Value Proposition Part 2

At this point, you have written out your value proposition, outlined a “target” market or company profile and you have identified specific companies you are interested in. I’m assuming your list has more than 10 entries when you start. Remember that while you will need something like a hundred to guarantee success, you can start with as few as one.
Your next step is to choose one to start with. Don’t over think your choice, you have done your primary screening, so any one of them will work. In order to make this effective, your research really starts now. Let’s assume you got your info from D&B (Dunn & Bradstreet), it will probably include the name of one contact at least, research the individual, then research the company.

• On the company side try to create a mini “org chart”.
• Who is the CEO, CTO, CFO, COO, etc? How long have they been at the company?
• What has been the company’s history?
• Is the company profitable?
• How many locations?
• Where would you fit?
• What does the company do?
• Everything else you can think of.

 

Your goal is to identify an individual that has hiring authority, budget authority and is likely to benefit from the services you provide. When in doubt, move up. If you are technical project manager and you can’t find an identified CTO, look for the COO. If they don’t exist, then it’s the CEO.

Dig out as much info as possible on each. Your initial letter will be stock, but when you call, you will need to know who to ask for and as much as possible about them and their company.

When you call, you will be asking for an appointment, but you need to be prepared for anything. Write out your questions and have them in front of you. Script your open, literally. Write it out word for word and read it when you call. Rehearse it before hand so it doesn’t sound like you’re reading it, but read it.

Your expectations need to be appropriate for the process as well. Unfortunately, most of the time, you’ll get some variation of “don’t call me, I’ll call you.” If they send you to HR, it’s the same thing. You may want to follow up with HR, but that will be the exception. Your goal is having a personal conversation with someone with both budget and hiring authority, anything else and move to the next one.

Part of the reason for starting with 10 or so companies is because of how often “No” will be your outcome and you’ll need to have that next one to focus on.

What will happen at this point is you will genuinely be in a numbers game. If you can do this 100 times, then you will get at least one offer. You could get as many as 10. You should get 30 to 40 interviews.

A possible script might go:
“Hi Bob, my name is Steve Paul, I sent you a note a week ago introducing myself. I build extremely resilient, high performance IT teams. The reason for my call is to follow up on the letter and ask you if there is a time we could talk about how I might be able to help. Is now a good time or should we set an appointment for later?”

 

The reason for having your questions written out now is that the success of the interview will be directly related to the quality of your questions and if “Bob” says, “Actually I do have a couple minutes, what are you thinking?” you need to be able to ask a good question. Something that relates to your value prop. In the example above, I would start asking about how complicated there IT needs are. I would start by citing something I had found through my research, then turn it into a question. “I see you have 13 offices in Western Washington, how many IT people does it currently take to support them?   How effective do you think the team is?"

The point is to be ready. Really ready. This is a way to create opportunity, and when that opportunity is developed, turning it into something that you can grow with over time.

Creating the "Value Proposition" letter

Coming back to the Value Proposition process. 

You’ve gone through Dunn and Bradstreet, identifying target companies. For each of these you have the name and address of the “Principal”. The titles vary a lot, but D&B has a primary contact. For each company you target, more research will be required to get the most current info. Start with the company web page, then look it up on Google/Bing. Do a LinkedIn search as well. After you have done this, your list should be a bit smaller as some of the companies may have moved out of the area, gone out of business, changed businesses, etc., but you’ll know a lot about the companies that interest you.

Separately, you’ve done your research on what you provide for that company and can very succinctly state how your skill set provides exceptional value. When I look at my own history, I’ve done a lot of stuff and while my design and planning skills are completely competitive, what separates me from my peers is my ability to create very high performance teams that are stable and have exceptional durability.

The next step is to create a letter of five or fewer sentences that highlight what you can do and what the positive consequences have previously been and how those might apply to their company. This letter ends with a sentence stating that you will follow up on a specific date.

Using myself as an example, here’s how I might write a value-proposition letter:

Dear Ms Smith,

Over the last ten years I have had the opportunity to create three teams that support information technology and that have consistent, extraordinary results. In each of these cases, my team exceeded expectations significantly, built exceptionally robust systems and high levels of customer/user satisfaction, while remaining under budget. One of these teams rebuilt a corporate technology infrastructure including development of standards -based computing, increased uptime to more than 99%, and implemented a common “Electronic Client Health Record” across six distinct departments.

I would love to provide a similar level of support for your company and will call you to chat about how I can help on xxxx the xx of xxxx.

Regards,

Stephen M. Paul

www.linkedin.com/stephenmpaul



Call on the date and time specified. Say to the receptionist (or whoever answers the phone), “May I speak with Ms. Smith? She is expecting my phone call”. When Ms. Smith answers, say, “Hi, I’m Steve Paul. I sent you a note last week and am following up to see if you would like to chat about how I might be able to help XXX company obtain greater results in (here have a succinct version of what you are good at) testing blah de blah, or developing a larger customer database, or educating your customers on how to use your product.”

Whatever it is, this is the point where Ms. Smith has gone back through the 7,000 emails and letters she’s received and finally remembers that yes (or no) she is interested in talking about what you might be able to do. She does have a problem that you addressed in your letter. So she says, “Yes, Steve, nice to meet you. And yes, I would like to talk about fixing (something). I’m busy right now, but could you drop by tomorrow at 10 in the morning?”

Or she says, “No, we have a very well oiled testing system (or whatever it is) here and don’t need any help. Thanks for calling.” And hangs up.

Remember that if you get one out of 10 to be a positive contact, you are hitting a good sales percentage.

Selling is what you are doing, so learn to sell the fine brand that you are, so you can get a good job.

Value Proposition Campaigns

Pretty much all of my posts so far have been about how to get a “job”, as in an existing, defined role in an existing, defined company. You know the drill, create resume, find an opportunity, then apply or try to identify who the hiring influence is etc. A second process would be to work your network until someone tells you about an opportunity that hasn’t been advertised and follow up with the person who needs the new help. Both of these can work and for many roles those are the two most effective ways for finding a new job. There is another approach and for some kinds of opportunities it’s especially useful.


Smaller companies, say less than $20m in yearly revenue, simply can’t afford hiring one of the big search firms to find their most senior executives, and frankly putting an ad on Craig’s List for a new Chief Financial Officer (CFO) is pretty tacky and simply not going to net an interesting candidate. So how is this new CFO found?

There are a few ways, but only one of them is the subject of this post. This isn’t especially original, but it seems difficult for people to do; it’s the creation of a “value proposition campaign”. Using the above example, you are a Stanford MBA, CPA and have the requisite experience. For whatever reason you are now looking for your next opportunity and your target is CFO of a medical manufacturing company with between $5m and $20m in revenue.

The theory is very straight forward: Identify the 2 or 3 things you are sure will be needed by every company in this sector and that you have done well and look forward to doing again, write them down (on paper) and snail mail them to the CEO. Follow up 2 or 3 days later asking the CEO if you can sit down over coffee to discuss how this might benefit his/her company. Pretty simple, right? Unfortunately, the devil is in the details.

Trying to cover the various parts of this process in a single post is pretty hopeless, so I’ll break it into parts:

• This is the intro (of course) and covers the concept and what to expect the next few entries to entail.

• Market research/identification, how do you find the companies you want to send these letters to? What about the name of the CEO? What about whether a company even has a CFO currently?

• Creating the letter

• Getting the interview

• Asking for the sale

This is going to be interesting.