Selling Yourself and Your Company.
I am a student at Abilene Christian University, and as such some of my friends are professors. One in particular is a gentlemen named Matt Boisvert (pronounced Boi-verr, It’s French or something). Anyways, he is my Marketing professor, and as I was talking to him about some of my outside studies, he introduced me to a concept of selling yourself that changed how I thought about presentation.
The full-story on presentation at the click.
Specifically we were talking about resumes but this can apply–and does– apply to anything involving marketing, or advertisements.
I asked him how I should send out my resume, e-mail or snail mail. He replied;
Well let’s think. Should you send it e-mail, snail mail, or Fed-Ex?
E-mail. Something that when you send it, it’s instantaneous. You press “send” and BAM, it’s there, in their inbox ready to be read, and reviewed almost immediately. But who are you sending this resume too? Is it someone high up in the company, because if so, how many e-mails do you think they are getting in a day? 50, 60, 200? Who knows how many, but what do you do with e-mails? Open, scan for nit-bits, and then maybe flag a few here and there that you want to go back to and read later, but you never really have full on interaction with an e-mail. So e-mail, is probably not the best avenue for a resume.
Snail-Mail. It’s pretty cool right, everyone likes getting a little snail-mail now and again. But how much snail-mail is this company getting in a day? How many of those are landing on the desk of the person you just sent that resume to via e-mail? Sure sending a thank you card or something for reading your resume would be nice but, do you really know if they read it if you sent it via e-mail? Sure you sent it, and you know where you sent it, and your computer says it was sent, but was it really even opened… did it make it past the junk-mail filter even? And also, if you are sending your actual resume via snail-mail, how long is that going to take to get there? 5 – 7 days? By then interviews could have been scheduled and done with, and you could be sitting in a new windowed office with a steady salary and or nice hourly wage. So snail-mail isn’t the best avenue either.
Fed-Ex. What happens when you get something from Fed-Ex. You get excited. You see an envelope from Fed-Ex on your desk, it’s big, it’s colored, and says “NEXT DAY” really big on the front, and so it creates a sense of urgency just it’s appearance. Not only that, but how are you actually sending this Fed-Ex message? Is your resume boxed or enveloped? Is the envelope lined with bubble-wrap or is it just plain? How much time did you spend on the packaging and presentation of your resume? All of this factors go into how your resume, your message or advertisement for yourself, is going to be received–and more importantly how you are going to be viewed as a potential employee. Sure, you are going to be spending a little more on the Fed-Ex box and the presentation, but what does that say about you? Quality, professionalism, this person is willing to go the extra mile–and if they do it with their resume, God only knows how much farther they will go with an actual career at my company.
So what’s the best choice?
Think about this one yourself. What’s the best choice? What’s the best ad? Who is marketing themselves the best? The person who e-mails their Microsoft Word Templated Resume, the guy who snail-mailed it a week back when the interviews happened this week, or the guy who overnighted it via Fed-Ex in the Coconut CD case with the resume cleverly folded and packaged to get my attention, and keep me interested from the time I noticed I had a package.
Presentation–More important than most give it credit for.
Here is an ad by Doritos, how are they packaging themselves?
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