I recently started coaching someone who has been out of work for 2 years and has been in denial because she has won 12 marketing communication awards. Although her positioning rhetoric got more “sales-y” at 18 months, Mary’s search and networking activities were otherwise generic. The campaign did not offset prejudice about her age (a matronly 52) and being out a long time. Did you know 70% of hiring managers avoid candidates who are out of work? (a)

Long before she panicked, she should have been test-marketing alternative strategies to see which offered her the best ROI (Return On Investment.)

I asked her what she has been doing in her spare time. She admitted that she loves travel and gardening. Has won 5 awards for gardening. Would love a marketing job in travel or gardening but has no paid experience in either.

Here are strategies she is now exploring in order to create more options for herself:

• Create kick-ass “whitepapers” to demonstrate her marketing knowledge in depth in formats that will additionally showcase her award-winning publication design abilities.  Find ways to circulate them to hiring managers including those she has already met.
• Produce B2B or B2C publications on gardening or travel to be used to demonstrate that, although she has never been paid by those industries, she has lots to offer.
• She is going to quietly shadow a salesperson selling to resorts to learn more about VOC (Voice of the Customer) for the hospitality industry.

If what you have been doing is not working, have you considered something new?

(a) http://money.cnn.com/2010/06/16/news/economy/unemployed_need_not_apply/index.htm

Topics: career strategy, hidden job market, solving problems | No Comments »

Pursuing “what you really want to do” sounds totally impractical in the buyer’s market we are in. I just wrote several blogs on what you need to do to get ahead based on what the corporation and industry responds to. But consider this. You will perform best in the role and everyday activities that you excel at most and with the products you love. The right job is the one you would do for free if you could afford to. Your customers will be happier and respond to your sales pitch more often and with more fervor.

Some folks who are not finding jobs or promotions have set goals for years based on what they think they should be doing. But many do not want those results enough to remain fully committed to the goal. Hence they do not perform as well as those at top of the band. Or they may not know how they measure up against the most successful people in their band because they were promoted regularly in better economic times and didn’t spend much time thinking about emotional alignment as long as bigger paychecks continued to arrive. Men have been taught for hundreds of years that they are only successful if they can buy the family successively larger houses, cars, and boats. I can name a COO who is convinced he must be CEO to be deemed successful. (His co-workers all think CEO is entirely the wrong move.)

So however you got to the position you are in, if you are not being promoted and hired as often as you were, it is time to re-consider if your goals are in alignment with your priorities in life and your actual skill set. Maybe you would be MUCH happier as the owner of a Bread and Breakfast or as a woodcarver or at a non-profit. And much more successful.

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Someone usually gets promoted to Sales Manager based on his/her track record as a solo Account Executive rather than on his/her potential as a leader and sales coach. Most often the AE received limited training, but not enough to explain the good sales numbers. Ranking is more the result of personality (relationship building) and persistence. When that AE is promoted to the supervise others, the team’s numbers are most heavily dependent on the innate skills that came with the team.

An exceptional Sales Manager can identify and nurture the competencies that are needed for every team member’s success. The Manager can articulate the processes and benchmarks required to win most sales opportunities regardless of customer issues. Like an effective Product Manager, a top Sales Manager will probe more deeply into root causes and unarticulated problems with team members and customers than other Managers. Delivering a better ROI (return on investment) for the entire team is not an accident, it is part of that Manager’s toolkit. He can predict and deliver the team’s revenue within a very small percentage.

Topics: branding + positioning, career strategy, interviews, negotiating, networking, resume + cover letter | No Comments »

Most Product Managers and even Directors have “complete responsibility” over product features and pricing with influence over strategies within marketing objectives approved by the GM or CEO. However, it is easy for the mid-level manager to get caught up in the decisions that have to be made every day. A typical Manager is at the helm of a product for only 18-24 months before being rotated to another product. So the scope of a Manager is necessarily short-sighted and fairly tactical and it is easy to lose sight of long term product priorities and the big picture of what is good for the company and customer.

An exceptional Product Manager stretches the boundaries of inquiry into areas and questions not addressed by his/her predecessors. This may include reaching out to external resources such as ad agencies or research houses for increased intimacy with the Voice of the Customer. Inspiration may come from lots of secondary research into articles and the trade press or by many deep discussions with executives from other companies and disciplines such as experts in supply chain, finance, or packaging. It may be new packaging rather than the product within that is the key to increasing sales. A Product Manager less knowledgeable about packaging would not have explored the issue.

If you are a Product Manager with strengths your peers don’t possess, have you showcased your assets as strongly as you could? Is it clear what you did that led to the successes? Can we be fairly certain from your pitch that you are exceptional? Or does it require a leap of faith?

If you cannot yet call yourself exceptional, have you laid out the roadmap of how to be considered exceptional in the future? Making it to VP or CEO is not an accident. It is the result of a carefully considered string of actions.

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Much of what we have been taught to do to make us valuable to “the job market” is more about the convenience and profit of the employer rather than giving the employee maximum control over his/her destiny and security. However, as company agendas will continue to be less and less stable for an individual employee, a “Portfolio Career” strategy is a concept you need to understand as a pro-active means of a establishing a foothold for you in a new industry in case your current job disappears or if you wish to change roles long-term.

On a simple level, a “Portfolio Career” means someone earns income from more than one simultaneous employer by choice or necessity. It is not a new concept. “Freelancers” in ad agencies and “Contractors” in IT have been doing it since the 1970’s as a means of gaining exposure to a wide variety of clients/technologies as quickly as possible. Folks with multiple jobs are easy to find in any industry in Europe.

Deliberately selecting unrelated simultaneous jobs spreads your risk if any one industry or skill area shrinks. Remember when the telecom industry shrunk by 70% in the 1990’s? Ad agency work has been shifting over 20 years from mass media like network TV and magazines to the Internet and other personal media. A Portfolio Career would protect you in similar transitions. Read the rest of this entry »

Topics: career strategy, hidden job market, networking, solving problems | 2 Comments »