Guerrilla Marking for Job Hunters 2.0 - Jay Conrad Levinson [101]
Every single day for the past 20 years, I’ve heard some iteration of the following:
Hi, Mr. Employer. My name is Pam and I am a marketing expert with well over 20 years of experience. I have been following your company for some time and am quite impressed with some of the recent successes. I would like to see if there would be an opportunity to meet with you and discuss how my qualifications and experience could serve your company.
Sounds nice enough, doesn’t it? But it doesn’t work. This is a new millennium, and that is an old and tired approach. Seriously, Mr. Employer is going to politely get rid of you. He will ask you to send a resume (the number one way to get rid of a job hunter) or refer you to someone in human resources, who’ll tell you they’re not hiring, “but we’ll keep your resume on file.” So if this tried-and-true method has run its course, is there a better way? The answer—fortunately—is yes!
■ YOUR ALTERNATIVE
I would love to take credit for what I’m about to teach you, but that wouldn’t be fair. First off, the base methodology and principles are not mine. Second, the ideas in Thomas Freese’s book Secrets of Question Based Selling: How the Most Powerful Tool in Business Can Double Your Sales Results (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2000) (www.qbsresearch.com) were brought to my attention by Daniel Houle (www.danielhoule.com).
As a successful headhunter and guerrilla marketer myself, I was intuitively doing what Freese teaches, so when Daniel introduced me to the book, I wasn’t shy about integrating the question based selling (QBS) principles into my firm. Tom’s fresh approach helped me keep Perry-Martel International flying high at a time when most of our competitors crashed and burned.
Freese’s premise is that people sell to people. Although this might not be a revelation, it’s critical that you understand the instinctive psychological process that interferes with the sale by pitting you and the employer against each other—why the employer is looking for a reason to say no.
Interviews are adversarial because our natural defense mechanisms come into play every time someone tries to sell us something. Freese refers to this defense mechanism as mismatching; and all humans do it.
Mismatching is a form of disagreement. It is an instinctive and emotional behavior that causes people to respond or push back in a contrarian manner, usually by taking the opposite viewpoint on what’s being said.
It’s important to realize that mismatching isn’t something we do consciously. We do it mostly because we want to add value to a conversation. The easiest demonstration of this is perhaps the following exchange between 2 people about the weather:
Person A: Well, it’s supposed to be really nice this weekend.
Person B: I heard that we may get showers Sunday afternoon.
Person B’s intent was really to share an additional tidbit of information, but at the same time, dispute the assertion that was made by Person A.
Mismatching is common in the first phase of a sales process because—let’s be honest—we all get defensive when a salesperson calls. Think of the way you answered the phone the last time a telemarketer called you at dinnertime; that’s how an employer usually feels when someone is trying to score an interview. As can be expected, mismatching often leads to outright rejection. Most salespeople who fail do so because they never learn how to avoid mismatching.
Freese’s first rule is to limit your exposure to mismatching by memorizing the following sentence, which summarizes the QBS approach: “You don’t sell by telling but by asking.”
So what does this have to do with finding a