they do is they do respond.

If you do put out comments there, if you do put out tweets there, if you do put out content out there and someone does respond to it and make a comment, make sure you respond back because to not do that, is to be broadcasting on a social platform, quite honestly it’s rude. It’ll be a bit like going into a pub and saying your views on the football that evening, and as someone goes to respond and give you theirs, you just get up walking away. Anyway, that’s what you’re doing would be in a social platform. Making sure you respond to those as well also makes you look credible and trustworthy and accountable.

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