You're The Product And The Product Manager: Now Develop Your Personal Marketing Plan
Many executives in transition, especially those who have little or no marketing experience, are often unaware that regardless of specialty or functional expertise they have to think of themselves as both the product and product manager and develop a Personal Marketing Plan to secure their next career position.
The key elements of the marketing mix are often described, perhaps somewhat superficially, as the "4 P's" -- product, positioning, price, and place (or distribution). However, these elements are just part, albeit an important part, of a more sophisticated tool called a marketing plan. In this article I'll describe the major elements of the marketing plan, including the "4 P's", and how they relate to your job search process. This is your Personal Marketing Plan.
Broadly speaking, your Personal Marketing Plan combines your career objectives, a set of marketing strategies, with a timetable for action. The key elements of the Personal Marketing Plan are your resume which can be equated to an executive summary, your current situation (or rationale), an evaluation of the business environment in your chosen target markets, and your objective (all of which can be summarized in an "elevator speech", strategies (which include a clear expression of your 4 P's), action programs, anticipated results, and contingency plans. Let me address each of these elements individually:
An executive summary is a one or two page review of the main facts and recommendations that often appears at the front of a marketing plan. The idea is to highlight the most important parts of the marketing program for top management. This allows an executive to gain a quick overview of the plan without a deep immersion into the whole presentation and the supporting documents and exhibits. An executive who needs more information than is provided in the executive summary can go directly to the sections of the marketing plan that include the requisite detail.
In your Personal Marketing Plan, your resume is the critical counterpart to the executive summary. And your career objective and personal profile are the most important part of your resume since they should highlight what you want to do, what you've done in the past that supports what you want to do, and what contributions, implicitly or explicitly, you can make to a new employer. Notably, just as the marketplace for products in the U.S. is extremely competitive, the marketplace for jobs is equally so. As a consequence, your resume has to be "A+" quality to stand out and garner attention, and when it does, it also means that the rest of you Personal Marketing Plan has to be thoughtful, crisp, and well executed to ensure you achieve your objective.
Your current situation (or rationale) is how you got to this specific place in your life at this time. In the case of those in transition, it's how they came to be looking for a new position. And the reasons are varied -- you quit your last job, you relocated because of your spouse's career, you were part of a large downsizing, you were terminated, or your company closed its doors. The key here is not to be defensive or apologetic about how you got to this place. It is crucial to develop an appropriate rationale about your current situation.
A rationale is simply a believable statement, rooted in the truth, about what happened in your last employment situation. It provides a network contact, executive recruiter, or hiring manager with a polished explanation of why you left your last position and allows you to bridge the conversation to your future -- what you want to do, where, and for whom. While this seems like a basic step, it requires a high degree of care and thoughtfulness in composition and a series of rehearsals to insure a smooth and articulate delivery. Not perfecting this early and crucial step of your Personal Marketing Plan will present a genuine problem in executing the balance of your plan.
The next element of your Personal Marketing Plan, awareness of the business environment in your chosen target markets, involves knowing the environmental factors that influence hiring in those industries where you have a career interest. Among the most salient factors are industry profitability and margin trends; growth or decline in underlying industry demand; expansion or contraction, through consolidation among industry participants; investment in innovation and invention; history and policies, both formal and informal, regarding hiring executives from outside the industry; the level and intensity of government regulation; and critical skills, and experience being sought by industry competitors (that you may or may not have to offer). Clearly, as an executive in transition, you want to think twice about investing a significant amount of time and energy trying to join a company that is losing money, laying off significant numbers of employees, and participating in an industry whose demand is rapidly declining and margins are suffering severe deterioration.
The objectives section of your Personal Marketing Plan is a succinct distillation of the position you're seeking, in which industry, for which companies, and for what compensation level. Surprisingly, many executives fail to create these objectives and, as a result, have more trouble and take considerably more time finding new positions than those who do. It stands to reason that if you can't describe your objectives, a potential employer will not know where or whether you fit their organization and are unlikely to enter you into a job related decision process, let alone hire you. At the same time, you may have multiple objectives if your background, experience, interests, and skills qualify you for more than one type of position. For example, an experienced financial executive may have objectives of seeking a position as a tax director or a controller because of previous successful experience in both roles.
As noted earlier, the "elevator speech" is the succinct summary of your current situation, your chosen target markets, and your objective. You need to be able to communicate this information to a perfect stranger (and better yet, a valuable networking contact), perhaps one you meet on an elevator, in a way that elicits the support of that individual for your job campaign.
Returning to your Personal Marketing Plan, the strategy section is a statement that shows how you will achieve your objective and lays out the areas you will emphasize to successfully execute your plan. It's a tailored framework for the 4 P's as illustrated below:
Product
As indicated at the outset of this article, you are the product. When developing your strategy statement it's very helpful to understand who you are -- your beliefs, values, behaviors, personality, and management style -- in order to communicate them to someone else and determine whether you will be a strong fit for certain positions. Working with a first rate career transition firm which administers proven assessment tools, is trained in their analysis, and helps you generate your management "product attributes" can be extremely helpful in allowing you to present your profile to others.
Positioning
Simply stated, product positioning as it pertains to your job search is how you want to be viewed by networking contacts, executive recruiters, hiring managers, and other people you meet, relative to your competition, in this case other executives who are looking for similar jobs. Positioning focuses on the perceptions others have of you and how well your characteristics (such as experience, skills, and capabilities) match up with the needs of a prospective employer. Just as you purchase a consumer product because you're familiar with its performance, or understand its benefit promise, or because it was recommended by someone whose opinion you trust, an employer will hire you for the very same reasons. Thus, it is incredibly important relative to an offer as well as long term performance on the job that you are able to deliver on your positioning. Major gaps between your positioning and delivery will likely create performance issues and dissatisfaction for you and your prospective employer in the future.
There are two constituencies critical to perfecting your positioning. The first is a set of 3-5 core references -- usually people for whom you've worked; your peers; and people who have worked for you, all of whom have seen you at your best on the job. You will share you’re a very good first draft of your resume, rationale, and "elevator speech" with them and solicit their comments and thoughts, many of which you will incorporate. You will want to make sure your references are responsive to inquiries (and support your various candidacies) and debrief you on conversations with potential employers and hiring managers.
The second is what I call a Personal Board of Directors. While you will also share your resume, rationale, and "elevator speech" with this group and solicit their comments and thoughts, the purpose of the Personal Board of Directors differs from that of your references. While your references have seen you in favorable situations on the job, your Personal Board of Directors, which can include your spouse and your career coach, is comprised of people you trust, some of whom are experienced in business or the professions, have good judgment, are insightful and thoughtful, may have a strong contact network, and know you well. Among other things, the purpose of a Personal Board of Directors is to act as a sounding board on Personal Marketing Plan, help you out of an occasional dark mood by affirming your genuine worth as a human being, give you strategic rather than tactical advice, and provide introductions to other key people.
Price
Price in the context of your Personal Marketing Plan means the total compensation and benefit package you are seeking in your next position. Your price must be set with consistency between your previous compensation, your current positioning, and what your target market is willing to pay. Inputs to the pricing decision can include base salary, bonus, stock options, restricted stock, retirement and pension benefits, health benefits, life insurance, severance, and even change of control provisions. The most obvious point to be made here is that if your desired price points are out of line with your target market, either too high or too low, you are unlikely to secure your desired career position.
Place
In the context of your Personal Marketing Plan, place (or distribution) means those venues, organizations, trade associations, suppliers, customers, consultants, professional service providers, intermediaries such as executive recruiters and venture capitalists, and other personal contacts (as well as those offered up by your Personal Board of Directors) you successfully use to develop and increase your career network which will lead to the position you want. Perhaps more than any other variable, successful development, utilization, and maintenance of your "distribution network" will spell the difference between success and failure in your search.
The next step in executing your Personal Marketing Plan is to develop your action programs by translating your strategies into specific actions and tactics. Establish timetables and commitments to show the starting and completion dates, or interim progress points, for each critical activity. An excellent example of developing an action plan for your "place" strategy is first, to identify the specific individuals within consulting firms, suppliers, and personal service companies who work with your target companies and, second, to identify people who you know or people your contacts know who can give you insights about your target company, validate your fit with their needs, and make introductions into the target company for you. All of this can then be reduced to an specific action plan and timetable to make contacts and capitalize on each of these contacts to make additional connections, all leading you to the hiring managers who are critical in helping you secure your target position.
As part of executing your Personal Marketing Plan it's important to forecast results and then compare the forecasts to what your effort is really delivering. While this is always an inexact science, and more so when you're dealing with people and their interpersonal actions and reactions, assessing the results of each strategy and the underlying tactics will give you a window into which strategies and actions to emphasize, which to abandon, and which to modify before further pursuit.
For example, you might find that characterizing yourself as a Director of Finance is not turning up a sizable number of positions, but positioning yourself as a Controller, especially in tough economic times where there is a renewed emphasis on reporting integrity, is exactly the type of executive employers are seeking.
Contingency strategies are needed because real world events interfere with the best conceptual marketing plans. In this section of your Personal Marketing Plan you ask the "what if" questions about possible developments in the marketplace and then answer them. For example, what if a company that is on the verge of making an offer to you institutes a six month hiring freeze. What's your strategy then? Or if an important reference on whom you were depending leaves the country on an extended business trip, what's your next step in this situation? The primary advantage of contingency strategies is that they force you to think about a broader range of challenges which might occur and provide alternate options that can be implemented quickly if needed.
A Personal Marketing Plans is best if it's written because the process of creation and commitment to paper provides the concentration and discipline needed for successful execution, leading to the career position you've been seeking. Are you a Product? When you are seeking a career position you certainly are. Are you a Product Manager? Everyone can be, and in transition must be. Can you develop a Personal Marketing Plan? You can; and if you want to improve your chances of success, you will.