A common Social Media strategy amongst companies I know:

Objective:

1)     Build business.

2)     Reduce customer service costs and identify unarticulated product and service problems.

3)     Provide content helpful to the customer.

I heard a similar Public Relations strategy recently. Employees of this company are asked to participate in everything from walk-a-thons to collecting clothes for disadvantaged inner city job seekers.

Objective:

1)     Build business.

2)     Build team spirit amongst our employees by having them participate in these activities as a group.

3)     Generate news media mentions of our company to build awareness of our services.

4)     Establish our reputation as ethical and caring.

5)     Do good for the community.

What’s wrong with doing things for the customer and community because it is the right thing to do? Regardless of return???

If you go into these activities with money generation as your primary agenda, I will make a bet your audience (and employees) can hear the lack of authenticity and sincerity.

If you have substituted Social Media and PR activities for what used to be your advertising budget, it is unreasonable to expect the same ROI from it. In fact, you may create a negative ROI by targeting the wrong objectives.

Topics: branding + positioning, communications, leadership, selling skills | No Comments »

One of the ways to prove your readiness for a promotion or why you should be hired before a sea of other candidates is to create hypothetical case histories of different business problems and discuss the problems, business ramifications, and proposed solutions in great detail. We are talking pages, not two lines on your resume. Put your remedies on the table with a deep, strategic discussion of why they offer the best ROI (return on investment) for the business situation and be willing to be graded/critiqued for your proposed fixes before or early in the interview process. It will help you get into higher level interviews sooner and more often.

It is giving away free consulting, perhaps, but in a risk-adverse job market, it may move you past other contestants. It is actually safer in this instance not to offer remedies to the potential employer’s current problems, because it is likely you will not know some choice business tidbit that suddenly makes your proposed remedy look foolish. If you write about enough different business situations credibly, you will suggest that you could make future headway on the problems of the employer you are hoping to impress even if you don’t currently have all the information to score an A+ today for the target project. It is an effective way to show you are viable for a new industry.

If you were thinking of whining about all the work I am suggesting, one of my coaching clients, who had been at $150K before being laid off, moved to a $235K salary in his next move by creating a “portfolio” showcasing his business insights. He intends to repeat the strategy in the near future to accelerate his next promotion. (He also pointed out the exercise cost less than his MBA and accomplished more.)

Another approach is to write an erudite white paper or two on bleeding edge industry issues. Write an article that gets into the WSJ or Financial Times or the leading trade magazine in your industry. You can’t plagiarize or try to “snow” anyone with these. You need to be ready to discuss any of the topics for 2-3 hours convincingly in an interview.

This process is a good exercise to test how credible you are as a candidate for a more senior role than you have had previously without long term risk to any party. Both you and the hiring manager may need to see the concrete proof of how you rank versus other candidates.

It is also good way to remove the personal stigma of having been at a failing company in a senior title. I just recommended the process to someone who has been at several small start-ups that did not make it long term.

The flip side of this strategy is that, for something like 10 years now, companies have been pulling in 10-15 candidates and giving them 40-70 hour assignments of what would they do in X situation without paying consulting fees. Then the company takes the consensus of all the hopeful applicants and doesn’t hire any of them. I first saw this phenomenon amongst high level IT Project Managers with PMPs. I happen to think this is unethical and would never work for a company that asked it. One way to defend yourself against it is to offer solutions to problems at other companies as suggested in the second paragraph, before or regardless if the company asks for “free advice” with bad intentions.

It is all about demonstrating your thought leadership in a way that allows you to hop, skip, and jump past other potential candidates.  It also allows you to grow as fast as you can rather than waiting for company projects that allow you to flex your muscles.

Topics: branding + positioning, communications, getting ahead, innovation, interviews, leadership, management skills, salary, selling skills, solving problems, technical skills, visibility | 1 Comment »

Just because you work for someone else, doesn’t mean you should not consider yourself 100% responsible for your own business success.

I am always surprised how many people, when asked why they were laid off, say “I don’t know why I was in the 10% laid off.” The same people frequently say things like  “I make my revenue quotas every year” without really knowing how they are viewed versus others at their current employer with the same quota track record or title. It is also typical of those who rely too heavily on relationship-building strategies.

You need to know how to make opportunities for yourself in any situation, independent of, or in spite of, the organization agenda.

Because employers will experience more and more pressure from globalization and innovation in the future, employers will have less and less ability to care for an individual’s destiny. It will be increasingly critical for you to know, defend, and augment your value to the current organization and the larger industry. It is just as important to a happy, currently working employee as to someone unemployed.

So how do you gain traction over your own image?

The key strategy is to gain awareness of your impact on the organization and customers as others measure it. You need to solicit constant feedback from your internal and external customers: What can I do to serve you better? Where do I (and we, the company) impact your business most? What do you value? What would you like me to do less of? Who are the other stakeholders I should get to know better (and serve) better? How do I rank versus your other providers? What are your unmet needs?

You need to be sincere about these questions, and ask them in an “open-ended manner” so that you hear issues other than the ones you expected.

If you have grown up in an engineering-driven or sales-driven environment, you need to become more customer-centric. The customer doesn’t care much about your agenda as provider, and will care less and less in the future as they will have more and more providers and services to choose from. You need to be seen as the preferred provider. Are you?

Career coaching is as relevant to someone happily working as to someone in transition.

Topics: branding + positioning, communications, getting ahead, management skills, networking, selling skills, visibility | No Comments »

A big (or small) “network” means little if you have not made a lasting, memorable impression on it. Meeting someone at an event or being connected to him/her in LinkedIn means nothing if that person is not subsequently a strong advocate of your personal and business value.

Business and personal value are measured by the trust and influence others assign to you, not the “power” of your title, degree, or size of your network. Think about this. There are many bosses you don’t respect and don’t listen to because they don’t seem to be open to their environment. Because they think they have all the answers and have stopped learning, you don’t trust their thinking. Influence comes from trust in their judgment and two-way input.

How do you demonstrate and increase your sphere of influence? Talk about the projects and the related employees, co-workers, and customers you have mentored. Be as quick to make a more junior co-worker look better as your boss. Show others how you were successful. Talk about smart articles you read that someone else authored. We need to hear and trust your judgment on issues that are most important to us.

Just being a nice guy is not enough. I won’t invest any of my money in that guy. On the other hand, showing that you helped Joe learn how to afford his first house does have value in establishing your ethics and character even if it didn’t make you money. (And I couldn’t actually have advised Joe how to be credit worthy.)

LinkedIn can be a tool to demonstrate and exercise your influence, but most users have not learned to use it that way. I would argue that you are better off staying out if you don’t use it well.

The most influential networking is more about giving than receiving and more about listening than preaching. A sincere effort to help others will be most memorable to your audience.

Topics: branding + positioning, business skills, communications, getting ahead, leadership, networking, selling skills, visibility | 3 Comments »

In my last blog I mentioned there is a very simple, free, low-tech way to track information of business (or personal) connections so you can search them by keyword and collect notes over time. My personal database has loads of information not available in the typical LinkedIn profile and is searchable on hundreds of keywords. The process below could include much more information but is very easy to execute with either a little or a lot of information per person.

Many people have an Excel or Outlook database that provides name, title, company, phone, and email but does not offer the ability to find someone who was, but is no longer, at a medical device company or someone who is an expert in Quality Assurance. One can add columns in an Excel spreadsheet to track who has experience in each of 20 industries or Commercialization or Voice of Customer but the spreadsheet soon gets too large to search easily. I have also destroyed my Excel database more than once by not sorting carefully and ending up with data irretrievably next to the wrong person when, of course, I did not have a recent backup available.

Because you can search for keywords  in many documents simultaneously from the file directory (in Windows) or from Finder (in Apple,) here is a simple search tool. It is simply a page created in Word, for instance, one for each person, with keywords that can be searched with the assurance you have not missed any files. Contain all of these files to a single folder in your computer so searching amongst them is easier. The other trick is to keep a separate list of keywords on your desk to guarantee you always use exactly the same spelling of a keyword or company name. In other words, so you always use “QA” instead of “Quality Assurance” spelled out.  “UMN” versus “University of Minnesota” versus “University of MN.”

Below is what might be in the Word document named “Smith_Pete_notes.doc”   :

Pete Smith notes

01/12/12 had lunch to catch up
07/09 hired him for 3 month contract at Ameriprise, focus process improvement
04/03 Hired him at State of MN, 8 mo sales tax project, saved us $108K by automating testing

2002- current, Independent contractor, Software QA Consultant
• Process improvement using Six Sigma techniques
• Project management
• Quality methodology implementation
• Unit, integration, functional, system, user acceptance testing
• Creates training on quality techniques and testing
• Creates training on writing and managing requirements

Clients
Medtronic, Ameriprise, State of Minnesota, Digital River, Best Buy

Industries
Manufacturing, Finance, Retail, Mortgage, Medical, start-ups

Keywords
Contractor, SaaS, FDA compliance, POS, RUP, CMM, ISO 9000 certified Auditor, Method1, Six Sigma Black Belt, unit testing, integration testing, functional testing, system testing, user acceptance testing, training, managing requirements, writing, best practices, implementation, process improvement

Family
Wife Lisa Manufacturing Engineer at Honeywell ECC, gourmet cook (remember the chocolate croissants?)
Son Sean, 12 in 2011, is soccer nut, goalie on Blake School team

QualityWorkExcellent (glued together as one word so searchable with more software tools and distinguishable from personal skills comment)

PersonalSkillsExcellent

CheckInMar2012, CheckInJune2012  (when to call back to check in)

BirthdayFeb232012

Topics: business skills, communications, hidden job market, networking, selling skills | 2 Comments »