If you don’t ask…

Have you ever heard the old cliché, “If you don’t ask for what you want, you’ll never get it?” This idea recently came to the forefront of my mind when I was visiting with a job-seeker. He was telling me about the hundreds of letters and resumes that he had sent over the last few months to potential employers after he had been laid off from his company. He told me, “I just can’t figure out why they are not calling me back. I have an amazing resume that focuses on my sales results and my cover letters are always personalized to the company in which I am applying.”

I asked him to send me his resume and cover letter and he was absolutely right. The resume and cover letter he provided me was pretty amazing, probably one of the best that I had seen in years. As I reviewed his cover letter, one thing really stuck out in my mind after reading it. Although he had clearly communicated his value to the company as a results-oriented sales professional, he did not give the reader an actionable reason to respond to his letter. He did not ask for an interview.

I called him back to talk with him about this and I was actually surprised by his answer to my question, “Why did you not ask for the interview?” He told me that he did not feel that that was “professional” and thought it sounded desperate. I thought about his response for a moment and then asked him some qualifying questions about his resume.

As I stated earlier, his resume was stellar. In one section of his resume he stated that he had “Increased sales of a specific product more that 200% over eight months and expanded the number of clients in his territory by 35%.” Pretty impressive numbers! When I asked him how he was able to do this, he told me that he was “really good at asking for the customers business.”

He paused…Then it hit him like a ton of bricks….

Sometimes asking the simplest and most logical question can be incredibly difficult. He was very comfortable asking customers to “buy” his product when he was working for someone else, but now that he was unemployed was having a very difficult time asking potential employers for an interview. I quickly helped him to see that there was little difference between the two situations and we formulated a new cover letter that integrated his “closing” abilities.

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