Jon Lester’s Big Job Interview

GO RED SOX! 

Last night was a a very touching night for my favorite team — The Boston Red Sox. Jon Lester returned to the big leagues for the first time since going down with cancer almost a year ago. He pitched great. Perhaps winning a full time spot in the starting rotation or, with the trading deadline approaching, perhaps it was just a big job interview for some team that is considering doing a deal with the Sox. If that was the case, Theo Epstein (the Red Sox GM) will have a much easier job getting a deal done involving Lester than he would have yesterday.

Great performances in front of large audiences at work not only bullet-proof your career, they are also the best way to assure a steady stream of new job opportunities continue to come your way.

Making Presentations is Just One Big Job Interview

When you’re speaking to a group, you have the power to command their attention. People not only hear the words you say, but they develop a lasting impression of your communication skills and an enhanced perception of your intellectual prowess. Speakers who can carry themselves well at the podium are generally viewed as “bigger than life”. If the audience is impressed with what you say and how you say it, they’ll remember you and may become fans for life.

In the summer of 1993, I was the Senior Marketing Manager for Computervision’s North American Operation. Things were not going well. The company was losing money and an upstart competitor was hitting North America the hardest. We had scheduled a big sales meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Florida to unveil a new “formula” for increasing sales. As the senior marketing executive for North America, it was my assignment to define “the formula”, create most of the material and deliver 80% of the first day’s presentations. This would be a daunting task, and I struggled for weeks trying to find a theme that would win over a tough audience of seasoned salespeople.

The biggest problem Computervision had was its complicated product line. The company had been around for decades and suffered from overlapping products, built on old technology, and new products that didn’t actually work yet. The corporate marketing department made matters worse. Every product had a marketing manager whose career hung on the unit sales of their product line. This meant that they never admitted to having any product weaknesses and whenever they compared their offering to the competition, they made it sound like “only a fool” wouldn’t choose Computervision. The sales force knew this wasn’t true. They believed that they were losing deals for product reasons, not bad salesmanship; but the not-so-hidden agenda in corporate marketing was to blame North American Operations for the company’s weak sales performance.

My epiphany for “The Formula” hit me. All I needed to do was to delineate the strong products from the weaker ones, and then focus the sales force on just selling the products that were winning head-to-head competitions in North America. I could also point out which products were “dogs” and steer them away from wasting their time pitching them. Poking fun at these hapless offerings would provide me with grist for making jokes at the expense of the home office — something the sales force loved to do. This turned out to be exactly what the audience was looking for.

I created a four-hour workshop on this theme. I knew I had good material, but I was still nervous about my ability to deliver a solid presentation to a room of 300 skeptics. Then I had a second epiphany. Sales people hated marketing presentations because they never trusted marketing people. But I was about to change that and I knew my style would win their trust. By pulling this off, I’d turn a room full of seasoned skeptics into a room full of future job references. I started thinking about the presentation as one big job interview. Since Computervision was failing, most of the people in the audience would be working somewhere else shortly and wherever they ended up, there might be an opportunity for me as a marketing executive.

This change of mindset, combined with good content, made the meeting a rousing success. Of course, Computervision continued to fail and I left a year later to pursue a better job for more money. The people in the audience that day ended up helping me win my next position, as well as the one after that. It did turn out to be a big job interview.

While an important presentation is like a job interview there is one exception, the audience seldom gets to ask you tough questions you can’t answer. You control the agenda; you make your case, back it up, and declare your conclusions. Hopefully you’ll be able to get off the stage while everyone is still clapping. People who witness a great presentation become job leads for the rest of your career.