Just got off the phone with Howard. He was disappointed that he did not get an interview for a role as the senior writer of Executive Communications. He has years of writing to and on behalf of the F25 C-Suite but he had not done enough in this pitch to establish just how good and unique he is.

As a writer, Howard is used to the role of a support person, who reacts to assignments but doesn’t originate them. As a Minnesotan, he is not sure it isn’t a sin to strut his excellence. Yet he is frustrated because he has been praised for many years for his high caliber writing, and is looking for a next, awesome assignment.

Howard needs to give himself permission to create the platform that showcases his skills enough to claim one of those rarified assignments. Since he wants to move to a new corporation where he is unknown and there is high degree of scrutiny due to the visibility and sensitivity of the executive communications role, it is particularly important for him to match the sophistication of the assignment with a sophistication of pitch.

Most of you hope using the same kind of pitch everyone else uses will somehow get you an assignment that sets you apart from mere mortals.

To move through the wormhole and leave everyone else behind, you need a vehicle and an attitude that will get you there.

Perhaps you will also need a presentation that teaches your customers that a higher level of performance by their organization is possible and that you can show them how to get there.

If you are not quite ready to find yourself on another planet or in another dimension of time, you need to start exercising the muscles that will get you there when you are ready for change, fame, and fortune.

I believe all of us need to get better at these skills to survive and thrive in the future Workforce 2020 marketplace.

Topics: branding + positioning, business skills, getting ahead, ideation, selling skills, technical skills, visibility | 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 »

A huge percentage of the sales people I know brag about being “a relationship builder.” Simply because so many of you mention it, it is a useless differentiator, but there is a bigger problem with the positioning. A recent study proves that, if relationship building is your primary strategy as a sales person, you are relying on one of the least effective sales strategies for today’s market.

I am not suggesting the remedy is “consultative” or “SPIN Selling” where the rep asks the customer to identify his needs. This new study and resulting strategy comes from the same folks¹ who invented the SPIN Selling concept in the 1970s but they now recommend against a customer driven process. The sales people who are most successful in today’s market are collectively called “Challengers” and are in a position to LEAD the conversation with the client, not react to it.

Here is what we know about the sales process with challenger reps:

Success comes from helping customers think differently and bringing them new ideas. The challenger rep goes way beyond asking customers what their unmet needs are (VOC) or offering services to a customer driven solution that any competitor would have suggested. It is about identifying unarticulated needs no one else can meet. The challenger rep is more expert than the potential customer about how to grow business using the technology or services in discussion but the focus is not on selling the vendor’s product. It is about teaching the client to manage his business better.

Three-quarters of vendors currently attempt to be a solutions provider. The challenger rep can push the customer to a solution the customer had not imagined and can’t implement as well on his own. The solution will be one the competition cannot do as well or imitate for a lower price. The challenger rep is able to support his price and stay in control through the teaching role and strategic insight. This rep can sell his idea to different stakeholders across the client matrix. The soundness of the solution will make sense in spite of the condition of the economy.  (These reps gain share in a bad economy.)

Are you thinking the challenger rep walks on water? It all stems from having the self–awareness to understand why and when the client would buy from you over someone else. You can’t be all things to all people, but you can sell by knowing for which customers your company can be the preferred resource. What customers can you teach something to? Do you know the things each stakeholder at the client cares about? You must discover this before the first conversation, through in-depth market research, as discovery at a field sales call is way too late. You need to have several solutions and pitches to the different stakeholders already thought through at the first sales call and you must lead with a discussion of the client’s problem, not your products. A sales or engineering driven company is at a real disadvantage in this evolved solutions process.

Regardless of your present comfort zone or company commitment to the process, any rep can become more like a challenger rep. The key is to be pro-active and do discovery before approaching the client. Solve the client’s problems, don’t sell features. If you are in an environment of where complex sales are the rule, “Challenger” reps are 2.5 times more likely than the average sales person to be a high performer and 5 times likely than the “Relationship Builder”. The likelihood that a “Relationship Builder” achieves star status is nearly zero. Buy the book The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson.

¹ Sales Exec Council, www.executiveboard.com

Topics: branding + positioning, getting ahead, ideation, innovation, leadership, selling skills, technical skills | 1 Comment »

A reminder that generating a job offer is not different from closing a sales deal.

1. You can’t expect to be the preferred resource when applying for a job at a particular company if you don’t know what product to offer. You must listen/do research to learn VOC (voice of customer) and then address the relevance and value of your product and services. Client will be looking to solve a specific problem like fix products now flat or in decline. Grow profit. Even if your resume has a track record of success, it has little value if it has questionable relevance.
2. Providing facts and features about you does not move the relationship forward by itself. Trust and relationship are crucial to the selling process. The client will prefer someone with lesser credentials on a superficial level if that person comes highly recommended by someone the client trusts. Resumes offer too little depth or proof of connection of you to the results claimed to offset that. Single interviews don’t often solve the problem because clients are not usually trained interviewers.
3. Network with several people at a company first, send resume later. Listen 2/3, talk 1/3.
4. “Consulting” with a client you would like to work for permanently without a designated selling process may distract and pre-empt closing a deal. Similarly, offering too much information during consulting, networking, and interviewing without closing the deal encourages the client to ask for more free advice/details without committing. A gift of gab does not equal selling.
5. A direct mail piece gets a .5-2% return at best. A superficial resume sent to a portal generates similar results.
6. You are highly unlikely to get what you want from a sales meeting or interview if you don’t ask for it and specify exactly what you want and provide specific rationale for deserving it. “I want $200K salary base and $200K is justified for these reasons…” “I want the open Business Development Manager role, and I am the best candidate over other Biz Dev Mgrs with the same amount of industry experience and sales success because of these reasons…” The sales trainer John Baker says 3 reasons establishes a pattern and builds just enough intrigue to consumate the deal.

If you want more in depth training on closing deals in person whether or not you are a professional sales person, read The Asking Formula, by John Baker. He is a fun trainer for any audience.

Topics: communications, getting ahead, hidden job market, interviews, negotiating, networking, resume + cover letter, salary, selling skills, technical skills | No Comments »

I really do believe that most LinkedIn profiles (and resumes) send a more negative than positive message about their owner because not enough thought or positioning differentiation has been put into them. Too many profiles make the owner look like a commodity player, or, even if metrics are provided, don’t leave the reader convinced that this executive was the key to why company sales grew 10%. More importantly, 75% of readers of your LinkedIn profile are not looking to hire you but are looking for someone to answer a question or be the source of a referral. To receive those queries and turn them into networking opportunities, you need to demonstrate EQ or social intelligence in your profile and LI activities. So spend a few minutes re-examining your LinkedIn presence and consider these questions:

• What comes to mind when people think about me as a professional brand? What have been my greatest personal successes or epiphanies? How am I different from others with the same title? How am I better? Have I demonstrated it convincingly?
• When a company has never worked with me or my firm previously, what do they want the most assurance about? Do I reflect knowledge of how my customers measure success and excellent customer service?
• What issues in the industry am I very knowledgeable about or do I want to promote? (Green energy, less government regulation…)
• What business issues do I have a personal passion about? (Ethics, empowering others, world peace…)
• Have I demonstrated my willingness to help others whether it makes me money or not?
• Have I said all of this in a way that identifies for which target audience or company I am most valuable or most interested in for the future (which might be different than my last role?)
• Have I provided references from key customers?

You get the idea. To be seen as the preferred resource in LinkedIn, you need to present yourself as a multi-dimensional executive whom not only has credible technical competency, but can and wants to collaborate, facilitate, and empower the world around you.

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