There are many parallels in sales & marketing to job seeking
➔ If you’ve ever wondered why sales and marketing are important in your job search, wonder no more. Job seeking may be the most difficult kind of sales and marketing there is. Why? Because in a job search, we’re selling ourselves.
The similarities are many. Preparing your resume and LinkedIn profile along with networking and researching employers are essentially marketing functions. You’re preparing your product – YOU – to go to market. And that’s when the selling begins.
It wouldn’t hurt to treat your job search as a sales campaign
The selling component of the job search happens during all your networking activities, informational interviews and actual job interviews. You’re trying to sell yourself. You want that hiring manager to “buy into” hiring you and to offer you a sufficient price for your services (your salary.) In addition, you want that networking contact to buy into you and your services as well.
If you’re unsure about your ability to sell, that’s understandable. Most people (outside of actual sales) rarely see themselves as sellers or being sales people. In fact, when confronted with the concept, usually reply that they can’t sell or that they don’t like selling.
But sell they must. And learning simple sales techniques proliferate in our digital age.
We’re not alone here. A simple Google search of “sales training” yielded 9.6 billion hits. “Best free sales training” uncovered a mere 6.1 billion. If you’re more video oriented, searching “sales training” on YouTube resulted in dozens of videos and was still loading.
More to the point, searching for “job seeking as selling yourself” produced 138 million hits on Google from sites such as Monster, Forbes and Indeed.
Successful selling is a skill, just like any other. You don’t need to become supremely proficient as a sales agent, but your job search definitely will benefit from learning and understanding the basics. And the best news of all? You only need to sell one – YOU.
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