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As a “product” in the workforce market, there are eight steps that must be completed in order to sell yourself successfully.
Step 1 – Define the Product
In other words what are you selling? And what it is it about the product that is unique? How do we describe the product in such a way as to create value in the eyes of the reader, that is, the person looking at your resume?
Step 2 – Understand Why Your Product is Better
You need to know why your product is superior to competing products, because you will have competition. There are others who have equal or greater skills vying for these same positions. Therefore, it is important that you look better and be perceived as having greater qualifications and skills than your competitors.
Step 3 – Figure Out Who Needs You
Who are you going to target? Why are you targeting them? What companies are you going to go after and present yourself to, and why are you presenting to this company versus that company. It is a very important distinguishing characteristic of the search to understand who you are targeting and why you are targeting them.
Step 4 – Know Your Brand
What is your brand? Brand consists of five things:
- Your resume.
- Your website (especially for those at the executive level).
- Your LinkedIn profile.
- Your verbal delivery during interviews.
- Your appearance.
Those are the five components of your brand. What is extremely important in understanding branding is that you must have all five components in sync with each other. You can’t go in dressed to the nines/looking really sharp and have nothing good come out of your mouth that excites them. You can’t get the chance to interview until you give them something to interview you about. As you can see, all of these are interlinked in terms of brand.
Step 5 – Secure the Interview
How do you get in front of the buyer at the target company to get them to consider buying your product? In other words, how do you secure interviews? What methods do you use? What channels of marketing do you use? How do you manage those? Those are all issues related to securing an interview.
Step 6 – Eliminate the Competition
When you are in front of the person you are interviewing with, your aim should be to eliminate your competition. You are not there to practice. You are there to get them to make you an offer. They won’t be hiring two of you for the same job, therefore it’s important to understand how to eliminate your competition and receive an offer.
Step 7 – Negotiate Effectively
The next step is to negotiate in a way that doesn’t leave money on the table. Your objective is to have the interviewer walk away saying they were lucky to get you for only $10 or $20K more than they thought they would have to pay. When they make that statement, it means that they have perceived that you bring value add to the table and now you will make a contribution to either the top or bottom line, or both. As a result, they will make you a better offer than they would someone else.
There is a formula that I use in determining value of a particular candidate, and I balance their qualifications against this formula. Here it is:
Take the salary – let’s assume that it’s a $150K base salary – and multiply it by 25%, which will cover your benefits. Then add that number back to the base. What you have now is approximately $187K—your salary plus benefits costs.
But that’s not the true cost of the position. There is overhead that has to be applied corporately to each position. The only way you can calculate the true cost of that position is to divide the $187K (salary plus benefits) by the gross profit margin. Let’s assume that it’s a 40% gross profit margin at this particular company. When you divide $187K by 40% you get about a $470K cost basis for that position.
Many folks forget that when they are interviewing for a $150K position, they are really interviewing for a cost basis that is a multiple of that number. They also forget that it is incumbent upon the applicant to demonstrate that they exceed this cost basis, bring value add, and will ultimately make money for the company.
Step seven is essentially to negotiate effectively enough to not leave money on the table. How do you do that? You must be able to demonstrate clearly, through every step of the process up to that point, that you are the right person for the job.
Step 8 – Have a Longer Term View
You will have multiple jobs in your lifetime. Many of the executives I work with average between 47 and 54 years old. They will have at least three or four jobs by the time they retire due to consolidations, mergers, acquisitions, buy outs, leverages, whatever. The important aspect of this step in this process is positioning oneself for perceived increasing value over time.
I tell my clients, “You are not just interviewing for this next position. You are setting yourself up to increase your potential income over time. This is your value.” Here’s an example:
Suppose that for a $150K position, John Doe accepts $155K because he hasn’t followed the steps or the formula. He hasn’t created value, but he did get the salary bumped up $5K, so he feels pretty good about it.
SC&C clients don’t work like that. My clients most often receive much higher offers than they expect or than those offered to their peers. Why? We instill a perceived value-add for the client from the beginning and that continues throughout their search process.
Companies are happy to pay my clients more. The long-term impact of that decision and action on behalf of the company is significant. For example, if the client had accepted the meager $5,000 increase they would have left a potential $300,000 on the table after 20-years went by. In other words, if they accepted the $5,000 and they could have secured an increase of $20,000, that $15K difference computes to $300,000 over a 20-year period until retirement.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that he will never recoup those dollars in his career, because he will always be working from a lower level.
So the objective that I have for all of my clients – and the objective you should have – is to get them to make you an offer that is significantly better than advertised. Then you’ll know they have valued you properly. And you will be contributing to your long-term income potential. The secret is understanding how to create that perception in the mind of the “buyer,” your future employer.
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