Hello.

I'm Dr. John Beckem, Professor for Self-Management and Self-Marketing.

And today I have a personal friend of mine.

He's Richard Sellers, who I work with on a weekly basis in Score and

we help small businesses either expand, that want to grow, and

some that kind of start up from scratch, and determine whether or

not it's feasible for them to start a business.

And if so, how can we help them?

So I'm honored today to have what I consider to be an expert in marketing.

>> [LAUGH] >> So welcome.

And if you could start off by telling us a little about yourself and your background.

>> Well, thank you John.

And you mentioned the keyword which is marketing.

I'm fundamentally a marketer.

I've got quite a bit of general management experience, consulting experience but

my core, my soul is marketing.

That's what I love and I have my whole career.

I'm currently, in addition to working with you at Score which I enjoy a lot,

I'm Chairman Emeritus of the Marketing Executive Networking Group which is 1000,

1200 or so marketing executives.

I ran that for several years.

That keeps my hand in the game which I really enjoy.

You know, I, within the last four, five years I've done over 150

coaching sessions with members of this marketing group.

>> Okay. >> And usually coaching them on how to

find the job, sometimes how to do their job better.

And also do blogs on career, do webinars.

In fact, make an offer to you right now that you can send out to your students

a webinar which I'll put on in another week or two and

send you the PowerPoint that's how to improve your resume in 60 minutes.

>> Oh excellent. >> It's chock full of information.

I hate to put it this way, it's a data dump, information dump.

It's not a soft, fuzzy, pretty picture type PowerPoint.

I also blog for several different, what I call distributors.

Different group blogs and

spend a lot of time on this general area of how do you keep people up to date.

About three years ago I edited a book called Overcoming the Digital Divide.

Trying to help people typically over 40,

who were behind the curve on what's happening in our new digital world.

That was a lot of fun.

And I was the editor, certainly not the writer of that.

Earlier in the career, I was at General Electric and Procter and Gamble,

I think I was at eight companies and must have had 20,

24 bosses, about that many clients when I was consulting.

And ended up running marketing as the top guy for

three multi million dollar companies with a budget as much as $400 million.

What you and I have found is the size of the budget really doesn't matter.

Our Score clients which are small businesses are using the same thinking and

strategies that the big companies are.

Obviously their tool set's different and

the amount of money they can spend is different.

And also the move toward social media has added things,

really not subtracted anything but has added some tools to that, the category.

And when you think about me and marketing, I have to go all the way back and

this is, perhaps, unique to high school.

I got interested in journalism.

I worked a little bit as a reporter in the daily paper, and

have a degree in journalism for the University of Missouri.

So everything I look at in business includes the idea of those classic

questions, who, what, when, where, why, how, and in business, I added how much?

And if there's one takeaway from our conversation today,

I hope your students will use

those classic journalism questions as look at projects and your own career.

Because it can help you analyze and come to a path that you should take.

And again it's just who, what, when, where, why, how, and how much.

>> Now are those great questions also for

a student who's reflecting upon themselves?

So even before I enter into the job market or begin searching,

let me ask those questions of myself to determine what's my competency.

What are my strengths?

What areas do I need to improve on?

And how can I be an asset to a corporation?

>> You just did.

>> [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] That list,

the way you went through it is perfect.

>> Okay. >> And there's only a few words there but

you can apply them in may different ways.

You know, who am I?

And that's so soft in some ways but it takes a lot of thinking.

What makes me happy, what do I want to do, what am I good at?

Why should somebody hire me, what should they hire me to do,

why hire me versus somebody else?

You know, how am I going to accomplish this project which I've never seen before?

Who can I get to help me?

You can go through that litany and you probably have a thousand ways you

can apply those few words to come to a thinking process and uncover both

strengths and weaknesses in yourselves, in your approach, in your team.

>> Oh great.

Now part of the projects, and the course is over 15 weeks so we have many projects

in helping a student self reflect as well as project, looking forward.

And one of the initial points is resume.

>> Oh, yeah.

>> Them building a resume and developing it.

I'm quite sure as VP of

big companies you've seen probably a plethora of resumes.

>> [LAUGH] Yeah.

Are there any dos and don'ts or

tips that you would convey to the students and recommend for building their resume?

>> Well I'll start in the process of getting to the resume and

make another recommendation.

It's a book that's been updated annually for I'm

guessing 40 years, at least 35 called What Color Is Your Parachute?

>> Okay.

>> It's the 101 course of how to find a job.

And it applies a lot of things even what jobs should you be doing and

there are projects in there that I highly recommend.

I recommend this book, incidentally to college students, who I see

usually a couple a year, trying to help them, to CEOs.

It is very useful.

It's a little fundamental.

But if you will go through there and really work on it, it'll help you.

What I found with my marketing executives, is they have several problems.

One of the biggest is that they tend

to say I can do whatever you need to have done.

I'm really good, you should hire me.

That's BS.

>> Yes.

>> It's factual but it's not useful.

I'm assuming I'm gonna hire somebody that has an excellent track record.

Now, somebody coming out of college has a much different track record than

a 40-year-old VP, but everybody has a track record for what they have

accomplished, relative to their peers, and that's who they're being assessed against.

And, so you go through and figure out the first, a couple of questions

I ask when I'm interviewing somebody, the first one is, who is going to hire you?

And it's a most likely.

And that starts with a category and some company names so you get a general idea.

The second thing coming through there you gotta build when you're thinking your

resume is what are they gonna hire you to do?

And that's a combination of title and level,

and under the title, some function or functions.

Then the next question is, why are they gonna hire you John?

Why are they gonna hire me?

And that's where you put together an elevator pitch,

a very specific brand or position.

You can work it either way, different marketers love jargon.

It's like every field has their own jargon.

But your brand, you have a positioning.

And what you have to communicate, like Vine does in about six seconds,

which takes the elevator pitch even shorter, is a hook as to what makes you

different, what makes you, the phrase I use, uniquely useful.

>> Yes.

>> And you won't be the only person in the whole world that has that talent

but you need to come across with a specificity of focus.

And if somebody can say oh, this is a person who has, fill in,

done stuff, factual.

You're from Saratoga also so you know the name Tom Durkin, who is,

well was until the end of August, the world's best announcer at horse racing.

He said, you gotta have a plot, that's the facts, that's what you've done,

and you've gotta have a narrative.

And the narrative it's a story about you and that brings the plot alive,

takes it into a future tense so somebody can view you from your history and

the way you present yourself as to what you can be and can be for them.

And it goes back the more you understand who's more likely to hire you and

the better your understanding of why they're gonna hire you and

what they're gonna hire you to do, you put the facts you have,

and they are facts, in such a order and combination.

You blend them in such a way that you'll stand out as being very appropriate for

what that firm needs.

And I say firm.

It's really either a boss, a hiring manager, or a hiring team.

Sometimes, shall I say, muddied up with the HR department.

>> Yes.

>> You've got to learn to work with HR, but

you're really hired by the department you're working for most often.

>> Great.

I mean, you just gave some great information, some solid snippets.

And I kinda wanna unpackage these systematically.

Okay? >> Okay.

>> So that's some great information for someone that's building a resume

thinking forward, thinking of who's gonna look at this.

>> Yeah. >> And trying to properly disseminate

the accurate information that is useful.

All right, so now they have their resume in hand.

What about the marketing and self-marketing?

So there's a self-marketing strategy, and then there are self-marketing tools.

Can you talk about- >> [LAUGH]

We are here, folks.

There we go.

We're obviously not moving around very much.

>> [LAUGH] >> This is not a verbal.

>> Right.

>> Yeah. That's funny.

So let there be light.

>> Yeah.

So can you talk about, a little bit about the self-marketing strategy

versus the self-marketing tool and how to properly use both of those for

the student's benefit.

>> Oh, and these things overlap.

>> Okay. >> Very much.

The most important thing is to earn respect of people who have respect.

So you can do that many ways simply by doing a good job in whatever you're doing.

That can be with your professors in the coursework, with your teammates.

Some of the best job openings you'll ever hear of come from your peers who may or

may not even be in the same field.

But you start by earning respect by people who have respect.

Because if you or I were asked for who do you know, we are only going to give

names of people that we think would reflect positively on us.

>> Absolutely.

>> So that says I give very few references and

the references that I give are targeted to where I think the person will fit,

both job skill and corporate personality and both are equally important.

If you take that as first step and you've heard,

every time we meet I think I say who do you know?

Do you have a database of them?

Build your database.

And that can be at many different levels of this respect and

you do go out broader than what I'm indicating.

So that's a first tool and first strategic approach, and they're really combined.

And if you don't have a network,

the first think you need to do, is start building that network.

And I will admit, and I'm sure it's got to be true with you because it's true about

98% of people, a number I made up right on the spot,

that you're not keeping your network up to date.

>> Absolutely. >> So for the people who are two,

three years into their career let alone 20 or 30, this is a lifetime requirement.

Because I'll say life happens I'll clean up what I usually say life happens.

>> Uh-huh.

>> And there are gonna be times when you need your network.

Maybe to get a job, maybe a reference.

Very often, you need a contact in a completely different field.

You're looking for

a lawyer, a developer, whatever, you go to your contact list first.

And that's still what's very old-fashioned.

That's the first part of networking.

After that you can go out to broader base with social media etc.

>> Social media is a great segue.

Our students are learning some of the social media tools that are out there.

>> Yeah.

>> LinkedIn is the most popular right now, but that's not the only one.

What ways or

avenues can the individual begin to self-market themself using social media?

Well, we're talking professional jobs now, so let's go with LinkedIn first.

>> Okay. >> And LinkedIn,

I just did a kind of analysis of 13 members in

my marketing group who I know are really good at self-promotion.

And they all had 500 plus contacts.

Most of them are people they actually know or

are from groups that they highly respect.

A few of them are open ended.

They have a positioning like we just mentioned on there.

They have content that shows their full history, not necessarily their results but

at least where they were, what their title was, what they're responsible for.

They have managed their endorsements of skills so that they

are fitting into what these people actually can do and want to be known for

because that's relatively speaking your brand, that list of skills.

That's what people think you are, therefore accurate or

not that's kind of who you are from a branding point of view.

And they go through, they're putting information on there.

They're putting PowerPoints or videos you know on there.

And joining groups, you've got to join and work with the right groups.

And so I'm probably a member of 40 groups, but I work with probably five or

six that I'm most interested in.

The rest are kinda just sitting out there.

And think that's a good approach.

As you're younger, you won't have as many, but you need to build that up.

And those people go back to people you respect, people who know you, and

you build that.

And it is fine to find people you'd like to link to that you don't really know and

introduce yourself with a very personalized note.

And as you're working through that, LinkedIn for careers is number one.

Okay it's a full stop, take a deep breath,

then you go on and think about other things.

There are people who were using videos like this to really build their

awareness and reputation of blogs.

I do a lot of blogging.

I really enjoy it as a way to give information and

the blogs I'm on, I think, says a lot about me.

It's not just what my blog said.

I'm on Ming, online, which is a marketing group.

I'm on shellypalmer.com, which is my personal guru,

that 's the interface of entertainment, media, and technology.

I'm on a small one for small businesses that I just think does a wonderful job.

Then I'll get picked up most of the time by business to communications.

>> Mm-hm.

>> Very nice source there.

So that's the first thing and I would do that right.

You know, the LinkedIn and then move into video or blogs.

Now if you're in a design business or something that is very visual,

you wanna use the YouTube much more.

You wanna use Pinterest.

You know, there is no one list right for everybody.

So think about your industry and how to communicate that.

I enjoy Twitter a lot.

I send out marketing and career information on Twitter and

keep it fairly small.

I think I have about 700 followers.

I don't care to go too broad, that's not my objective.

I want to be of use to people I think are highly interested in the subjects I am

communicating.

So everybody needs to fix their list realizing that after they go and

analyze it they can't do it all, but you need to do a certain amount.

And it's a way to just communicate what you

would've ten years ago via post office.

And in fact direct mail, I think it may be, and I'm guessing as I've done a lot of

direct mail, may be more successful today than it was ten years ago.

Because I don't know about your inbox, but

other than the catalogs, I don't get much mail.

>> No.

Occasional bills.

[LAUGH] >> Yeah.

So I look at my mail.

You know, ten, 20 years ago, an inbox like this, who could look at all that?

>> Right, and now the inbox would just overfill, and flood is now my e-mail,

you know, and, you're right, now,

I tend to try to scan through my e-mail because I'm receiving so many.

>> And the new Google or Gmail approach which is just in beta testing

sounds like a more confusing answer to the simplistic chronological order

that maybe, I mean intellectually is fantastic.

From a practical point of view, I'm not sure it's gonna be doable.

>> Right. >> Maybe version six.

>> Yes and Google is known for starting things, figuring out whether or

not it works or not continually or either slamming it.

>> Oh yeah.

Entering the job market: An interview with Richard Sellers

Strategic Career Self-Management

Conheça os instrutores