Improving Networking Effectiveness

The Challenge:

Jack was a long-term supermarket store manager. Although he still enjoyed the food industry, he became increasingly disinterested in managing subordinates and the custodial nature of his 75-80 hour work schedule. Jack preferred not to be tied to a single worksite or group of employees. He by this time decided he would enjoy selling food rather than buying it.

When we met, he was already leveraging his sizeable network to inform him of sales openings and pass his résumé around. But he was getting zero traction from the effort. He had not yet learned that, once a job was published, a flow of qualified salespeople and internal candidates would emerge. Naturally, he didn’t stack up well in comparison to those doing the work already.

The Solution:

Job Guy taught Jack to get in front of hiring mangers before competition was ever created by looking for companies with missed opportunities in their business that he could address. We determined, for example, that Jack’s extensive knowledge of the inner workings of grocery stores would be of great value to a company that was losing revenue opportunity due to poor representation. Instead of using his network for résumé distribution, he redeployed it to find good companies that had been losing share in the grocery store market. Since most of the companies that sold to grocery stores were sending reps to sell to him already, accessing this intel and finding decision-makers was easy and convenient.

The Result:

Jack convinced the first company he approached that he could teach them how to appeal to their grocery store clients to win prime display space, generate more orders, and garner promotional support. His new employer was thrilled to match his former salary while requesting that he become an individual contributor with a five-day work week.