I once hired a guy who had sizzle. Everything about him was right.
Until he came to work for me.
Then I learned that he was all sizzle, no steak.
Don’t get me wrong, he was a nice guy. People liked to be around him (generally). But when it came to doing his job, well… ahem.
Worse, for me as a manager, my colleagues (other managers) would ask me to harness him because he was causing problems in their divisions (spending too much time chatting with people, not work-related at all).
In the last 12 years of doing JibberJobber and my own job search, I’ve met plenty of people who were all steak, no sizzle. That is, they were very competent in what they did (from electrical engineers to dentists to marketers to you-name-it), but no one knew it. They didn’t have peers or colleagues who thought about them, talked about them, etc. They enjoyed a quiet life with a good job until the good job went away… their puny brand went away in the first gust of wind.
I’ve developed an amazing tool in JibberJobber. Yes, there is a lot to do before I’m satisfied, but really, it’s an amazing tool. We have an amount of breadth and depth that no one else has (for job seekers). I’ve done a decent job at being the senior product manager here… but, who really knows about JibberJobber?
Well, plenty of people. I used to go to resume writer and career coach conferences… and have spoken at many of them. I used to network a lot with recruiters and outplacement companies. I have spoken at job clubs from Seattle to Miami, from Boston to San Diego, and plenty of places inbetween. If you search “job search organize” (or any version of that), you’ll likely find JibberJobber.
Why, then, do I get people who sign up today and say “I have been looking for you for months and couldn’t find you! Why are you hiding?”
So, JibberJobber is great, but we are hard to find? Yep (sometimes).
I think many of you suffer from the same problem. YOU ARE GREAT, but the right company/employer is not finding you. Even though your resume is on Monster, your profile is pretty okay on LinkedIn, and recruiters are supposedly looking for you.
WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?
I submit that while you are pretty good at being the Product Manager of You, you are not very good at being the Product Marketing Manager of You.
When I started JibberJobber it was partially because it was my comfort zone. I was comfortable thinking about and designing web apps. I was comfortable working with developers and QA and figuring out how to get the idea from my head to the web.
I was not comfortable talking to people, networking, giving my 30 second pitch, and otherwise sharing my branding messages.
I was comfortable as Product Manager of Me, but not as Product Marketing Manager of Me.
Here’s the real issue: many times, the actual product doesn’t matter. It’s all in the marketing.
Haven’t you ever gotten something that was marketed well, but the actual product was a let-down?
I’m not suggesting that you, as a product are or will be a let-down. I’m just saying that you might have been focusing too much on the product and not enough on the marketing.
So let me give you this challenge: over the next week or two, figure out what MARKETING YOU means. Make a plan, build a list of tactical, actionable things you can do, and then work your plan. Become the best product marketing manager (of you) that you can!
You really can’t have one (a great product) without the other (marketing your product).