“FAIL” needs to fail.

Every week I’ll highlight a word that catches my attention. As a marketing and communications professional, I stress simple, straightforward language in my work, however I’m always watching for the evolving lexicon of the market. For growing vocabulary, I recommend these sites: FreeRice.com, UrbanDictionary.com, InvestorWords.com, BusinessDictionary.com, Merriam-Webster Online]

 

The word for this week is — FAIL.  Maybe it’s me, but when did it become acceptable, even humorous, to denounce a person, comment, organization, government, etc. with a single word verdict?

 

FAIL as a “thumbs down” from a websphere heckler falls into the same bucket of dismissive, lazy interjections as “whatever” and “sucks”.

 

Urbandictionary.com has 41 entries for the term FAIL.  A quick Google Blogsearch for the exact phrase FAIL yields more than 7 million entries, but that includes the appropriate use of the verb, so it’s hard to sort out how pervasive its use is as a pejorative. 

 

There is even a Failblog.org site which I have to confess has some pretty funny content.

 

The bigger picture is this: I’d like to believe we’re more evolved than reducing our subjective interpersonal vocabulary to single-word backhands.  Let’s bring back intelligent, constructive conversation.  Or: “If you can’t think of anything nice to say…”

You can have them at “Hello”

This is the second of a three-part series offering concrete, actionable ideas for how to separate yourself from the pack in today’s feverishly-competitive job market.

 

Part II: Treat the interview like you’re on trial.  Or in front of a Congressional sub-committee.  If you show up and elect to “wing it” because you’re so sure you know your material cold, or somehow you’re under the impression that the person/people conducting the interview are your “friends,” it’s probably over before it begins.

 

An Interview Binder can be the difference between killing or flopping at an interview.  More on this in a minute.

In Part I yesterday, I shared the concept of a Sales Cover Letter (“Your Resume Won’t Get You a Job”) as a tool for rising to the top of the resume pile to get to the invitation to interview face-to-face.  Congratulations, you got the call and the meeting.  Today I provide an approach for creating a dramatic, compelling impression as a superior candidate…before the actual interview begins.

 

It’s very easy to fall into the trap of assuming you’ve got a crisp, well-considered answer for any question that might be thrown at you in an interview.  After all, you’ve gotten this far in your career because you’re an expert in your field and at your profession.  You’ve been in countless meetings and presentations with little more than an agenda and a notepad.  And that’s probably worked out for you.

 

This new interview is not one of those times.  You want to stand out from the other candidates because you get one shot.  This interview is Pass/Fail.  But your schedule is packed.  You’ve got budgets, meetings, reviews, maybe a trade show.  “I’ll be ready” you think.  And maybe you will.  The problem is that the interview is not about you…it’s about them.  Have you done enough to be ready for them?

 

The typical candidate prepares by putting a fresh pad of paper in a leather-bound notepad holder, a nice Cross pen, a few copies of the resume, a printout of the Position Description, and a few pages from the company’s website.  A quick scan just before entering the interview and “it’s ‘go’ time.” 

 

The Interview Binder is a tool that accomplishes three of the most important objectives in an interview: 1) it gives you structure for optimal pre-interview preparation; 2) it creates an indelible impression with the interviewer(s) before the first question; and, 3) it sets the bar for any other candidates.  The basic construct of the Interview Binder I’m suggesting looks like this:

1. The Binder:  Buy a new one.  A 1.5-inch binder is a good size because it can hold about 100 pages comfortably, including tab dividers.  D-ring is key because when you open it all the pages lay flat.  Don’t leave the front and back cover sleeves and spine unfilled.  These are panels you can use to market your intention.
2. Tab Dividers:  The 8-tab dividers provide enough sections for the scope of research and preparation you’ll need to perform.  Clear tabs allow you to insert custom labels about each section’s contents. The sections most commonly used are found in #3-10 as follows:
3. Answers to Their Questions:  This comes first because it is the crux of the meeting.  Write out the hardest, most awkward questions you can imagine being asked, then write out your answers.  Practice answering these questions in front of a mirror or with a friend.  Refine them until you are crisp, concise and compelling.  “60 Minutes” built a franchise on top of people who thought they could handle any question thrown at them and got burnt.  Key Point: the answers should be framed about them and their needs, not you and your needs.
4. Your Questions for Them:  This is your chance to uncover information about the position and the company you will use to decide if you want the position.  Questions like: “Why is this position available?”, “What are the issues that keep you up at night?”, “What are the opportunities you want to go after now but can’t, and why?”
5. Capabilities eBrochure:  More on this tomorrow.
6. Job Description/Correspondence:  Just what it says.  Print out and include here the description and all correspondence that has transpired between you and the company.
7. Research on Interviewers:  Know who is sitting across from you and what his/her/their hot button issues are.  Google, Zoominfo.com, LinkedIn.com and the company’s website are great places to start this research.  Break down your research into key talking points you can insert into your interview at opportune moments.  It’s amazing how people open up and take notice when someone asks them to talk about themselves.
8. Company Website/Research:  Print out important pages from their website, find points of interest you can use in your interview and use Post-Its to make it easy to turn quickly to a particular page to reference a point as you’re making it.  Use Google and Google Blogsearch to find articles and other commentary about the company you can reference to demonstrate you understand their “today” issues.
9. Competitive Research:  Do your homework on their top 3-5 competitors.  Create your own competitive issues matrix document or print out and highlight web research.
10. Research on Yourself:  Nobody ever does this.  Research yourself on Google and Zoominfo.com.  Put yourself in their position and find the landmines and goldmines about yourself that exist online.  Have those pages and notes that explain or exploit each major point.

Final Tip:  Practice using the Binder before your interview.  Develop a smooth, natural interaction with the material emphasizing eye contact with your interviewers.  Use the material to support points you want to make, while maintaining the connection with them.  If asked, it’s okay to show them what you’ve assembled.  Never leave the binder behind.  Unless they trade you for an offer letter.

 

Wednesday:  Part III: The Closing eBrochure

Your resume won’t get you a job

UPDATE: Click here to learn how to find your next job instead of waiting for it to find you.

 

This is the first of a three-part series offering concrete, actionable ideas for how to separate yourself from the pack in today’s feverishly-competitive job market using marketing and sales, instead of job hunting, techniques.

 

Part I:  Your resume won’t get you a job.  Not by itself, anyway.  And probably not the version you’re using now.  Still thousands of experienced professionals carpet-bomb the few openings available today with a resume and a 2-line cover letter.

 

A Sales Cover Letter with your resume can get you a job.  More on this tool in a minute.

 

Look at a job search from the perspective of a search professional or committee, or hiring manager.  Each is working with a thoughtfully-prepared Position Description that elucidates the typical responsibilities and candidate requirements for the position.  Once advertised, the next step is to sort through 100 to 1,500 applications that consist mostly of 1-to-4 page resumes (all in different formats and with candidate data presented from the candidate’s perspective) and cover letters that often are not much more than two lines that say “check out my resume and you’ll see I’m a perfect fit.”

 

So who ends up doing the work to figure out if you’re a good fit and whether your resume should be moved to the top of the pile?  The search professional/hiring manager?  If you knew about the same position and met the hiring manager on the street, would you use that opportunity to hand over your resume, tell him/her to read it to see that you’re a perfect fit, and walk away?  See where the mass mailing approach breaks down?

 

Look at it even another way…if you were doing your marketing, sales or business development job for your employer and met a potential customer on the street, would you just hand the prospect a brochure, tell them to read it to see that your product or service was perfect for them, and walk away?  Probably not.

 

The Sales Cover Letter is your spokesperson on the hiring manager/search professional’s desk.  It does the work of matching your skills, experience and accomplishments to each and every Position Requirement.  It does so from the hiring manager’s perspective, but in your own voice.  And in an ocean of two-line cover letters, your Sales Cover Letter will leap off the pile and speak directly to the hiring manager about your fit.

 

The basic construct of the Sales Cover Letter I’m suggesting looks like this:

1. Opening Paragraph:  State the position for which you are applying.
2. Benefit Statement:  State what the benefit to the employer will be if they hire you.  If you don’t know, stop.  You’re not ready to apply yet.  Do your homework until you do know.
3. Why You Care:  Explain your inspiration for seeking the position.  If you can’t think of anything more thoughtful than “I want a job at your company” then don’t apply until you can.  If you can’t express why you care, why should they.
4. Point-by-Point:  This is the key section.  Copy-and-paste the Position Description into your letter and break it down sentence by sentence or by each discernable criteria.  Sometimes a Position Description will repeat criteria and it is OK to group them together.  Under each criteria, take as much room as you need to make your case, but use clear, crisp, well-written sentences.  Use bullet points as needed to make it an easy read.  Only state verifiable facts.  Emphasize results, not action.  Quality versus quantity.
5. Call to Action:  Invite the followup call, then stop writing.  You’re done.

FAQs

Q:  Shouldn’t a cover letter be no longer than 150 words.

A:  If your resume is littered with experience at Fortune 500 companies or category leaders (e.g. Google and  Intel for tech; Procter & Gamble for CPG; etc.) and your career plan is to stay in the same industry, then 150 word cover letter might be enough.  For most, this simply doesn’t work.  Moreover, I have yet to see a Position Description that is only 150 words.

 

Q:  How can I use the Sales Cover Letter when online job boards only provide for attaching a PDF of a resume and separately including a cover letter of 750 words or less in a text window?

A:  Create a personalized Sales Cover Letter according to the construct above and bundle your resume as the last pages so you produce a PDF that is all one document.  Use the space provided by the online job board to explain how the employer will benefit from hiring you, and invite them to read further in the attached PDF Sales Cover Letter/Resume.

 

Q:  What if I use the Sales Cover Letter format, but I don’t have skills or experience to list against every criteria?

A:  Then you’re probably not qualified for the position and you shouldn’t apply.  Sorry.  The Sales Cover Letter also can serve as a filter to keep you from wasting your time and the hiring manager’s time.

 

Final Tip.  If you use the Sales Cover Letter to its fullest potential, you are going to apply to 1/10^th the number of openings you did previously, but you are going to make a 10x better application for each.  It can take up to a week to write each Letter.  I’m reminded of an old business joke…”we’re going to lose money on each unit, but we’ll make it up in volume…”  The same is true here.  If you’re not compelling in a single letter, sending out hundreds of half-hearted efforts isn’t going to improve your chances.

 

Tuesday: Part II:  The Interview Binder
Wednesday: Part III:  The Closing eBrochure

Conflate this!

[Every week I’ll highlight a word that catches my attention.  As a marketing and communications professional, I stress simple, straightforward language in my work, however I’m always watching for the evolving lexicon of the market.  For growing vocabulary, I recommend these sites: FreeRice.com, UrbanDictionary.com, InvestorWords.com, BusinessDictionary.com, Merriam-Webster Online]

The word for this week is — conflate.  I started running across this in the blogs I read with increasing some weeks ago and a quick Google Blog Search reveals more than 32,500 results. 

In fact, there’s even a blog titled “conflate”.

It describes the mashup of words, phrases or ideas into a new composite expression.  A quick scan of Google and Google Blog Search results shows the usage of conflate seems to fall into roughly three camps: religion, politics and the economy.  It’s an aggressive, jarring word most often used to unfavorably, even confrontationally, highlight the pairing of ideas with which the user takes issue.

From a marketing and communications perspective, I think it works best in op-ed pieces, speeches and blogs.  And sparingly.

Calculating the marketing value of customer “badwill”

My TV died last night…again. 

I didn’t even get mad.  Just disappointed.  This is the second time in 24 months.  After watching a couple of my favorite shows online last night (if you haven’t discovered this on Hulu.com or FXNetworks.com, I strongly encourage you to give it a try), I woke up this morning with this thought.

Every Marketing executive should add a line in his or her annual budget for the holistic value of customer “badwill.”  Of course, this is the corollary to customer “goodwill” which is a key ROI measure every marketing executive like me likes to believe we engender by the truckload through our work.  Badwill has a very real value to the organization, cause, product or service we market and I think we might make very different decisions at the Senior Staff table if it showed up on a balance sheet like “bad debt” or “bad debt reserve.”

Let me use my very silent TV as an example…as it sits there in the middle of my living room, one tiny little red light still glowing like a very small extended middle finger.  I’ve purchased many TVs in my life.  One of the first things I did when I got to the University of Kansas and into my freshman dorm room — with the money I was given for food, books, and sundries — was buy a color TV.  An RCA color TV.  Cost me maybe $350 and it was a huge deal.  TVs were indestructible back in the day.  When you moved back and forth between home and college, you just threw them in the back seat with your books, beanbag chair, clothes, whatever.  Parts broke off and they still worked.  You could put things on top of them without offending their delicate sensibilities.

As I moved through various career, domicile and marital stages, my TVs got bigger and better.  And more fragile.  To me, an electronic appliance is supposed to perform for me, not me for it.  So two years ago, another chapter passed and I find myself at Fry’s in Las Vegas.  I LOVE Fry’s.  Like my Dad loved Sears.  But that’s a post for another day.

I knew I wanted 50+ inches of screen and I wanted Hi-Def.   The salesman walked me to a corner of the display area and asked me if I’ve thought about a Mitsubishi and 1080p.  He showed me a very compelling example of 1080i versus 1080p display clarity and I was sold.  He pitched me 13 months of interest-free financing.  Again, I was sold.  He rang me up…$2,200 and change (BTW, that’s a lot of change for a TV).  Delivery in a day.  He had engendered my goodwill for the benefit of Fry’s and himself.  And this TV was amazing!  Incredible picture.

Fast forward 9 months.  My Mitsubishi WD-57731 DLP TV is sitting in my living room…dead.  I go back to Fry’s…dismayed.  After way too much back-and-forth, I learn the lamp in my TV is only designed to run for 3000-4000 hours before it craps out.  WTF?!  My first color TV lasted for 10 years without a whimper.  The good news is the lamp assembly is easy to replace.  The bad news is so many of these Mitsubishi TVs have lamps burning out it will be a month to get the part.  But they give me a 37-inch loaner set for free and eventually the part shows up and we’re back live on the air again.

Until last night.  So I go online to look for a replacement lamp.  And I find chat room after chat room rife with words like “class action lawsuit” linked to Mitsubishi and DLP TVs and I start to think…”was there a Senior Staff meeting at Mitsubishi where Marketing, Channel Sales, Engineering, Finance and a decision-maker agreed to market and sell this product even though they knew it would FAIL several times with each customer and they thought this was a GOOD idea?”

If Marketing had a line item in its budget for “badwill” and that debit would have a direct impact on the department’s overall budget for salaries, bonuses, TV ads, promotions, spiffs, events, etc., and there was a possibility that marketing a known defective product and technology might bankrupt their “goodwill” budget…shouldn’t the Chief Marketing Officer or VP of Marketing speak up?

I mentioned earlier the holistic value of badwill.  Marketing and selling a bad product hurts your own company.  But in the case of this TV, it hurts lots of other related entities…albeit in minute ways…but in ways that have value.  To begin, I’ll never buy a Mitsubishi TV again.  When I do buy a new TV, I’m not going to trust the salesman is telling me all the truth I need to hear…this hurts Fry’s and that salesman.  With a dead TV, I’m not watching any programming, which impacts everyone associated with creating and distributing the content.  I’m also not watching any advertising, which impacts every single advertiser, and the station carrying the programming, and the cable provider who pipes it into my home.

Do the math Mr/Ms. CMO/VPM.  Marketing is responsible for brand equity, reputation management, and customer goodwill, in addition to sales leads.  If no one else in the company will stand up and say selling a known defective product is bad for business, then you do it.

Earn my goodwill by demonstrating you understand its lifetime value.

140 characters cramp your style? Make a statement in 7.

I’ve been paying a lot of attention lately to license plates.  And thinking about personal branding.  Stay with me for a minute and I’ll explain.

What got me started was all the chatter in the blogosphere and Twittersphere about the possibilities and limitations of 140 characters.  Add in the debate over whether your Twitter profile name should be branded or creatively eccentric.  Mix in whacky Myspace profile display names which can look like someone fell asleep on a keyboard.  I ended up back at license plates.

Specifically, personalized license plates.  For many years we’ve had seven characters to use to semi-permanently tattoo our cars (and by being in the left-front seats…ourselves).  By my recent observation, many owner-operators have been pretty creative.  In most states, you also have to pay extra for the privilege. 

So personal branding is on four wheels all around us.  I decided to do a little data-gathering as I drove around town for a couple of weeks, pad and pen at the ready.  I live in the southern end of the Las Vegas metro area and my sample set was unscientifically small, but it didn’t take long for a pattern to develop.

Most plates fall into one of five buckets: Attitude, Profession, Affinity, Affirmation…and Dogs.  Yea, I know, people just love their dogs.  And they love New York, or at least having once lived there.

Here are the actual personalized license plates I observed.  Remember, in Nevada you have seven characters available:

Attitude:  RISS K, NSTG8TR, UNLMTD, BRAVERY, JUICY, BALLHOG, EVIL QN, AGRV8D, CRE8TV, ARTSI, PHREEK

Profession:  CAPT747, PHPGUY, MYTMIXR, VMAIL, AFTAHRS, SCADSGN, KNJRLTY, HYGIENE, HAIRS2U

Affinity:  1NY2LV, NY 2 LV, FLAG8TR, IAMQBAN, SRFNSND

Affirmation:  LIV2ROK, LVE2LIV

Dogs:  K9DROOL, MYAKITA

Makes 140 characters seem almost novel-length by comparison.  No follow-up message or further explanation.  Sometimes the vehicle the plate is attached to says a bit more about the occupant, but my observation suggests this is relatively infrequent.

So the challenge for the professional struggling to articulate his or her personal brand is this: What single statement can you make about yourself in seven letters?  Or in a 30-second elevator encounter?  Or in a cover letter?  Can you reduce yourself to a soundbite and still make an impact true enough to last?

The example I love to cite for people is this:  John 3:16.  “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” 

If the essence of Christianity can be summed up in just 25 words, anyone should be able to tell their story in 140 characters.  Or seven.