019: Value of Industry Expertise and Leveraging Video as a Sales Rep with Nathan Leary

Nathan Leary is an IT & Cybersecurity Sales Pro based in Austin, Texas. He is the host of Security + Brews Chat, which is a video series about actual IT problems. He has conversations with IT professionals over coffee, which positions him as an industry expert and a content creator. We discuss his early sales career, how he accidentally fell into IT (and loved it), and how he thinks about video, personal branding, and sales teaming with marketing to really add value to his buyers in the sales cycle.

Show highlights:

05:00 - Nathan selling Cutco knives as first sales job to haphazardly applying for SDR jobs after college, looking for a start up. Accidentally ended up in IT sales. 08:00 - How Nathan came to know and love cybersecurity without a background in it. He learned from talking to customers about their problems and listening. 13:00 - Starting the "Security and Brews Chat". Content in the sales process and include the personal branding piece. Nathan's goal is entertaining and valuable. 20:00 - Resources to get started with trending sales, marketing, and prospecting tactics like video. Find frameworks to make your content, then sales reps can plug and chug versus reinventing the wheel. 22:00 - How sales can approach marketing and brand managers to do bottoms-up messaging, versus waiting for it to trickle down. Nathan recommends Jake Dunlap for enabling sales to be digital brand ambassadors. 25:00 - find a company that lets you take an idea and run with it, especially as a sales rep if you're already taking content that marketing made and make it digestible. 28:00 - Frequency of posting content in 2019, don't dilute your message. How do you balance it with your job? It's okay not to scale your brand at a fast rate.