In a tough financial climate where there's fierce competition for work, making yourself stand out from the crowd is essential to achieving commercial and career success, according to personal branding coach Lesley Everett.

It’s no longer good enough just to do a good job. To maximise your success and career progression today you need to pay attention to your personal brand, as well as your exposure and visibility within your chosen target market. Ask yourself:

• Do the people I want to know really know who I am?
• Do others have to describe me in great detail for these people to know who I am?
• What am I famous for or what should/would I like to be famous for?

From the answer to these questions you will know if you are managing your personal PR as well as you should be.
In the crowded accountancy marketplace, if you just fit in you won’t get ahead. It is essential to stand out and be the architect of how you want to be perceived. Statistics show that your chances of promotion are down to three major factors:

•  Doing your job well – 10%
•  Your attitude and behaviour when you do your job - 30%
•  Visibility and exposure – 60%*

*Source: Eleri Sampson, The Image Factor

Building ‘brand me’
The Walking Tall personal branding concept has been developed through working with thousands of executives over the past ten years. As well as providing a framework for building a strong brand, it focuses on managing your personal marketing, the major principles of which I will outline below.

Before you even think about raising your visibility in your organisation and/or your chosen target market, you have to think about what you want to stand out from the crowd for. In other words, what are your unique strengths and brand values? In order for your visibility plan to be positive, your brand messages need to be authentic and based on who you really are, otherwise you’ll be in danger of being seen as attention seeking and false. It’s important to be congruent.

To discover your personal brand, first think about your fundamental strengths, your individuality and your personality. Uncover from within what you’re outstandingly good at. For this, you need thinking time on your own. Consider these elements of your character:

• Personality traits: If you take a step back and look at yourself, how would you really define your personality? What are the adjectives that you would use
• Talents: What is it you’re outstandingly good at? Often we miss what we’re good at because we’re either too focused on bridging weakness gaps or we just get on and do things and assume others are also good at these things. Forget modesty for now and think about your strengths.
• Values: What do you stand for? What are your principles? What can’t you bear when others do or don’t it? These are your fundamental values in life. Think outside of your work environment too for this.
• Personal style: How do you apply yourself to new tasks or projects? What is your natural approach? For example, are you very structured, creative, open minded or perhaps a lateral thinker?

As a secondary step, consider the uniqueness of your brand. Record all the memorable moments in your life from as far back as you can remember; i.e. the experiences or things people said that made a difference to you, the pivotal points in your career, and the common threads. Everything you do every day adds a layer to your brand and your brand evolves organically over a period of time. Every email you send, every telephone message and conversation, every meeting and presentation all add to your brand and either reinforces key values or dilute and weaken them.

Increase your visibility
Now you’ve considered your ‘brand me’ proposition and how you come across to others, let’s look at how to build your visibility plan. You need to know who your target market is, both internally (i.e. your boss or colleagues) and externally (your customers and clients).

Make a list of 100 people who need to know who you are and what you do. Consider who you want to know about you and have a plan of how you can become more visible to them. Who also knows these people? Is there some useful information you need for a presentation from them? Is there some regular information you can forward to them that may be useful?

By spreading your brand and reinforcing your brand values within the right circle of people you’ll see how others will start talking about you. Your visibility will grow, and not necessarily by being out there physically all the time. That’s not what it’s about.

Be remarkable
When people talk about you, you become ‘remarkable’. “It’s no longer good enough to be good enough”, according to Seth Godin, author of ‘Purple cow: Transform your business by being remarkable’. “Only the exceptional, the amazing and the remarkable have the chance to build awareness, word of mouth and profits”. Once you’re confident with your personal brand and you project it consistently, you’ll become remarkable.

Going that extra mile really works. Do you remember personal information about your clients and colleagues? Are you interested in them and show it? Remember, you can be a more interesting person if you’re interested in others. Sending a handwritten thank you note rather than an email for example will always make that extra impact and letters that are hand signed with a fountain pen work well. If people feel you’ve put thoughtful time into communicating with them, especially if they know how busy you are, you will be putting strong values into their mind about you and about your standards, integrity and style.

Top tips
There are eight key steps you can take to raise your visibility in your chosen target market:

1. Become great at presenting and be aware of taking the opportunities to present.
2. When gathering information for presentations, include your target market.
3. Recognise opportunities to go the extra mile with whatever you’re doing.
4. Make notes about important personal points. People love to know you’re interested in them too, not just their business.
5. Consider the most successful people in your company or industry – why are they well known?
6. Always be aware of occasions when picking up the phone or a face-to-face chat would have more impact than an email.
7. Surround yourself with people you want to be like; people who will talk about you.
8. Focus on your unique values, build your ‘brand me’ and be consistent.

If you think about these points and act on them you’ll be sure to build that all-important personal brand in other people’s eyes and they will talk about you. You will make it easy for them to label you, and people like labels – it makes our lives easier. Finally, at the end of every week, think about what you’ve done for your brand image and visibility this week. Have you added to making yourself ‘remarkable’ or have you just ‘fitted in?

Lesley Everett is a leading personal branding expert and author of Drop Dead Brilliant (McGraw-Hill New York – 2007)

www.lesleyeverett.com [1]

Need some more hands on assistance? Try Lesley Everett’s new video e-course on executive presence and personal branding. The course is made up of 12 modules lasting 10 minutes each and the first two are available for download free of charge at www.walkingtall.the845club.com [2].

AccountingWEB.co.uk members who subscribe to the course can also claim a complimentary copy of the accompanying audio CD, Taking Control of Your Personal Brand (worth £12.50).