What do people say about you when you leave the room?

I'll be honest with you. When I first started running personal branding sessions, I was doing it for selfish reasons.

It was the middle of the pandemic, I was leading customer success at Google, and I didn't want to lose the muscle of presenting. We were all stuck in our garages, our spare bedrooms, our kitchens, talking into webcams.

So, I picked up personal branding workshops as a kind of extra-credit volunteer project, something to keep me sharp.

And then something funny happened. I fell in love with it.

What started as a way to stay in practice turned into one of the most meaningful things I've ever done professionally. I trained a lot of people, but the conversations that stuck with me most were the ones with revenue leaders.

Because branding for revenue leaders is a different beast. The stakes are different, the cross-functional dynamics are different, and the way your brand shows up with customers, with your team, and across your org has a direct line to outcomes.

So, that's what I want to talk through here. What personal branding really is, why it matters so much if you're a revenue leader, and how to actually develop and manage your brand over time so it works for you instead of just happening to you.

A quick story to set the stage

Let me share something I wrote in about 10 minutes during one of my own workshops, while the people I was facilitating were writing their own statements:

"Amy is a passionate customer success leader dedicated to supporting the development of customer success leaders through coaching and impactful experiences."

I'm not going to pretend that's a perfect statement. It was a starting point. But that's the thing about personal branding. You don't have to nail it on the first try. You just have to start being intentional.

Before Google, I was at Salesforce. And my brand at Salesforce, for a while, was basically: "Amy used to work at Google." That was it. That was what people knew about me. And at some point I realized I needed to be more deliberate. I needed to focus on what I could actually do, what I cared about, what I wanted people to associate with me.

Because here's the thing. You already have a brand. Whether you've thought about it or not, people in your organization, your customers, your peers — they all have an impression of you. The only question is whether you're shaping that impression or letting it happen by accident.

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The Bill Murray principle

There's a famous quote attributed to Bill Murray about having a true sense of yourself, about leaning into your unique self.

And if you know anything about Bill Murray, you know the man is committed to the bit. He shows up at random house parties and washes dishes. He bartends in small towns. I heard he was in Oceanside earlier this year leading a pie-eating contest.

He has no agent, no manager. If you want to book him, there's an 800 number and an answering machine, and maybe he gets back to you in six months.

Now, none of us are going to operate quite like that. But there's something to learn from him. He has an unmistakable sense of who he is. And that's really what we're talking about when we talk about personal branding.

Authenticity.

Knowing what makes you different from everyone else in the room. Knowing what you bring that nobody else does.

When you start thinking about your brand, that's the question to sit with. What's the unique thing about you?

What personal branding actually means

The term itself was coined back in 1997 by Tom Peters in Fast Company magazine. His idea was simple. Brands exist for products, so why not for people?

Over the past 25-plus years, that idea has only grown more important, especially with the rise of fractional leadership, LinkedIn-driven careers, and the general expectation that you can articulate your value in a clear, repeatable way.

Here's how I summarize personal branding when I'm working with people on developing theirs:

Your personal brand = your strengths + your values + how you bring them to life.