This is the final part of my series on Why Your Personal Brand Needs a Mindset Shift. You can read the other posts in this series here: Part One: Your Personal Brand Needs a Mindset Shift Part Two: Normal is Not Enough and Part Three: Answer the Why!
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I hear from job seekers on almost a daily basis that they’ve sent out 100 resumes and just aren’t having any luck.
Or perhaps you run a small business where you run yourself ragged chasing hundreds of leads each day!
Well, today is the day to rethink those strategies. To turn them on their head even.
Quality is better than quantity.
One person who buys everything that you offer is better than 10,000 people who never buy anything.
One interview is better than 100 job applications you never hear back on.
One person who visits your site every day is better than 100 people visiting just once.
One outstanding assignment is better than 20 just-what-we-expected results.
Quality is better than quantity.
And, as always, I’m going to give you a three-step tactical plan for success. So, take out a paper and pen to get the most out of it!
Step One: Identify What Success Looks Like What does success look like for you? Is it a job offer, a paying customer or a raise?
Step Two: Determine Your Time Investment Assess just how much effort (time, money, energy) you have been putting into earning this success. How long did it take you to submit 100 resumes? Or how much did the spike in traffic cost you? Whatever you do, just make an honest assessment of how much work you’ve put into your current results.
Step Three: Make an Investment in Quality If it’s taken 20 hours of your week each week to make cold calls to 100 businesses, is there a better way for you to use these 20 hours? I believe that there is. Rather than making 100 cold calls, what if you invested those same 20 hours into 5 extremely well-matched potential clients. You would have time to to extensive research on each client, create a personalized presentation and invest your time into building relationships: all of which will yield a far greater success rates.
Let’s translate this to the job search: rather than submit 100 resumes, what if you picked 5 companies or departments within companies you’d really like to work for and put 100% of your efforts into that. You would know each of those companies forwards and backwards, you would be able to do significant internal networking, you could invest in your application, showcasing exactly the things that they want to see — all without expending any additional effort.
Let’s look at one more example: you want to get a raise. To get a raise, generally speaking, you need to do more work than your job description. The challenge is that you are already putting in the maximum time that you want to allot to your own job description, so how can you add more? How can you focus on quality? Again, its all about walking through these three steps: identify what success looks like in your position: What are the three most important things you do?; look at the time that you spend outside of those three key pieces What are you doing that is sub-optimal or unimportant?; translate this into quality Meet with your boss, talk through how you can create space for you to take on bigger projects. And, when you choose the project — go for broke. Take a risk and invest yourself in it fully.
By choosing quality, you will stand head and shoulders above the crowd making your success rate exponentially higher. Making this mindset shift will get you results.
I’ve seen it work — time and time again. What does choosing quality look like for you?
