How to Get Noticed – and Get Hired!

If you want to get hired, you have to position yourself. When you clearly communicate what makes you different, you make it easier to get noticed by your prospects.

Strong and relevant differentiation greatly increases the number of inquiries you get. It also helps you land a larger percentage of the prospects who contact you. Differentiation is especially important when you provide services that are more transactional in nature. In other words, services that companies in your target market are already buying.

For instance, ad agencies hire freelance copywriters all the time. Most of them need good copy but don’t have copywriters on staff. Similarly, software companies will often hire specialized freelance developers for projects where full-time staff is not justified. And businesses frequently hire freelance photographers for their annual conferences and customer events.

However, many solo professionals have to market their services to companies that:

• don’t recognize they have a problem or need in a particular area, or
• recognize there’s a problem but don’t realize that viable solutions to the problem exist

In these cases, talking all day long about what makes you different won’t do you any good. In fact, it will count against you because your prospects will think that you don’t really understand their business.

Let’s take a freelance marketing consultant who specializes in creating customized lead nurturing programs (programs for staying in touch with prospects who aren’t ready to buy at the moment). Even if she’s the very best at what she does, if she’s talking to companies that don’t even realize they have a problem turning long-term prospects into customers, her message will fall on deaf ears.

Or take a freelance productivity expert who starts knocking on doors and talking about all the benefits of increasing worker productivity. If the people he’s approaching don’t even know they have a productivity problem (or one that’s significant enough to warrant looking into), he’s going to have a very difficult time.

So what’s the answer? What approach should you take if you find yourself in this situation frequently?

Develop a clear value statement

A value statement is simply a message that communicates what you do and whom you do it for. But rather than going into why you’re different, you instead explain what tangible results you deliver.

Whenever possible, those tangible results should focus on business value. Specifically, on factors such as profitability, revenue, costs, time, efficiency, customer satisfaction, market share, inventory, collections and so on.

Just as important, the value statement should explain exactly how you impact those factors. And whenever possible, you should offer some numbers to back up your claim.

Let me give you some sample value statements to better illustrate this concept:

• I help financial services firms increase their lead conversion rates by 48 to 72 percent through customized and automated lead nurturing programs.
• I help regional retailers slash store renovation and retrofit times by up to 23 percent through improved sourcing controls and better material planning. This, in turn, shortens time to revenue by an average of 17 days.

From here, you can then expand on these messages so you can highlight the actual problem and better explain its impact on the business or department. This gives you a more complete statement that will better resonate with prospects who don’t even realize a problem exists:

• Many financial firms struggle to get qualified leads in the door despite spending a fortune on lead generation campaigns and advertising. I help them increase their lead conversion rates by 48 to 72 percent through customized and automated lead nurturing programs that turn more of the leads they already have into qualified opportunities.
• For regional retailers, opening stores on time enables them to generate revenue faster and capitalize on important seasonal shopping activity. I help these retailers slash store renovation and retrofit times by up to 23 percent through improved sourcing controls and better material planning. This, in turn, shortens time to revenue by an average of 17 days.

Could this approach be used by those of us working in more transactional areas? Of course! Especially today, when corporate and nonprofit budgets are getting scrutinized like never before and when value is now a key driver of decisions.

But for those who sell to markets where customers don’t recognize they have a problem in a specific area — or won’t even talk to you unless you can demonstrate tangible value in an area that’s important to them — creating and using value statements in your marketing communications and conversations with prospects is an absolute must.