Episode Summary
In this episode of Rep Your Brand, the host, Nick Bennett, talks to Kyle Coleman. Kyle leads the Growth team at Clari – a combination of sales development, growth marketing, and revenue enablement.
Kyle talks about the importance of building a personal brand. He believes personal brands have a positive impact on a company’s success as well. He also finds LinkedIn as the best platform for presenting himself. LinkedIn, as Kyle says, fits his business style, writing style, and target audience.
Successful people usually act like success is a Zero-Sum Game, Coleman states. They believe someone’s success must come at the expense of someone else’s. That’s not true, the guest explains. The whole point of success is sharing your story and helping others achieve it. It is also the projection of how far you have come and what else you can do to be even more successful.
Kyle and Nick mention another key to success, and that is personalization. Interlocutors conclude: hundreds of likes don’t matter. What matters is the impact you have on the people you interact with. If you’ve helped one person, you’ve done a tremendous job.
Guest Profile
- Name: Kyle Coleman
- What he does: Kyle is the VP of Revenue Growth & Enablement at Clari
- Company: Clari
- Key Quote: ''There's a lot of knowledge out there. And the more willing you are to share with the community, the more willing the community will be to share back with you and vet your ideas and make them better.''
Key Insights
- Make your content skimmable. Kyle believes the time he has spent in the SDR realm helped him generate LinkedIn content. A lot of the principles for good outbound messaging work on LinkedIn as well, Kyle explains. ''You don't need to be too technical or too esoteric with the words you're using, like esoteric. And spacing things out well is important. The principle I think is valuable is: separate thoughts go on separate lines. I want my content to be easy to consume. And if you can think about what fits your eye and if you think about things that you read, trying to adapt those same sorts of principles to the things that you're writing, you'll find success.''
- Speak like a human, and you'll get much more human responses. The two agree that personalization is the key to success, but people continue to use a copy-paste method.''People will send cold emails, and marketers, for those of you listening, you're as guilty of this. You'll go to your company's About Us page, and you'll say, 'Oh, this is brilliant. Copy.' Don't do that. That sucks. Nobody wants to read about you in a cold email. If you can take what you know matters to that person, the challenges they're facing, the strategies they're pursuing, and you can reorient your messaging through that lens, you can cut out the marketing buzzwords.''
- It doesn't matter if you get hundreds or dozens of likes — who cares. People get seduced by big numbers. Kyle is aware that thousands of comments don't leave anyone indifferent. But he is a firm believer that if you help one person or build a strong relationship with one person, you've done a meaningful job. ''Yeah, it's cool when something that you write has mass appeal and goes viral. But it doesn't ultimately matter; it's not the reason that many of us are doing this. The reason the best people are doing this is to help other people. If that is your success criteria and you say, 'I helped one person today,' that will be a much more inspirational way for you to continue putting your thoughts out there.''
“Posting on social helped me learn more. It just became this big feedback loop.”
Kyle Coleman
VP, Revenue Growth & Enablement
Clari
Episode Highlights
The Personal Brand Makes a Huge Impact on the Company
The personal brand is crucial for anyone on LinkedIn, Kyle explains, but it is also significant for the company. Companies should encourage their employees to build personal brands because it is beneficial for their businesses too. ”I don’t separate my brand from the Clari brand. Most of what I’m doing or the immediate impact that I can see anyway comes in the form of affecting event attendance and demo requests, and whatever it may be. So that’s one of the benefits I would say of having a brand, and that’s one of the reasons that it matters.”
Post About Things You Have Experience in and Some Semblance Of Expertise
”I always want to make sure that what I’m doing is posting about things that I have experience in and some semblance of expertise in. I hesitate to call myself an expert in anything ’cause there’s always something to learn. But the combination of experience and expertise is, I think, super important to put out meaningful content and put out content that you can stand behind to substantiate with your experiences or with data or with whatever it is.”
Kyle’s First Post on LinkedIn
Kyle’s first post on LinkedIn was about mentorship. It was a topic he was very interested in for quite some time. People will reach out, and they’ll ask: can we talk for 30 minutes? And they don’t contextualize it in any real way. And so I just posted something about the right way to ask for people to be mentors. You need them to understand who you are and what you’ve done, what you’re trying to do, and why you feel like that person you’re reaching out to is going to be a solid mentor for you.”
What Does Adding Value Mean?
A lot of people are successful, Kyle says. But most of them act like success is a zero-sum game. They believe your success comes at the expense of somebody else’s. That’s not the case, Kyle confirms. ”So, get over it, and share the tactics that work for you.
That’s what people want to hear. That’s what you want to hear from other people when you’re consuming content on podcasts or LinkedIn or whatever. I’m not going to be super secretive about what’s working, and neither should you.
If you’re a marketer, if you run a successful campaign or program or event or something like that, think about what made it successful and post about that. It is a useful exercise for a couple of reasons. One, because you’re helping other people. But two, because it forces you to be retrospective and do a real post-mortem on the types of programs you’re running and how you’re spending money and all those sorts of things.”
I Like to Be Pretty Thoughtful With the Posts I Write
Kyle is only active on LinkedIn. The platform fits his style of thinking, writing, and target audience. ”My target audience is mostly SDRs, salespeople, marketing people, and they’re most active on LinkedIn. I also like to be pretty thoughtful with the posts that I write. I’m a little bit different than some other content creators out there. I take a little bit more time to do a draft and final draft version of writing.”
Sources of Inspiration
Kyle finds inspiration in everyday interaction with his coworkers. He also likes to read other people’s content and comments on LinkedIn. ”I have the benefit of working with 15 SDRs who I get inspired from every day, in one way or another. Either inspired by the work that they’re doing, which truly is world-class. And then the other things I get from them are questions about how to approach time management or how to do some tactical sort of thing.”
How Does a Marketer Get Your Attention?
Aside from creating content, Kyle consumes content on LinkedIn. Things that draw his attention are related to topics he cares about or are meaningful for his company. ”A marketer gets my attention by having a real perspective on one of two things or both in a best-case scenario. The pains and challenges that I’m facing day-to-day or what our company is trying to accomplish from a strategic sort of standpoint and how their product or service can help us in service of that strategic initiative.”
