S2E4: Justin Welsh: Controlling Your Sales Career Starts With Your LinkedIn Audience
Creating a meaningful personal brand on platforms like LinkedIn can have significant impacts on your corporate brand. This episode of the Revenue Harvest Podcast with Nigel Green features Justin Welsh, Co-Founder of Audience & Income.
Justin discusses how your personal brand can not only grow your network, but can also help you meet other leaders who can shortcut your career goals. Justin stresses the importance of investing in yourself especially through courses created by market and thought leaders.
Justin also explains that you don't always have to be “the guy” and why financial freedom is the ultimate flex. Listen now>>
Show notes:
We’ve moved into this next generation, this creator economy where everyone owns their own personal brands. Companies that leverage this well are getting ahead - they're attracting top talent. They get a lot of attention in the marketplace. They're generating a ton of leads on the backs of their employee’s personal brands.
Justin grew his audience not by saying “look at me”, but instead: “Here's some lessons, here's some failures, here's a few wins. Here's some folks on my team that I'm really proud of and I'm really appreciative of”.
I highly recommend that sales leaders go out and start controlling the narrative. Much like how small businesses have websites, they get to control the narrative… versus relying on third-party information.
If you never worked with me and we've never been peers in a company before, you have to just look at what you see out in the universe and use that as a deciding factor. And so knowing that people have limited information to make choices - I am damn sure going to control that narrative on my LinkedIn page. So I write my own story and when I write my own story, I get to be the teller of truth. When you get to be the teller of it, you get a lot of leverage.
When you get better at writing, you know how to hook folks in. When you can hook folks in, you get engagement. When you get engagement, your posts grow, your following grows.
If everyone loves your posts, you're saying something really, really vanilla. If everyone hates your post, then you're probably an asshole. So I like to be somewhere in the middle. I like to do 70/30, 80/20: I love it when 70 to 80% of my audience feels what I'm talking about, and another 20 to 30% of my audience thinks it's the worst thing they've ever heard.
The reason that I am really bullish on investing in yourself and controlling your destiny is because I believe that when I put a dollar into myself, it generally comes back both short-term and long-term in a high multiple. And so I invest in myself; I keep my expenses low, I try not to live a lavish lifestyle because to me, the coolest thing in the world is financial independence.
Links mentioned in this episode:
About Justin
Over the last decade, Justin has helped build two $50M+ ARR companies and raise over $300M in venture capital from firms like HLM Ventures, Leerink Transformation Partners, Vivo Capital, Toba Capital, and athenahealth. Then, in 2019, he burned out. So, he walked away from a high-paying executive job at a fast-growing startup in Los Angeles to work for himself. He wanted to completely redesign his life with more intention. His wife and him moved from LA to Nashville and built their own businesses online. They use active income to create passive income, and passive income to invest in their future. Now, he’s helping others through Audience and income, a private membership community for LinkedIn creators, dedicated to helping them grow their audience and create income online. In his spare time, he advises multiple SaaS companies, mentor entrepreneurs in LATAM via the 500 Startups mentorship program, and he’s an LP at GTM Fund, a rolling fund investing $4 million per year into early-stage B2B SaaS companies.