Marketing for a Better Tomorrow

Is this actually the resume you’re submitting or you really just don’t want the job. That’s just one of the things you don’t want a recruiter to think when looking at your resume. Yes, the job search process can be very discouraging at times. You find jobs that seem like a perfect match for your skills, but get no callbacks for any of them. The reality is that you have to work harder and smarter to stand out amongst the thousands of candidates who think they’re great for a job too (as well as those who randomly apply for every posting knowing they’re nowhere qualified.) If your resume has been circulating the job boards, but your phone is as quiet as a church mouse, it may be time for a makeover. Find out if you’re guilty of any of these mistakes that will sabotage your personal brand. 1. There are errors on your resume. Having blatant typos on your resume can be worse than saying congratulations on your baby to someone who's not pregnant. Errors on your resume may not al...

Several weeks ago, I shared the above Venn diagram in a status update. With 20k+ likes and comments on LinkedIn and over 2.2k retweets and favorites on Twitter, it's become the most viral update I've shared to date. As a result, thought it might be interesting to provide some additional context on where the diagram came from. It all started in a meeting where a talented team was presenting their plan for a potentially high impact initiative. Midway through, they covered the measurable results they expected to achieve in three years. Granted, they were being somewhat conservative, but their objectives were still way off what I would have expected them to be targeting based on the addressable opportunity and the assets we were bringing to the table. Without hesitation, I challenged the team to increase their long-term goal by roughly 20x. Regardless of whether or not they could hit the target (which I think they can), the point was to get them thinking much bigger, without cons...

Questions can engage and motivate people, but they can also discourage them by seeming confrontational. To engage employees (not scare them), reframe these questions: What's the problem? Rather than fixating on problems and weaknesses, use positive questions geared toward leveraging strengths and opportunities and achieving goals: What are we doing well, and how might we build upon that? Whose fault is it? This focuses on finding a scapegoat when there is likely plenty of blame to go around. To identify weak links without focusing too much on blame, ask: How can we work together to shore up any weaknesses? Haven't we tried this already? This is important to ask, but the wrong tone makes it sound condescending and defeatist. It doesn’t recognize that failure could have been due to bad timing, not the idea itself. Ask: If we tried this now, what would be different – and how might it change the results?  

I've sent out hundreds of resumes over my career, applying for just about every kind of job. I've personally reviewed more than 20,000 resumes. And at Google we sometimes get more than 50,000 resumes in a single week I have seen A LOT of resumes. Some are brilliant, most are just ok, many are disasters. The toughest part is that for 15 years, I've continued to see the same mistakes made again and again by candidates, any one of which can eliminate them from consideration for a job. What's most depressing is that I can tell from the resumes that many of these are good, even great, people. But in a fiercely competitive labor market, hiring managers don't need to compromise on quality. All it takes is one small mistake and a manager will reject an otherwise interesting candidate. I know this is well-worn ground on LinkedIn, but I'm starting here because -- I promise you -- more than half of you have at least one of these mistakes on your...

Several years ago we came up with a great idea for a new leadership-development offering we thought would be valuable to everyone. We had research demonstrating that when people embarked on a self-development program, their success increased dramatically when they received follow-up encouragement.  We developed a software application to offer that sort of encouragement. People could enter their development goals, and the software would send them reminders every week or month asking how they were doing, to motivate them to keep on going. We invested a lot of time and money in this product. But it turned out that people did not like receiving the e-mails and found them more annoying than motivating. Some of our users came up with a name for this type of software. They called it “nagware.” Needless to say, this product never reached the potential we had envisioned.  Thinking about the decisions we had made to create this disappointing result led us to ask the question, “What ca...

These key sales and marketing principles may not be trendy--but they're true. Anyone who says that prostitution is the world's oldest profession is forgetting that someone first had to make a sale. Ever since, salespeople have been trying to find better ways to convince customers to buy. Hucksters try tricks or schemes that may work for a while, but caveat emptor eventually wins the day. On the other hand, there are key sales principles that have proven successful in winning and keeping customers throughout history. You may want to make these six important customer-oriented concepts–which come from a half-dozen of the world's top sales and marketing icons–part of your company's core philosophy. 1. "Understand their needs better than any other company." Source: Steve Jobs Apple's co-founder also commented (infamously) that his company never used focus groups to design products. That doesn't mean they didn't listen to customers. Apple r...

The word strategy has many modifiers in the business world: portfolio, diversification, differentiation, growth, market share, shareholder value, customer, brand, product, pricing, cost, manufacturing, supply chain, channel, distribution, sourcing, IT, digital, people, communications, investor relations, and M&A among them. All of these forms of strategy are variations of the two most fundamental types: corporate and business. Typically, corporate strategy is seen as being relevant to a company as a whole, whereas business strategy is reserved for the individual businesses within a company. But things get more complex when you consider the most fundamental questions that a strategy needs to answer: 1. Who is the target customer? 2. What is the value proposition for this target customer? 3. What are the essential capabilities required to deliver that value proposition? In considering a company operating in multiple businesses (think Siemens, UBS, Unilever, Reliance, and ...