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#WorkTrends Recap: 2017: The Year of Selling Yourself

This week on #WorkTrends we went beyond selling products and services and looked at how 2017 can be the year of selling yourself. We are all salespeople whether you realize it or not.

Host Meghan M. Biro was joined by best-selling author and expert salesman Anthony Iannarino to discuss what people need to do to rise above the crowd at work and be a standout employee.

Anthony shared tips and ideas that you will be able to use during 2017 and beyond.

Here are a few key points he shared:

  • Selling is not a bad word. It is all about relationship and building trust
  • Selling yourself requires transparency, authenticity, and knowing what unique product only you have to offer
  • The more you care about other people, the easier it is to gain trust

Did you miss the show? You can listen to the #WorkTrends podcast on our BlogTalk Radio channel here: http://bit.ly/2iARN6v

You can also check out the highlights of the conversation from our Storify here:

Didn’t make it to this week’s #WorkTrends show? Don’t worry, you can tune in and participate in the podcast and chat with us every Wednesday from 1-2pm ET (10-11am PT). On Jan 11 I will be joined by career coach Valerie Martinelli to discuss how women can elevate women.

Remember, the TalentCulture #WorkTrends conversation continues every day across several social media channels. Stay up-to-date by following our #WorkTrends Twitter stream; pop into our LinkedIn group to interact with other members; or check out our Google+ community. Engage with us any time on our social networks, or stay current with trending World of Work topics on our website or through our weekly email newsletter.

Photo Credit: RecruiterMixer – Executive Recruiters Flickr via Compfight cc

#WorkTrends Preview: 2017: The Year of Selling Yourself

We’re very excited to kick off our very first TalentCulture #WorkTrends of 2017!

We have a very big show lined up that everyone will benefit from. The Year of Selling Yourself. This goes beyond selling products and services, on Wednesday, January 4, 2017, we’re going to be discussing how YOU can better sell yourself. This means focusing on what you need to do to rise above the crowd at work and be a standout employee. It also, means what each and everyone of us needs to do to find success and happiness in life.

Please join host Meghan M. Biro and her special guest sales advocate and best-selling author, Anthony Iannarino on Wednesday, January 4 at 1pm EST, as he shares tips and ideas that you will be able to use during 2017 and beyond.

2017: The Year of Selling Yourself

#WorkTrends Logo Design

Join Anthony and me on our LIVE online podcast Wednesday, Jan 4 — 1 pm ET / 10 am PT.

Immediately following the podcast, the team invites the TalentCulture community over to the #WorkTrends Twitter stream to continue the discussion. We encourage everyone with a Twitter account to participate as we gather for a live chat, focused on these related questions:

Q1: Why do people struggle with self-promotion?  #WorkTrends (Tweet this question)

Q2: What can employees do or use to stand-out among their peers? #WorkTrends (Tweet this question)

Q3: How can employees showcase their skills to leadership? #WorkTrends (Tweet this question)

Don’t want to wait until next Wednesday to join the conversation? You don’t have to. I invite you to check out the #WorkTrends Twitter feed, our TalentCulture World of Work Community LinkedIn group, and our TalentCulture G+ community. Share your questions, ideas and opinions with our awesome community any time. See you there!

Join Our Social Community & Stay Up-to-Date!

Passive-Recruiting

Photo Credit: p.olesson1 Flickr via Compfight cc

Selling Yourself in the Interview

As 2016 ambles forward, more recruiters are going to be hiring than ever before. Not only are Millennials taking the job market by force, but plenty of current employees are planning on making a job transition, both inside and out of their own career paths. With all of that competition, selling yourself matters. It’s essential to stand out from the pack and highlight what makes you more hireable than the Joe Shmoe interviewing before you and the Jane Doe interviewing after you.

Know What You’re Looking For

The first thing to know before you even go in to interview is what you want out of your working environment. 20 percent of employees in the workforce right now are determined to find a new job before the end of 2016, according to a survey by CareerBuilder.com. The same survey found that, besides salary, the most important factors that come to light when considering a new positions are job stability, good benefits, location, good boos, and good work culture. Consider, before you plow headlong into a new position, which of these perks are important to you and whether or not you can live with your new position in the absence of any of these factors. If you’re one of the lucky ones balancing the call for multiple positions, weigh your options against each other, and shoot for the best fit.

Skills, Skills, Skills

Having the right skillset for the job is imperative in today’s work environment. The Skills Gap is a very real issue, with a Corporate Voices for Working Families and Civic Enterprises study finding that more than half of business leaders think it is difficult to get non-managerial employees with the necessary skills, training and education that they need. As the skills become more complex, the gap becomes larger, with IT firms stating that a whopping 75 percent are understaffed or are currently looking to hire. While you don’t have to get every single certification out there to prove that you’re qualified, bringing concrete examples of what you do know can help your chances out greatly.

Soft Skills & Emotional IQ

Perhaps even more important than hard skills are soft skills. Soft skills refer to a set of personal attributes that enable somebody to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people, perhaps the most important of which is Emotional IQ. Even if you’re the best programmer in the world, if you can’t work on a team, you won’t get hired by somebody that needs a team player. On the flipside, even if you’re not the best programmer in the world, you might still get hired because you possess an aptitude for learning and an attitude that says, “I can work with anybody and love it”. This type of flexibility and positivity has been tested for and found in 90% of high performers and explains 58% of success in the workforce across industries, according to some.

Ask Good Questions

In any interview, the best candidates don’t merely answer questions, but they ask them too. Hiring managers want to see that applicants are engaged and excited to work wherever they ultimately end up. If an interviewee isn’t asking questions, how does that person know that they company they are applying for is going to be the right fit for them? Asking questions that show a proactive nature and evidence of critical evaluation are perfect. Here are two examples queries listed by US News as two of the “smartest interview questions you could ever ask”:

  • “If you were to rank all the people who have done this job in the past, tell me about No. 1 and why you would put them there?”
  • “You’ve described this as a place that welcomes innovation. Can you tell me about a time when you failed at something, or when someone else in the organization failed at something? How did the organization deal with it?”

Be Yourself

Selling yourself matters but the most poignant piece of advice that you can follow during an interview is to just be yourself. We all know that there are plenty of toxic leaders out there that probably shouldn’t be managers, the type of people that are crotchety and mean, quite possibly sadistic, and quick to put down anybody that challenges their authority. These managerial types are easy to spot right off the bat by the way they make you feel like a doormat during the interview. Fortunately there are plenty of other managers who are not like that, and these are the ones that you want to work for. Imagine, for a second, that you sail through the interview with the first, mean boss, because you act like another cog in the wheel who will mindlessly follow orders.

The problem is that once you land that job, your true colors will shine eventually. Be yourself from the get-go. As Liz Ryan mentions on Forbes: “You can laugh at a job interview. You can be yourself. You can make a joke. You can be real. I talk to hiring managers all day, and I’ve never heard one of them say ‘I talked to a job-seeker who seemed very qualified, but was too real.’”

Ultimately, know what you want, know what you can do, know what you’re willing to do, ask questions, and be yourself. This is the road to success in the 2016 workforce. The sooner you find yourself doing these things, the sooner you will have landed the job of your dreams.

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Closing the Deal: Interviews as Influential Sales Conversations

It is no secret managers, human resource professionals and recruiters often receive stacks and stacks of resumes for each available position and that their main objective is to slash those to a manageable pile for interviews. In other words, disqualifying candidates is their first objective, in order to manage the overwhelming number of resume submissions.

What I want to encourage job seekers to realize is that once your resume HAS reached the short-stack, your opportunity for further qualifying yourself and closing the job deal skyrockets. So rather than feeling at the mercy of what sometimes feels like a merciless job interview process, once you have inched your way past the excruciating screening, exploit the opportunity!

In the worst-case scenario, an interview is a stress environment where the interviewer assumes and maintains charge, relentlessly hammering the candidate with questions with nary an opportunity for the interviewing job seeker to interject his value. However, in many cases, a consultative sales environment ensues, and the job seeker who is prepared for a more proactive, collaborative conversation gains an advantage.

Preparing oneself for this conversational process is necessary to ensure you are equipped with the right words to influence, connect, cajole and even disarm the hiring decision-maker and influence them that YOU are the best-fit candidate.

In a recent exchange on Twitter, Mike Haberman (@MikeHaberman) said,

“The consultative sales call approach works for both parties in the interview, but may be interchangeable based on interest.”

As such, when you are afforded the opportunity to perform in this consultative role, be prepared to maximize every word, every communication nuance.  Moreover, in some instances, with an unprepared or inexperienced interviewer, you may even be in the driver’s seat, steering the conversation. In any of these instances, you must be equipped with an arsenal of easily retrievable, memorable scripts and talk points.

A few tips to prepare for and act upon this opportunity:

1. First, realize that being consultative means that before proffering your solution to what ails your client (the hiring manager, the human resource pro, the recruiter), you must be equipped with ample research and a few smart questions.

2. Though sometimes a job interview situation may arise without much advance notice, performing a laser-strike study of the target company and/or target hiring manager for which you will be working is needed to position yourself apart from the pack of interviewees. Even with a fairly short preparation window, you can, and must, investigate.

3. Dip your research ladle into the endless well of Internet resources:

  • Hoovers.com: to search people and companies (limited “free” information); e.g., for company information, you’ll find address, phone numbers, rankings in FT Global, Fortune 500 and S&P 500.
  • ZoomInfo.com: a business information search engine that provides company search, people search and job search. It constructs profiles on people and companies.
  • Manta.com: the largest free source of information on small companies. This is a very cool site that has key information on over 60M companies, allowing you to drill down by industry, by location, by size, etc., and then find a profile (address, phone, website, company contacts) as well as reports; map; and web results (i.e., they do a Google search for you, providing a quick snapshot of search results!).
  • Forbes.com: home page for information on the world’s business leaders and includes nine editorial channels on business, technology, markets, personal finance, entrepreneurs, leadership, ForbesLife, opinions and lists.
  • Business articles at Bizjournals.com or Wall Street Journal (online.wsj.com).
  • LinkedIn: Follow companies and read their profiles and goings-on.

4. Prepare your challenge-action-results (CAR) stories that align with the target company’s pain points. Consider how you have solved problems related to the types of problems this company is and will be facing.  Write those stories out (note: if you’ve already navigated the introspective resume writing process, which involves ferreting out the most critical stories and areas of value you offer your target audience, then use your resume as a launch-pad.

  • Beyond the challenge, action and result, describe the strategic impact of the initiative. Outside feathering your career cap, how did the result reverberate into the company’s greater goals? Some call this answering the “So what?” by adding relevance to your achievement.
  • Consider what leadership or other problem-solving and solution-building talent you leveraged to move through this C-A-R. Write those out. For example, negotiation and influence, analysis, forecasting future market needs, etc.

5. Prepare responses to some of the most typical interview questions. Here are a few to get you started:

  • Tell me about yourself.
  • What is the greatest value you can bring to us?
  • How long do you intend to stay?
  • Why do you want to leave your present position?
  • What is the most stressful situation you have experienced at work within the past year, and how did you handle it?
  • What would your current (or past) employer say about your work?

6. And here’s where the consultative process really takes flight: YOU get to ask THEM questions, not only to display your interest in the company, but also to garner information by which you can further wrap your value proposition around their needs. Further, as your mind intuitively weaves your story to align with their responses, you are drawing upon the research notes you discovered during the company research prep phase (step 3) and weaving that information into the interview fabric. And as they respond to your questions, you also have a chance to knit in your C-A-R stories (step 4) to fortify that you can meet their impending needs. A sampling of questions YOU may ask THEM:

  • What are the greatest challenges you’re facing in your industry?
  • Is your industry/business growing?
  • What main factors do you attribute to your growth?
  • What do you attribute to the success of your company?
  • What makes you better than your nearest competitor?
  • Can you tell my why this position is open?

7. AFTER the interview is an opportunity to mine for gold. Think: What went well at the interview, what didn’t go so well, and what areas were left untapped? Address those in a sales letter that not only expresses appreciation for the interview (the “thank-you”), but also squarely addresses and overcomes potential weaknesses that were spotted and/or bridges gaps in presenting your value that you simply did not have time to address during the interview.

8. Moreover, after you have undergone a second (and perhaps, third, fourth) interview, with key influencers in senior management, executives or board members, consider writing a powerful influence letter. In this sales market document, headline your message with, “Why I should by Hired by ABC Company” and then assertively, confidently and passionately sell your VALUE to them. At this point, your humility should be set aside, and you should be laser focused on closing the deal.

Bottom Line: Interviewing is a consultative sales call and sometimes requires multiple contacts and conversations to “close” the sale. As humans, though we don’t always want to be “sold,” per se, we want to be convinced that we are making the right buying decision. It is YOUR job as the job candidate to influence the hiring management that THEY would be making the BEST decision for them, for their department and for their company by investing in YOUR talent.

5 Marketing Lessons from Crack Dealers

Disclaimer: I have never used illegal drugs and I do not advocate the use of illegal drugs or controlled substances illegally. Drugs and the repercussions of their use, do irreparable harm to the user, their families, their coworkers and the community at large. Stay clean, stay sober or stay home.

One of the things I love about teaching Sanera Camp is I get to hear the awesome ideas the recruits come up with. This was one of them.

Earlier in class this week, we talked about building relationships versus push marketing and how technology has helped us do that better than ever because the new tools allow us to share information across wider audiences. We also talked about the shift in mindset from protecting our information to sharing our information so more people can get to know us, our level of expertise and what it would be like to work with us.

Then this conversation broke out:

Person 1: Alicia, I was thinking that drug dealers are a great example of this.

Everyone else: A combination of silence, belly laughs and dropped jaws.

Me: How?

Person 1: Well, they’ve given out samples for years and years and it works. Their prospects know what it tastes like, what it feels like and the quality of the product.

Person 2: You’re right! I never thought about it before.

Person 1: Look at it. It’s a successful, multi-billion dollar industry that has world wide distribution. The use of illegal drugs has increased, not decreased even though it’s against the law. Their clients know where to find them, know how much the product costs and they tell everyone else about it. It’s perfect word of mouth advertising.

Person 3: But what we’re selling isn’t addicting.

Person 2: But can’t we make it addicting? If we give out some of what we have to offer, won’t people want more?

They are right. It’s hard to find a better example of how giving things away can drive revenue. But Person 3’s observation is pivotal – certainly one advantage the drug dealers have over us is that their product is physiologically and sometimes immediately addicting. So what can we do to drive our revenue without breaking the law and harming others?

How To Market Like a Crack Dealer

1. Know your target customer

Who wants your product/service? Better yet, who craves it? Who needs it so badly that the moment they get it, they will have an insatiable desire for more of it?

2. Analyze your market

Where does your target market hang out? What kinds of activities are they doing?  Is it in a certain zip code, metaphorical “corner,” in an industry meeting or somewhere online?

3. Make distribution easy

Ensure your target customer knows who you are and where to find your products/services. Make the purchasing process as simple and seamless as possible. You will jeopardize your chance of closing a sale if you make them:

  • Talk to lots of people
  • Click too many times online
  • Give too much personal information
  • Look at too many options

4. Give away the right samples

Here are some examples of things you shouldn’t give away:

  • Cheesy tchotchkies that people are going to throw away. If you’re going to give away promotional items, make sure they are things your prospects will use and value.
  • Proprietary information. Enough said.
  • Low quality products. I know this sounds obvious, but come on. How many of you have received a sample and discovered that it was someone’s attempt to get rid of their non-selling inventory? It’s happened to all of us. You will be associated with your samples. What do you want people to say about you?

Some things you should give away:

  • Consumables – when they run out, they will want more from you.
  • Useful, actionable information. This is not limited to service industries. If you are in retail or a product-driven environment, you have valuable information to share about your store, your products, care of your products, upcoming sales, etc. Err on the side of education & information vs. “selling.”
  • A piece of what you want them to purchase. Giving “everything” away eliminates the incentive for your prospects to want more.

5. Give them to the right people

If you give everything away, you won’t make money. Be selective. Find the influencers, the people who will spread the word and give to them.

It’s pretty unconventional, but think about it. Any lessons here you can apply to your own business?

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Special thanks to Nora FrostDenise Sample and Rob Hatton for their creative ideas and discussion. Keep the conversations going!