My honest opinion about personal branding in B2B

should you build one?

In this edition, I’m going to give you my honest opinion on personal branding.

This newsletter is not an essay against personal brand. I just want to reframe what a B2B personal brand CAN BE and how you can lead with expertise rather than personality.

Because personal branding doesn’t necessarily mean publishing photos of you with an inspirational caption.

It can also be a way to associate your name with an expertise.

And if you’re a B2B expert that DOESN’T want to lead with personality content, there are high chances that this is exactly what you need.

So here’s what I’m going to talk about in detail:

• Premise: what I think about personal branding

• What I think about CEOs who refuse to build a personal brand

• How to lead your personal brand with expertise, not personality

• How to compete in a red ocean of expertise

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1/Premise: what I think about personal branding

It’s a great revenue channel but it’s not as easy as what most people say.

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Let’s start with my definition of personal brand in B2B:

Personal branding is the deliberate, strategic practice of defining and expressing your positioning to the public.

It is how you manage your reputation, turning your professional identity into an asset that builds trust, influence, and authority in your field.

Here’s an example with Anthony Pierri and Rob Kaminski:

Now here’s what I think about personal brands:

1. Personal brands are a solid revenue channel

Some people still doubt that they drive revenue. Yet, I can attribute at least $500K to this channel in my previous business. A personal brand well positioned in an industry builds awareness, engagement, authority, and trust which compound into revenue.

2. Personal brands are faster to build than company brands

It’s hard to build a company brand, you need years. Personal brands are faster to build as people can quickly relate emotionally. That’s because our brains are wired to sympathise with other humans who look like us.

3. It’s not as easy as it seems to build one

You need the right level of experimentation, authenticity, and industry expertise to grow a personal brand. You also need hard skills like copywriting, public speaking, video editing, and above all the art of grabbing attention.

4. The revenue potential depends on the positioning

A personal brand positioned on a niche topic such as AI automation has higher revenue potential than a topic like remote work. Because it’s easier to link it to an offer, a product, or sponsorship opportunities.

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2/What I think about CEOs who refuse to publish content in their name

Breaking down this logical error

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Let’s address another problem I see a lot: CEOs who refuse to publish in their name.

I’m always amazed when they say: “I don’t want to show my photos in my social posts.” In my opinion, it’s a breach of duty.

Let’s run a logical flow to analyze this error.

• Premise 1: As a CEO, your role is to represent the company publicly, grow the top line revenue, and show the vision to attract and retain talent. This is commonly accepted.

• Premise 2: Social media platforms are now buying hubs. They work like a giant, always-on B2B conference. Buyers educate themselves and make decisions there. This is also widely accepted.

Therefore if:

• The CEO’s role is to attract opportunities

• And a lot of opportunities are now online

As a CEO, it’s your role to appear publicly where the opportunities are.

The objections I hear the most are:

Objection 1: “It’s creepy, I don’t want to look like a maniac.”

What it really means: the CEO is afraid of judgment from his peers. He imagines other executives laughing at his posts. In reality, half of them only care for a few seconds, and the other half wish they had started too.

Objection 2: “The company should be the brand, not me.”

What it really means: the CEO is not ready to associate his image with the company. He keeps a distance in case things go wrong. But buyers trust faces over logos, so this distance has a direct cost in revenue.

Objection 3: “I don’t have time for this.”

What it really means: the CEO does not see content as revenue work. He treats it like a marketing hobby. But content is now a central piece of what fills the pipeline today, so every week of silence has a direct cost in revenue.

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3/How to lead your personal brand with expertise, not personality

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First of all, I’m not saying leading your personal brand with your personality is a bad approach. I’m saying it’s an approach I don’t want to use and I know a lot of B2B experts don’t want to use this approach either.

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What is really expertise?

The word expertise comes from the French word expertise (meaning “expert skill”), which traces its roots to the Latin expertus (the past participle of experiri, meaning “to try” or “to test”).

At its core, “expertise” literally means knowledge or skill gained through personal trial, testing, or experience.

So expertise is different than knowledge, it implies:

• You earned it by doing, not by reading. Expertise is what is left after you tried, failed, and adjusted in the real world.

• It carries proof. Behind it sit real experiments and results, so you can show patterns and outcomes, not just repeat a theory.

• It is yours and cannot be copied. Because it comes from your specific trials, it produces a point of view no one else has.

• It includes judgment. You know what works, what breaks, and when, because you have been wrong before so you can own a point of view.

That is what makes content with expertise unique, and content with only knowledge generic.

But because you’re competing with photos, stories, and entertainment, you need to make your content easy to digest and visually pleasing.

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4/How to compete in a red ocean of expertise

You won’t be able to compete with pure knowledge against AI

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If creating content is extremely easy, then your content strategy should be uncopiable to differentiate yourself. Your end goal is not to be unique, it’s to help your audience. But you need to be different enough to attract attention in the first place.

Differentiate your content on 3 levels

You can differentiate on three levels, and the goal is to combine them: unique insights + unique point of view + unique formatting. It’s differentiation 101.

• Proprietary insights (your experiments, client data, case studies) make you a rare source

• A signature POV makes you a thought leader that adds interesting analysis to the public debate

• Distinctive design/copy/video makes you pleasant to follow.

Your proprietary insights should come primarily from lived experiences:

De-commoditize yourself

The first step to avoid being a commodity in a red ocean is to understand what is a commodity. Let’s first find a proper definition:

The defining feature of a commodity is that it is interchangeable (fungible) with other goods of the same type, meaning buyers view them as identical regardless of who produced them.

So everytime you have a content idea, ask yourself:

• Could a competitor publish this exact same content without changing a word?

• Does this idea come from my own experience, data, or client work, or could anyone find it on Google?

• If I removed my name from this post, would my audience still know it’s me?

Connect your expertise to lived professional experiences

I see a lot of personal brands with a strong experience focusing their content on the surface level of their expertise. They don’t go to the core and link to their experience.

• Specific decisions they made and the reasoning behind them, including the option they rejected and why

• Mistakes they made and what it taught them, told with the real stakes attached, not a sanitized “lessons learned”

• A specific client, project, or campaign named in detail (anonymized if needed), walked through from problem to outcome

• Disagreements they had with a boss, client, or industry norm, and how it played out

Here are 3 rules you can follow for this:

• Rule 1: Share all your content from your unique perspective

• Rule 2: Develop a signature point of view grounded in real experimentation

• Rule 3: Share what’s happening in your business (build in public)

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My final answer: YES, you should build an expert-led personal brand

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