Lost Your Gig? On To The Next!

I hope you keep taking risks with marketing, with products, with your audience, with your customers, and with your career. Because failure isn’t the point. What you do next is.

When a good marketing campaign isn’t working with your target audience, you take a close look at the metrics and you tweak it, and if that doesn’t work, you move on.

Maybe your product isn’t selling to the market you chose. Good product, vibrant market, no match—and no cigar. Move on. The worst thing you can do is kid yourself.

Move On

Here’s what executive candidates often say to me when they don’t get the job:

“Nick, just get me back in there! This job is perfect for me! They didn’t understand. Get me one more meeting! I know I can show them I’m perfect for the job!”

No, you can’t, and no, you’re not, I tell them.

The tough part is seeing the dejection, which often turns into self-doubt and loss of confidence. It takes me longer to get them past that than it did to prep them for the job interview. We are naturally wired to blame someone when X and Y don’t match up.

The campaign wasn’t wrong. The product is no good!

I’m perfect for the job. There’s something wrong with that company!

Usually, neither of the above is true. When an employer—or your target market—tell you “no,” there’s only so much you can learn from the experience. Then you move on.

Six years ago, Ask The Headhunter became part of the re-launch of CMO.com as a bigger and better hub for top marketers. I’ve written some of my best, most thoughtful stuff for this column because the CMO.com audience stimulated in me new ways to look critically at executive job search, recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and related challenges.

When the views stopped adding up, the metrics didn’t tell us much about why. I know, from licensing Ask The Headhunter to myriad markets over two decades, that you can’t always figure out what’s going to click with the audience.

The rules I use with candidates who fail to get jobs are the same rules that made us decide to end a column that’s not generating views.

Rule #1: Never Argue With Your Market

CMOs aren’t very gregarious on CMO.com. Few of you posted comments on columns and, unlike other venues where my readers send me tons of mail, there’s been virtually no mail from this column.

That’s not your problem, any more than a product that isn’t selling isn’t the market’s problem. X doesn’t match Y. That’s why an honest review of the metrics must drive decisions. And clear feedback from employers tells frustrated candidates to stop arguing to get the job.

Rule #2: Use Metrics To Find New Markets For Good Products

CMO.com continues to get top accolades for its curated and original content. Ask The Headhunter drives passionate dialogue in other venues. But my columns don’t match the CMO.com audience.

My job is to find a Y that matches my X. No one’s going to drive up and deliver that match to me. And if you lost your job or got rejected for a new one, finding the next is your smartest next move. But if you’re really good at what you do, doubting yourself isn’t going to get you there. Evaluate the data. Listen to it. Go where it leads.

Rule #3: Use Your Brain To Create New Products For Your Market

I sometimes coach failed job candidates to take a hard look at their huge constellation of skills and abilities—but only after they closely assess the problems and challenges that a particular organization faces. Then I tell them to carefully select only their most relevant tools to produce a business plan that meets the needs of their “market”—the employer. Just as important as what the employer needs is what it doesn’t need.

This is the last Ask The Headhunter column for CMO.com. But we’re putting our heads together to cook up new content with a different flavor that will pay off for you—our audience. We might get it right; we might get it wrong. What drives us is knowing you’ll tell us. What drives us is trying to better understand what you want and need. Because that’s our job, not yours.

Rule #4: Keep Taking Risks

I’ve loved producing this column and I’m bummed it stopped working, but I’m grateful for having been part of the CMO.com family. Thanks!

Long ago I learned to take the forthright advice in William Golding’s novel The Color of Light. It’s about a novelist and his lifelong literary agent. When the novelist wrote books that didn’t work, the agent never let the writer waste time with too many questions and doubts.

“On to the next!” he exhorted. On to the next risk.

I hope you keep taking risks with marketing, with products, with your audience, with your customers, and with your career. Because failure isn’t the point. What you do next is.

If you’d like to keep reading Ask The Headhunter, I invite you to sign up for my free weekly newsletter—now at 660 editions and counting.