The Invisible Tax of Being Unknown

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Welcome to Lesson 40 and the next learning path of The Purposeful Performer: Take Full Ownership Of Your Personal Brand. This will be identifiable via pink lesson numbers.

Most strategic tech sellers remain invisible to 99% of their potential opportunities. While you're surpassing quota in obscurity, lesser performers with stronger personal brands are fielding inbound offers for opportunities and roles you'll never hear about.

The solution isn't self-promotion—it's strategic visibility. When you architect your professional presence like a product launch, you stop chasing opportunities and start attracting them.

Total points up for grabs: 25

Your network is your net worth—but only if they know you exist

Here's the uncomfortable truth most high performers refuse to acknowledge: competence without visibility equals professional invisibility.

You've built the perfect sales motion. Mastered the enterprise deal cycle. Generated millions in revenue. Yet outside your immediate circle—your current clients, your team, perhaps a handful of industry contacts—nobody knows your personal story or what transformations you create.

This invisibility tax compounds daily. While you're heads-down executing, others with half your capability but twice your visibility are capturing opportunities you don't even know exist. Advisory roles. Speaking engagements. Coaching opportunities. Equity partnerships. The exact opportunities that accelerate the path to Level III (fully owning your calendar with multiple options).

The Purposeful Performer understands a fundamental law of modern careers: in a world of infinite noise, being excellent isn't enough. You must be excellently visible.

But here's what most get wrong about personal branding. They think it's about self-promotion, about broadcasting achievements, about becoming an "influencer." That's backwards. Personal branding is about making your expertise discoverable by those who need exactly what you've mastered.

Think of yourself as a product in a marketplace. The best products don't chase customers—they position themselves where ideal customers naturally discover them. They solve specific problems for specific people in specific ways. They build recognition through consistency, not volume.

When you shift from invisible excellence to strategic visibility, the entire dynamic inverts. Opportunities start finding you. Conversations begin with "I've been following your work on LinkedIn" instead of cold introductions. Your calendar fills with inbound interest rather than outbound effort.

This isn't about ego. It's about economics. Every day you remain invisible to your broader market, you're paying an opportunity tax that compounds against your long-term goals. The question isn't whether to build a personal brand—it's how much longer you can afford not to.

From invisible excellence to $50M in closed/won

The most prolific period of my sales career—2018 to 2022—didn't happen because I was the best seller. It happened because I became the most discoverable one.

During those four years, I generated over $50M in net new logos and pocketed $3.8M in personal income. Not by grinding harder or running more demos, but by treating myself like a brand instead of a sales rep.

The transformation started with terror. Eight months into my role as Strategic Account Director at LivePerson, I was given three days to replace an executive speaker at Skift's annual conference—the premier event for travel industry leaders. My audience would include Ed Bastian (CEO of Delta) and Christine Duffy (President of Carnival Cruise).

Instead of memorizing a speech, I did something different: I wrote a LinkedIn article first. "How to Delight Guests with Conversational AI" became my blueprint. Writing forced me to crystallize every point, understand our product deeper, and most importantly—find my voice.

That article did three things. First, it gave me confidence on stage (even with sweaty palms). Second, it created an asset that lived beyond the 45-minute presentation. Third, it became my follow-up. Of the twelve executives who handed me business cards, seven responded to my article link, complimenting my "deep expertise."

Here's what they didn't know: I had no formal travel industry experience. What I had was the perspective of a heavy traveler who understood their customers' pain points. Writing from that authentic place created instant credibility.

From that point forward, I made public writing non-negotiable. Articles like "I Cheated With Rose in Vegas, and I'm Not Sorry About It" weren't marketing fluff—they were personal stories about experiencing our client's technology firsthand. One prospect I'd falsely labeled as a detractor found that exact article and complimented me on it, opening a door I thought was closed.

This systematic visibility had a compound effect. While other sellers were explaining Conversational AI features, I was sharing transformational narratives. I wasn't selling software; I was selling "the limited opportunity for the right executives to fundamentally take the reins of how to deliver the ideal customer experience."

The math was undeniable: those four years as a visible one-person brand generated 10x the pipeline of my previous invisible years. But more importantly, it built the foundation for what came next. When I retired from corporate sales and launched my own business, I went from $0 to $100K+ in 140 days—using nothing but a newsletter, an ebook, and the audience that had been quietly following my journey.

The difference between my sales life before and my last four years wasn't skill development or better territories. It was visibility. The moment I stopped being the best-kept secret in strategic sales and started making my expertise discoverable, everything inverted from push to pull.

Every seller reading this has similar transformational insights trapped in their head. Deals they've orchestrated. Patterns they've recognized. Frameworks they've developed. Challenges they’ve overcome. The question isn't whether you have value to share—it's whether anyone will ever discover it.

Let’s unpack a step-by-step approach to start building this strategic visibility and a simple way to get started this week (you’ll be ahead of 89,638 LinkedIn followers by doing this by next Sunday).

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