Hey, {{contact.first_name}}
As a career coach, it breaks my heart when I see smart, talented, kind and very qualified candidates lose out because they shy away from self-promotion or ‘selling’ themselves.
While the idea of “selling yourself” may have you running for cover, the truth is you are already involved in persuading, influencing, and convincing people around you in a myriad of ways. Now it’s just time to get better at it!
Whether you are actively job searching, exploring your next steps through networking conversations, or positioning yourself for greater visibility at work, learning to communicate the value you can deliver is an essential skill!
Stop Fighting Reality
While you may cringe at the idea of selling yourself, the reality of today’s job market is that you must be able to communicate your value in a compelling way. It’s naive to operate as if the most qualified person is the one who gets the job.
If you find yourself thinking that they should just clearly see your obvious qualifications, it’s time for a reality check. Being good at something and expecting others to notice and do something about it is starry-eyed at best, and childlike at worst.
Know Your Value Proposition – Here is where YOU are the hero of the story!
To steer clear of being insincere, inauthentic, salesy, or outright lying (all the things we dread about selling!), you must KNOW YOURSELF. Conduct a thorough assessment of your strengths, skills, interests, and goals.
What are your superpowers (those strengths you love using and where your energy and engagement peak)? What results do you consistently help bring about? What are you the go-to person for? What motivates you? What’s your backstory? How you answer these types of questions will be the foundation of your value proposition.
Know Your Audience – Here is where THEY become the hero of the story!
Once you’ve got a clear value proposition, now it’s time to figure out who needs what you have to offer. How are you the SOLUTION to someone else’s problem? To sell yourself well, you must take the mindset of your audience. What do they need, want, and value?
When it comes to crafting your resume, interviewing, or positioning yourself for a promotion, it is never about what you want and need (this is important, of course, but it’s an earlier step and not the focus of what you communicate).
At this stage, make your audience the hero of the story; and yourself, the guide who can deliver what they need.
This is a shift in perspective.
When you’re writing your professional summary, LinkedIn About section, elevator pitch, or interview responses, you are not actually the star of that story. The people you want to persuade, or influence, need to be the star of the story. How are your skills the solution to their problem?
Connect the Dots and Deliver a Finished “Product”
Don’t hand me a bag of groceries; hand me a piping hot lasagna (because I LOVE lasagna!). If you list out everything on your resume, it’s like a bag of ingredients. No person on the planet is going to take the time to make sense of your background and figure out what to do with you.
Do not expect others to do the heavy lifting. This is YOUR job. Learn what your targeted audience needs and then put your ingredients together in a way that CLEARLY SHOWS that YOU are the solution they’ve been looking for (aka the piping hot lasagna!).
