YOUR PERSONAL MARKET PLAN
Having a productive and efficient action plan, your Personal Market Plan during career transition, will serve to focus your efforts, reaping the rewards of patience and persistence in your implementation. Successful implementation of your Plan confers rewards not unlike those in the workplace:
- A sense of accomplishment;
- Pushing oneself beyond expectation, often acquiring new skills or knowledge;
- Identifying developmental goals to assure continued career success;
- Gaining the respect of those around you, colleagues and customers;
- Being requested for future challenging opportunities!
A well conceived Personal Market Plan will help you to manage your time to get the best results for your efforts.
GETTING STARTED
Companies spend millions of dollars creating and communicating just the right message to ensure that customers will recall, respond favorably to, and buy their products. Your message, continuously delivered to contacts and hiring managers, can be broken down into two parts:
First, a statement of your functional identity (I am a corporate trainer…), followed by several marketable core competencies that you are "selling" (…with substantial experience in leadership development, performance management and team building.) This is referred to as POSITIONING. It comes directly from…
1. Assessment and Research…
A Candidate who is truly managing their own career is constantly aware of their own best "next steps." They research the marketplace, target appropriate opportunity, network effectively to both create personal "visibility" and create avenues to those opportunities that are right for them. Take the time necessary to determine your next right work.2. Setting Your Career Objectives… Knowledge of the process and self-awareness allow you to effectively set your career transition objectives. In order to implement an effective Personal Market Plan, your objectives must be defined by positioning (functional and personal strengths) and targeting (informed industry and geographic goals) your candidacy. Of course the best "FIT" occurs when your objectives are aligned with the needs of the marketplace.
Pre-determination of offer criteria and career objectives are essential cornerstones to the development of a high quality resume, part of the written collaterals of your Personal Market Plan. As your highly personalized, marketing collateral, your resume positions you in the marketplace… qualifies you with your experience, knowledge, skills and credentials… and can target your efforts with appropriate word selection relative to your industries of choice.
Take the time necessary to determine your career objectives, and how they best FIT what the market has offer you. It will we a rewarding, eye-opening time... well spent.
How will you assess FIT when opportunities come to your attention? At the core of your personal marketing strategies is the effective use of the actual words and phrases you use to define the FIT between your motivated competencies and the market's need for services and solutions. They are so much more than the "the right buzz words," or "keywords" as used in technology driven job banks (or the mirrored resume bank queries)... they are the building blocks of your message.
Yes, its worth your practice time to focus on words.
They can create high impact and convey powerful "word pictures." They are at the very core of your Plan, forming your communication strategy.
IMPLEMENTING YOUR PERSONAL MARKET PLAN
By extension, your message should include a clear statement that allows a contact to understand what you are requesting: "I’m seeking names of individuals who work in the corporate training field" or "I’m hoping to meet with you briefly to get your ideas on the key financial services companies in the Dallas area…." Or, "I’m looking for names of recruiters who specialize in manufacturing engineering…"
Your messages will be delivered in three different ways:
- Verbal communication (by telephone or in person)
In marketing, these delivery vehicles are referred to as collaterals. And at their core is a simple collection of words that describe the FIT between your strengths and the market's need. That collection of the right words and phrases, your definition of a good FIT, is the communication strategy of your Personal Market Plan.
T
HE PRINCIPLE OF FREQUENCYThis concept says that people need to be told something multiple times if they are expected to remember it. The best sales representatives stay in continuous contact with customers and potential customers. In fact, it has been estimated that only 20% of sales reps make six sales calls on the same customer, yet 80% of the sales are made on or after the sixth sales call. In essence, sales reps who are the most successful are persistent. They know that people remember things they are told multiple times.
TOP OF MIND AWARENESS
Your goal is to have people remember you and your message. You want to establish top of mind awareness. This marketing phrase is used to describe the goal of having consumers of a particular product think of the company brand name first when confronted with a buying decision. For instance, when you think of toy batteries, what brand name comes to mind? Eveready? Duracell? How about tires? Michelin? Goodyear?
The bottom line is that you want and need to be remembered both now and in the future and you need to establish top of mind awareness that relates your name to your career focus. For instance, job seeker, Peter Dexter wants his network to remember three things:
Peter Dexter---------Product Manager---------Medical Devices
If you are effective in creating top of mind awareness, then your contacts will remember you and will refer opportunities to you during your job search and possibly for years after.
TOP OF MIND AWARENESS
The FIT HAPPENS Series...
The Nature of Career FIT | Researching FITness | CAREER FIT Planning
Your Communication Strategy | Closing the Deal
July 16, 2008