It’s the start of a new year and a great time to evaluate your job situation. You just finished the year. Did you crush it? Do you love your job, your company, your boss? Are you happy with your current situation? Lots of questions to answer as we start off 2015. If you have the smallest inkling of wanting to look for a new job, my suggestion is to start a plan of action before you’re ready to make a change. It’s like making a sale, the best create a process or roadmap for success in finding their next opportunity. The best don’t wait for an opportunity to come knocking on their door, they go seek one out. As a sales person you should be able to use the same process you sell with to create your job process. Use whatever sales process you know and like, just use one and make sure you focus on “finding the pain” of the company you want to work for. If you’re really old school and still sell “feature, function, benefit” then read a book to give you some new ideas. You might try the book, Snap Selling by Jill Konrath. All sales organizations have areas of pain that you can help them solve. If you want to stand out as the best candidate, then do some homework and use your sales skills to identify their pain. Good sales people know it isn’t about the features of the product anymore, it’s about how you can help solve the company’s problem. I was talking with a client on Friday and the pain she wants us to help her solve is how she’s going to meet her 2015 goals of $10M in sales. She wants to find “kickass” sales people that have worked for a small start-up, strategic thinkers who can close deals quickly. She can’t afford any bad hires. That means she doesn’t want any slackers, she needs people who can hit the ground running and close deals. If you’re not a hard worker, problem solver, closer I’m not going to submit you to that client BUT that doesn’t mean I can’t find you a job. It’s just a different client with different problems to solve. Our goal is to find the right person for the right company but you as a candidate have to have some skin in the game too. Know your best attributes and what you can bring to a company. As part of the recruiting process there are a number of steps to complete along the way. If you really want to find a new job, then you need to complete the steps with us to get you to the goal. Do your homework, know something about the company, identify how you can help them solve a problem and meet their goals. You’ll do a much better job in the interview if you prepare with a process. Your interview should be about how you can help solve the company’s problem, not about “you” and how “you” do this or that. You’ll beat out the competition every time if you can focus on solving their problem! So as Nike says, “just do it”.
Find the Pain!
