Are you looking for ways to differentiate yourself in the marketplace to grow your business? How does one build a brand and grow his or her client base with the best prospects? I will examine the idea that building your brand is not about finding the best prospects. It’s about finding your best prospects. Don’t overthink it, but you will need to overfeel it. I will challenge that the key to success and confidence in prospecting is to be vulnerable and look inward. Clients may be purchasing a product from you, but it’s not what you think. You are the product. So, let’s get you market ready.
Step 1: Identify what makes you, you
When you are unapologetically authentic, you stand in your own power, and you shine like a beacon of light, which becomes so bright that the right people are drawn to it. Like lost travelers at sea pulled in the direction of a lighthouse, they will seek you out with fervor. Be authentic, and your people will find you. The key to being authentic starts with having clarity around your values. So, what are your values? At my core, my team and I value purpose, empowerment, curiosity, candor and charisma (“Quaresma,” pronounced “charisma,” is my last name, after all). These don’t have to be your values, but you must identify and commit to your values 100 percent.
Step 2: Share your values with your clients and prospects
When I showed up as my authentic self, someone who was curious, passionate and empowered, clients and prospects saw themselves, and I realized I had found my tribe. And when you have a tribe, it’s no longer about you. It’s bigger than you. It has the potential to become a movement that is so powerful because that means you have created a following. If you speak your truth, commit to your values and align your actions to your purpose, your clients will follow you anywhere and share you with their network.
Step 3: Connect to your values, find your path and take action
Advisors think, and often lead, with their products, strategies and tools. But, none of that matters if your prospects and clients don’t feel a connection with you. I have always considered myself an artist and activist destined to a life of sales. Being true to my core values, I created a marketing campaign that focused on women and their historic financial inequities. However, I didn’t get the idea, nor commit to its execution, by paying a marketing company or hiring a team to assist me in a marketing campaign. I got the idea after receiving many compliments on a vintage dress I wore to the office. This idea came to me by being me. With all the fanfare of my dress, I merely sat on my desk, had my assistant take a photo of me, clad in polyester, and then posted it on Facebook and LinkedIn with this fact: “Did you know that the original owner of this 1960s sheath dress couldn’t get a credit card in her own name until 1974? The future is female.” Then I added the hashtag: #financefashionandfeminism. Within an hour of my initial post, my social media blew up. And it didn’t stop there. People were sharing it on their feeds. Finance, Fashion and Feminism was born, and I decided to design and produce a fiscal calendar where I featured local Portland women who were CEOs, executive directors, politicians and the like. Why feature myself when I could feature and highlight the success and stature of amazing women in my network? With each calendar month, I showcased a different woman in my community and styled her through the decades, paired with financial facts of the time as they moved through history.
Step 4: Shine your light for all to see, and your tribe will find you
My inbox flooded with people saying they wanted to work with someone like me because I was someone like them. I wanted to share a woman’s journey of financial setbacks through the lens of fashion. Each era was romanticized in the beautiful female fashions of the time, modeled by these successful women in my tribe, only to juxtapose this with facts in the calendar below of the dark reality that was female inequity. I wanted people to think differently about money and opportunity. I wanted them to feel empowered about overcoming any financial setbacks or obstacles. When I found women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, I realized no one was speaking to them. So, I started to.
We featured each woman’s business and shared her personal and professional accolades. The women offered advice on what they wish they knew when they started out to share with our viewers. The calendar featured 17 women over 18 months. Each month we highlighted their businesses on our social media pages and tagged them and their businesses, which gave us access to their community, to their tribe. I knew we shared the same values because they were part of my tribe. Then their tribe merged with mine, and the clients and prospects kept coming. With the creation of this beautiful piece of art, I started getting introduced to the design and tech community in Portland, with many of them becoming my clients. It just started to snowball from there. I was asked to speak at Design Week Portland where I was able to share the history of women and money from the turn of the 20th century through the present day, adding a call to action for those in the audience to write their financial future, with the help of my team and a financial plan. Through this marketing project, we brought on 94 new clients in a single year.
Step 5: Take a risk, and own your story
Be courageous and unapologetically you, but a word of caution: With that courage, you may lose some people, and that’s OK. If you are for everyone, you are actually for no one. If you are building a brand, you have to differentiate yourself. I’m not suggesting everyone make a calendar. What I am suggesting is to get vulnerable. Be authentic. Identify with your passion and live your values. It was a huge risk for me to draw a line in the sand and wave my feminist and quirky flag in the air. But I did because it felt right. I stopped hiding behind a business suit that I thought the consumer expected of a financial advisor and traded it in for some vintage clothing where I could be myself. However, it’s not about what you wear on the outside; it’s what you live on the inside. Let that light shine outward. If your values truly make you who you are, your authentic self, then your tribe will find you.
Charlene Marie Quaresma understands that flexibility and creativity are needed to build wealth in adverse markets. With her, it's not about judgment; it's about owning your story and following your dreams.
