…and Work Your Plan
➔ There are those who believe that a job search is essentially a marketing and sales process. In the marketing phase, you create your product - which happens to be yourself - dress it up, clean it up, make it look as good as it possibly can - and then sell it to a potential employer.
When your selling process is successful, you’ve got yourself a job. Sound simple? It’s not brain surgery, but it’s not all that easy either.
Marketing vs Selling
To realize the full benefit of the process you probably should have some idea of what constitutes a sound marketing approach. This may be more difficult than it first appears. Unfortunately, many people mistakenly use the terms marketing and sales interchangeably, but the two functions – although inter-related – are very different.
Ideally, most of your marketing efforts should be completed before you venture out to begin selling. Know what it is you’re selling – the strong points, the weak points, the characteristics that will make a potential employer want to hire you. Your marketing program may not end there however. As you proceed through your selling efforts, you may find that you may need to modify your marketing. That’s not unusual. It happens all the time.
Another important aspect of the selling process is targeting the right customers. You may have a good sales pitch, but if it’s falling on deaf ears, you’re just spinning your wheels. The right product to the right customer can grease the skids – as they say.
The marketing and sales functions can be easily applied to your job search. In the real world of marketing, every plan is unique. While every plan may not contain every marketing element there is, there are a lot of similarities and constants among plans.