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“I am what I am and that’s all that I am.” - Popeye

The best messaging you'll ever write is already sitting in your sales calls, in the exact words your customers use to describe their problems.

Candyce Edelen built her business proving it.

This is part two of our Win Trust, Win Six Figures series on building a trusted brand as an independent consultant. (Replay the first part with Angie Jones here.)

In this episode, Candyce talks to us about turning what your prospects already tell you into LinkedIn posts and thought leadership that actually sound like you.

She cofounded five companies over 30 years. A pivot in 2018 forced her to rebuild her pipeline. Hating, cold calling, she turned to LinkedIn and was able to book 125 warm sales meetings in six months using a human-to-human approach to outreach.

The key to her success was sounding like herself, being curious and starting warm conversations on LinkedIn.

Now, as CEO of PropelGrowth, she helps founders do the same: protect the time it takes to show up consistently and publish the posts that feel too honest to send. 

Here's how she thinks about it all.

Founders and independent consultants always say, "I'm great at what I do, but I don't know how to attract new clients." Do you see this with your clients too?

Candyce: Honestly, for me too. When I'm trying to sell, I feel uncomfortable with it. But when I focus on figuring out what someone's situation is and try to help them solve a problem, the discomfort with selling drops dramatically. I don't like cold calling, so I use other techniques to avoid needing to do a lot of cold outreach.

How important is it to actually go talk to your clients directly, and what’s an experience that drove that home for you?

Candyce: It’s honestly one of the biggest lessons of my career. Early on, I co-founded a company with incredibly complex fintech and none of us could explain what it actually did. We kept trying to describe it from a technical angle, but it wasn’t landing.

So I sat down with a client who really understood the space, and asked her to explain how she used what we built. Shed said it’s about normalization – and that phrase changed everything for me. Once I had her language, I could turn around and use it with every other prospect because it was already how they were thinking about the problem.

That’s the lesson I’ve learned on for 25 years: go figure out how the customer actually talks and use that language everywhere.

Unfortunately, most founders and teams never do this because we get stuck in our own heads. We teach our teams the way we talk and pretty soon, everything is internal. I’ve worked with companies where the marketing team is blocked from talking to customers because sales is afraid to derail a deal.

But in my experience, it’s the opposite: every time I interview a client, they thank me for asking.

It used to take a lot more effort than it does now. I had to sight down with that client to get the insight. Today, with everything recorded and transcribed, that same customer language is already sitting in your sales calls.

You don’t have to schedule a special conversation to go find it, you just need to listen to the recording.

How are you thinking through how to use all the information from your clients to scale into real marketing, like LinkedIn and thought leadership?

Candyce: With AI and the fact that everything is recorded now, there are much easier ways to do this than there used to be.

What I do with my clients is have them send me transcripts of sales calls, and then I go through it with an AI tool. I have marketing build agents to go through all of those calls and start surfacing: What are the customer questions? Where do they have their aha moments, and how do they describe it? Then I go back and ask follow-up questions on that, so I'm not going in raw.

Right now, I'll pull those customer questions straight out of a transcript and go back to my client and say, "This is what the customer asked, these were some of the points in the answer. How would you expand on that?"

And then I use that content to create LinkedIn posts, because it's such a good way to get out there and be the answer people are looking for. Transcripts are a huge asset. Don’t miss out on it.

Since you've talked to so many founders already, how much time should they actually be spending on this?

Candyce: That's such an important question, and it's something that challenges every business owner. I'm a business owner too, and we're all spinning plates. Some days it's like I've got a plate on my nose, on my forehead, on each finger, and a foot up behind me holding a plate too — and I'm about to fall over. Then somebody resigns, or goes on leave, or wants to take a vacation, and I've got to pick up another plate.

Almost always, the marketing plate is what gets dropped, because it's important but not urgent.

But if a founder is going to build their brand on LinkedIn and post consistently, they need to carve out three to five hours a week to work on it. We take some of that away in our service by creating the content itself, but you still need to be out there commenting and engaging yourself.

If we think about the purpose of any business as creating and keeping a customer, then you have two jobs as a founder: marketing and innovation. That's it.

If you're too busy doing other things, you need to figure out how to delegate. The one thing no one else can do for you is share your voice and build trust that then extends to the brand.

I have another potentially controversial question for you. How different should you be from others?

Candyce: You should be yourself. You're already different, so don't try to make yourself somebody you're not.

I tried that early on. I was really buttoned up, trying to be perfect. But it's really time-consuming and harder. And people don't connect with that, because they connect with the flaws.

When I shared a post about how I got fired and how it made me decide to start a business, that post went crazy.

It also sent a ton of people to my profile, and a bunch of people reached out to me directly because of it. Don't try to hide the wounds and the scars, because those are the things that make you you. They're the things that make people trust you.

What We Can Learn from Candyce Edelen:

Your LinkedIn profile is either building your brand or a waste of your time.

There's no in-between.

Join Candyce. Edelen of PropelGrowth for Anya Ciecierski's How Microsoft Partners Build a Founder Brand on LinkedIn — Sept 10th, 10am MT / 12pm ET via Zoom.

👉 Save your seat: https://bit.ly/linkedin-founder-brand

🚨 Chart crimes!

Here’s a chart crime masquerading as good data.

The red, orange, and yellow should be 75% of the pie.