FREMONT, CA: Sales is the most important skill an entrepreneur must master. After all, the success of a product or service depends on your ability to sell the product or service. However, for sales to be truly successful, today’s entrepreneurs must participate as much as possible in promoting their products and services.
Lead with your soft skills
When employers meet you, they first encounter who you are, not what you can do. To effectively communicate your value, start with who you are as a person, not what you know and definitely not your academic credentials and pedigree. Instead, lead with your soft skills. Soft skills are personal attributes, attitudes and character traits that define one’s personality and general disposition. Less specialized and rooted in specific vocations, they are essentially “social skills” that help to decide whether one can interact effectively and harmoniously with other people.
Make sure you can hack it
Although Human Resource managers are now prioritizing soft skills, recruiters also want to reap tangible benefits from hiring candidates. To communicate your value to potential employers, aim to demonstrate that you can actually get the job done. To do this, foreground your specific occupational skills, knowledge and expertise and your prior experience that help to illustrate your hard skills. Hard skills are “technical knowledge or training that you have gained through any life experience, including your career or education.''
Your hard skills are critical because they show your proficiency in areas where prior knowledge and skills are essential. They also communicate to employers that you can execute the roles and responsibilities of a specific job. In today’s job market, good workers and candidates with highly specialized skills are hard to find. Your suite of hard skills must therefore be a strong part of the evidence you bring to the table. To communicate your value, aim to show how your skills increase productivity or efficiency, how your knowledge can be applied to the organization and generally how employers can benefit from their encounter with you.
Stand out
It is not enough to demonstrate your hard and soft skills. To communicate your value, it is essential to take stock of the areas in which you are most competitive, what marketers call your “unique value proposition” (UVP). A UVP essentially “describes your value, to whom you provide that value, and what makes you different from your competition”, says Founder of Clickx, Solomon Thimothy. Thimothy was referring to entrepreneurs keen to grow a successful and sustainable business and their obligation to know their unique value to position their product or service as the best possible option in the marketplace. It is also critical for job seekers to define the concrete variables that set them apart from competitors in their field before aiming to sell themselves.
To communicate your point of differentiation, consider the distinctive value you bring to the table. Why should an employer choose you over other candidates for the job? Beyond experience or qualifications, focus on your major wins and significant accomplishments, aspects of your niche that you are exceptional at, when you have gone above and beyond to accomplish a goal and the results that you achieve.
