Everything you send an employer – whether it’s a cover letter, an email or your CV – is a piece of sales communication. Don’t freak out – some people have a strange aversion to the concept of selling, so I’ll clarify. I define sales communication as any piece of communication that is meant to trigger a specific outcome. So, for example, if you’re sending an email because you want someone to call you in for an interview, that’s sales communication.
Before we get too deep into the specific pieces of sales communication that you’ll be dealing with (like your CV), let’s take a moment to understand the common elements of all sales communication. Why is it important? Because most of the time, sales communication is unsuccessful (doesn’t work, in this case doesn’t get you the interview) because some of these elements are skipped. So here are the elements:
- Establish context and relevance. Why are you contacting them, and more importantly, why should they listen to you?
- Demonstrate understanding of their (professional) reality. What makes their good days good, and what makes their bad days bad?
- Identify a problem that, based on your profiling, you believe they are facing.
- Explain that you have a solution (without going into detail), and establish credibility.
- Present a call to action (for our purposes, this usually means asking for an interview).
Now, here are the most common mistakes people make when creating their sales material:
- Starting around the fourth step – explaining that you have a solution to a vaguely identified problem.
- Forgetting about these elements altogether, and creating a document that isn’t much more than an almost-random collection of semi-related information.
We’ll go into details, and really explore how this applies to your job search, in the next couple of posts.
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[...] last three elements of sales communication that you need to consider when preparing your CV (for a list of all five, read the previous [...]
Good post! I agree with you in that a solid resume can be written by the job seeker without the expense of outsourcing. One other thing to keep in mind is that the resume is just one sales tool in the arsenal. The prepared job seeker should have quite a few sales tools at their disposal in developing contacts, interfacing with their intended audience in a variety of mediums and being prepared for those encounters. I look forward to more discussions!