Message #484
Monday, November 26, 2001
"You must either conquer and rule or serve and lose, suffer or triumph, be the anvil or the hammer."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Der Gross-Cophta, 1792)
SUMMARY OF TODAY'S MESSAGE:
If you have lost a job, fear losing a job, or simply want to get a better one, you have to be willing to sell yourself as a product. The process of selling yourself should resemble a sales call to a potential customer (the business you want to work for), not a celebrity interview.
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WHEN YOU WANT A BETTER JOB -- DON'T MAKE YOURSELF AVAILABLE. SELL THE PRODUCT...YOU!
A guy I know just lost his job. He came to me for advice on finding a new one. He faces several problems. He's 50 years old and an expert in an industry that is shrinking.
His initial efforts were completely unproductive -- which created an additional problem. He now lacks confidence.
"I'm afraid I'll end up bagging groceries," he told me. "I've
got two kids to put through college and a retirement fund that evaporated when
the market crashed."
He is scared and with good reason. But I told him not to worry about the zero responses he got from sending out 50 resumes. "That's the worst possible way to get a job," I told him.
If you have lost a job, fear losing a job, or simply want to get a better one (by transferring, shifting, or being promoted), what I'm about to say today (and the rest of this week) will be helpful to you. This is based on my experience both as a job seeker and as a job giver, as well as what I've learned by consulting with a resume writing business and some ideas I've gotten from a very good book on the subject titled "Don't Send a Resume."
Most people end up with jobs that result from a series of half-baked actions and fortunate accidents. Ask a dozen executives to retrace their careers and you'll hear a dozen versions of "this happened" and "that happened" but very few saying "I wanted this so I did that."
When you try to get a better job by sending out a bunch of resumes to businesses you barely know, you are doing the equivalent of "cold selling," says Jeffrey J. Fox in "Don't Send a Resume."
"Cold calls have a low success rate. The customer may have absolutely no need for the product, may not even be in the office. ...The person who receives the resume may have no need for an additional employee, may not even be the hiring person."
Fox is right. Resumes don't usually work, because they are designed wrong. They are all about you, the job candidate.
But the person doing the hiring is not at all interested in you. He's interested in his business -- the problems and the challenges he faces every day. He's interested in hiring you to help him meet those challenges and solve those problems.
He doesn't care about -- and doesn't have time to consider -- your career goals, what you like to do in your spare time, and what organizations you've joined. He'll only even listen to that kind of information if he thinks it will help him out in some way.
But the more he reads about what you want and what you need, the further away he feels from his own wants and needs.
That's not what you want to do.
Let's Face It, When It Comes to Getting a Better Job, the Process Is a Sales Event.
The product is you. The customer is the business you want to work for. And the process of selling yourself should resemble a sales call, not a celebrity interview.
How do you sell something?
You start by doing some background work. You study the potential customer base. You try to understand what they need, what worries and confuses them, and what their problems, hopes, and desires are.
You become close to your prospects, because you know that when it comes time to sell you are going to have to answer their questions, solve their problems, and convince them that you can help them achieve their dreams.
In this case, you have to sell your "customer" on the idea that you can make its business better. To do that, you need to figure out how you will improve its profits. And to accomplish that, you need to study it.
We'll talk about how to accomplish all that in the next few messages. For today, it's enough that you spend a few minutes thinking about the premise of my argument: If you want a better job, you have to be willing to sell yourself as a better product.
Ask not what a better job can do for you but rather what you can do for your next job.
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WHEN IT COMES TO STARTING A NEW VENTURE, STAY CLOSE TO WHAT YOU KNOW
During the Internet bubble, there were about a dozen initial public offerings for businesses selling groceries online (Streamline.com, the Webvan Group, ShopLink.com, and HomeRuns.com, to name a few). The concept made some sense -- until you thought about it.
The one success story turns out to be a 50-year-old company based in Milford, Massachusetts named Hill's Home Market. Since the company didn't have millions of dollars in venture-capital money to experiment with, it was forced to try an idea that was based -- in part, at least -- on experience.
Hyman Hill, the company's founder, had already discovered that they never made a profit delivering groceries ordered by phone. The only way to make that kind of sale work, he'd learned, was getting customers to order in bulk.
He designed a selling system that essentially trained his customers to buy meat, toilet paper, pasta, laundry detergent, and other constantly used products in bulk. After signing up, customers receive a free visit from a food consultant who spends an hour helping them calculate how many cans of products like tomato paste they consume every quarter.
"The other companies made a big mistake when they tried to deliver a week's supply of food," Marvin Hill (Hyman's grandson) told Forbes Small Business. "You have to do volume to make money."
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Hint: These heavy reds are not meant to be drunk young. Whereas you can feel free to enjoy a '97 Tuscany in a restaurant if you can find one at a good price, it's better to buy your Barolos and Barbarescos at a wine store and put them in your closet (at 58 degrees) for five or 10 years.
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The first thing to know about "dulcet" (DULL-sit) is that it is an adjective, not a noun. "Dulcet" means "melodious," "sweet," or "pleasant." It used to be used for describing taste. Today, it's more often used to describe sound. Example: "The dulcet tones of the French horn."
MMF
Copyright Early to Rise, 2001
* Don't send out resumes, send out sales letters instead
* Enough already with the e-mail!
* Direct Marketing Tip: Will an 800 number make your buyers more responsive?
* Living Rich: Fake It Till You Make It -- 5 things to remember about French wines
* Word to the Wise: Edify
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