Those same personal selling techniques can be applied to your SAP professional career. You may be eyeing a specific promotion or transition from a middle manager to an executive position. There are several qualified people providing strong competition as you look for your next step on the SAP career ladder.
Building up your personal selling techniques will provide you with the right approach for talking about your skillset and establishing your personal brand as an SAP expert. This can be a delicate balance as you do not want to sound like a pushy and overbearing salesperson. Applying the effective techniques of salespeople to your personal value will help you in your professional life. The tips that follow are those that help salespeople close deals and gain new customers.
You have a lot of positive attributes. However, they are not all relevant to your current SAP career goal. Pivot the conversation from focusing on all of your attributes to those that showcase your SAP skills in a unique way. Thinking about your value in relation to your goal position is important because:
You can think about your associated value in this way. Every job, even the same job at different companies, will have a unique job description. You would never talk about your ability to service customers if the job was for web development. However, you could have both customer service and web development skills. You would generate two different associated values and connect them to a specific position.
When you make the decision that it is time for your next career jump, you need to think about the employer as your customer. This customer has expectations for what will be delivered to them. They want someone who can contribute to their company in expected and unexpected ways. Two of the great strategies of effective salespeople are to challenge the status quo and to show tangible progress you would make.
You will find you tend to sell yourself by focusing solely on your skills and competencies. These are the features or benefits that you are bringing to your career. While it is important to highlight your SAP skills, it is likely that several other candidates will also possess similar skills. Therefore, you will not stand out against others competing with you for the employer’s attention by only focusing on what you bring. You might have one unique skill that very few others possess so, by all means, promote that! But present it in a way that is contextualized and not in isolation of your work environment.
To pivot your skills and make them a memorable proposition, spin them into how they benefited your current or previous employer. For example, a common skill set could be software development for logistics and operations. Look at the following descriptions and think about which one would be more appealing to an employer looking to add value to their company.
The first description is focused on being a savvy technical professional while the second is showing how you empowered team members to work on the solution and proactively provided clients with information. Presenting your skills in the second way is always preferred in personal selling.
It can feel unnatural to think of yourself akin to a product to sell. However, in the game of SAP career growth, you have to play the cards that are going to get you the win. In this case, the win is that career progression you have been eyeing. Shift your thinking from selling yourself to selling the value that you bring to positions.
You want your future employer to see that not hiring you would let a huge opportunity slip away. You want to make sure that know your value, align that value with employer expectations, and make your current or former employer the center of your skillset.
Does any of this seem like it would be challenging? Does it align with how you have positioned yourself for a career move before? How would you approach your current career goal if you thought about it from a personal selling perspective?