Who are the competitors in the market for my product?
Which features do competitive products offer? How do they compare to the features my product offers?
Which industries do competitors target? How do they compare with the industries my company targets?
Which contracts have the competitors won? How do they compare with the contracts my company has won?
How effective is my company’s product marketing? My website? My social media? My key employees’ social media?
Bredemarket can help you answer these questions.
Types of analyses Bredemarket performs
For those who don’t know, or who missed my previous discussion on the topic, Bredemarket performs analyses that contain one or more of the following:
Analysis of one or more markets/industries for a particular product or product line.
Analysis of one or more (perhaps tens or hundreds) of competitors and/or competitive products for a particular product or product line.
Analysis of a firm’s own product or product line, including how it is marketed.
How Bredemarket conducts its analyses
Bredemarket analyses only use publicly available data.
I’m not hacking websites to get competitor prices or plans.
I’m not asking past employees to violate their non-disclosure agreements.
How Bredemarket packages its analyses
These analyses can range in size from very small to very large. On the very small side, I briefly analyzed the markets of three prospect firms in advance of calls with them. On the large side, I’ve performed analyses that take between one and six weeks to complete.
For the small self-analyses (excluding the very small quick freebies before a prospect call), I deliver these under my Bredemarket 404 Web/Social Media Checkup banner. When I first offered this service in 2020, I had a complex price calculation mechanism that depended upon the number of pages I had to analyze. Now I’ve simplified it and charge one of two flat rates.
Because the larger analyses are of undetermined length, I offer these at an hourly rate under my Bredemarket 4000 Long Writing Service banner. These reports can number 40 pages or more in length, sometimes accompanied by a workbook describing 700 or more competitor products or contracts.
Obviously I can’t provide specifics upon the analyses I’ve already performed since those are confidential to my customers, but I always discuss the customers’ needs before launching the analysis to ensure that the final product is what you want. I also provide drafts along the way in case we need to perform a course correction.
Do you need a market, competitor, or self analysis? Contact me. Or book a meeting with me at calendly.com/bredemarket to talk about your needs (and check the “Market/competitor analysis” check box).
Knell Computer announced Friday that it is eliminating wi-fi capabilities from its business computer product lines.
“At Knell Computer, we strongly believe that the best work occurs in a traditional office environment,” according to Gabriel Knell, CEO. “Since modern offices are fully equipped with Ethernet cabling, wi-fi is an unnecessary expense. Removal of wi-fi allows us to sell Knell Computers at a lower price point than our competitors, providing cost savings to our customers.”
Knell will promote this innovation with an ad campaign in major city downtown business districts, where it will attract the attention of real workers.
Gabriel Knell: “If you’re an amateur who performs so-called ‘work’ at home in your shorts, rather than from a true cubicle office environment, feel free to buy wi-fi computers from our competitors. We are embarrassed to see the Knell logo in a coffee shop—or in a converted bedroom.”
In a related announcement, Knell will incorporate technology that “red flags” the use of any Knell computer in a residential zone.
Generated by Google Gemini.
For those of you who don’t know much about Knell Computer, LinkedIn’s helpful AI feature provided contextual detail, including answers to critical questions:
“What is Knell Computer known for?”
“How will removing wi-fi impact office environments?”
“What is the significance of the technology preventing residential use?”
All of these answers, sourced from information found in LinkedIn and on the Internet, were undoubtedly helpful.
But LinkedIn AI appears to have missed one teeny tiny thing.
Since I’m not engaged in full-time product marketing (although I perform some product marketing activities for my Bredemarket clients), I sometimes spend my time writing other things.
Like fake press releases for fake products from fake companies.
Who is the real Knell Computer?
But I think that most of you figured out that Knell Computer and its head Gabriel Knell are based upon Dell Computer and its head Michael Dell.
(Note the “angelic” naming here. And no, I’m not naming anything after Lucifer.)
Dell’s two classes of workers
And most of you know why Dell Computer was suddenly in the news in May, and actually a little before that, as this Forbes article indicates.
Dell’s new remote-work policy will categorize its workers into two main groups: remote and hybrid.
Hybrid workers must agree to come into an “approved” office at least 39 days each quarter. This is roughly the equivalent of three days per week. Remote workers do not have to come into an approved office at all. However, remote workers aren’t eligible for promotion or to change jobs within the company.
According to the Register, Dell confirmed the 39 days/quarter requirement, and explained why it believed it was important.
In a statement, a Dell spokesperson told The Register, “We shared with team members our updated hybrid work policy. Team members in hybrid roles will be onsite at a Dell Technologies office at least 39 days per quarter (on average three days a week). In today’s global technology revolution, we believe in-person connections paired with a flexible approach are critical to drive innovation and value differentiation.”
Starting next Monday, May 13, the enterprise hardware slinger plans to make weekly site visit data from its badge tracking available to employees through the corporation’s human capital management software…
Let me just pause right there. Any time that you read something about “human capital management,” your antennae should go up.
Blue flags are good, red flags are bad
But let’s get back to how Dell is managing its carbon-based capital.
…and to give them color-coded ratings that summarize their status. Those ratings are:
Bredemarket’s fake press release…and you’ll never believe what happened next!
So that was the situation as of June 1 when Knell Computer issued its press release, complete with “red flag” capability.
I’m forced to confess that Knell Computer’s product marketing efforts didn’t really make an impact. (I KNEW I should have included the press release in the Bredemarket blog. Better late than never.)
But Dell Computer’s efforts truly impacted its employees…but not in the way that Dell Computer wanted.
A few weeks after Knell Computer’s product marketing effort, stories began to emerge about what was happening at the real Dell. Here’s part of what Ars Technica said on June 20:
Dell announced a new return-to-office initiative earlier this year. In the new plan, workers had to classify themselves as remote or hybrid.
Those who classified themselves as hybrid are subject to a tracking system….
Alternatively, by classifying themselves as remote, workers agree they can no longer be promoted or hired into new roles within the company.
Business Insider claims it has seen internal Dell tracking data that reveals nearly 50 percent of the workforce opted to accept the consequences of staying remote, undermining Dell’s plan to restore its in-office culture.
But haven’t they killed their chances for promotion or lateral moves?
“But wait!” you’re saying. “So many people are willing to forgo promotion at Dell, or even to apply to new positions at Dell?”
Yes. Because here’s a dirty little secret:
Dell employees can leave Dell and work for other companies.
Granted many other companies aren’t remote-friendly either (believe me, I know), but those that are have an opportunity to scoop up Dell’s best and brightest.
Does Dell dissatisfaction provide an opportunity for me?
And as the Dell workers leave, this provides an opportunity for yours truly. After all, I’d be happy to report to Dell’s office in Ontario, California. So I went to see what opportunities I’d have.
When your company attends events, you’ll want to maximize your event return on investment (ROI) by creating marketing content that you publish before, during, and after the event.
The two things (first, second) you need to do NOW, well before your event.
And I’ll spill a couple of secrets along the way.
The first secret (about events)
I’m going to share two secrets in this post. OK, maybe they’re not that secret, but you’d think they ARE secrets because no one acknowledges them.
The first one has to do with event attendance. You personally might be awed and amazed when you’re in the middle of an event and surrounded by hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands of people. All of whom are admiring your exhibit booth or listening to your CEO speak.
Technically not a CEO (Larry Ellison’s official title is Chief Technology Officer, and the CEO is Safra Catz), but you get the idea. By Oracle PR Hartmann Studios – CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47277811.
But guess what?
Many, many more people are NOT at the event.
They can’t see your exhibit booth, and can’t hear your speaker. They’re on the outside, TRYING to look in.
And all the money you spent on booth space and travel and light-up pens does NOTHING for the people who aren’t there…
Unless you bring the event to them. Your online content can bring the event to people who were never there.
But you need to plan, create, and approve your content before, during, and after the event. Here’s how you do that.
Three keys to creating event-related content
Yes, you can just show up at an event, take some pictures, and call it a day. But if you want to maximize your event return on investment, you’ll be a bit more deliberate in executive your event content. Ideally you should be:
Before the event begins, you need to plan your content. While you can certainly create some content on a whim as opportunity strikes, you need to have a basic idea of what content you plan to create.
Before the event. Why should your prospects and customers care about the event? How will you get prospects and customers to attend the event? What will attendees and non-attendees learn from the event?
During the event. What event activities require content generation? Who will cover them? How will you share the content?
Some dude creating Morphoway-related content for Biometric Update at the (then) ConnectID Expo in 2015.
After the event. What lessons were learned? How will your prospects and customers benefit from the topics covered at the event? Why should your prospects buy the product you showcased at the event?
Creating your event content
Once you have planned what you want to do, you need to do it. Before, during, and after the event, you may want to create the following types of content:
Blog posts. These can announce your attendance at the event before it happens, significant goings-on at the event (such as your CEO’s keynote speech or the evening party launching your new product), or lessons learned from the event (what your CEO’s speech or your new product means for your prospects and clients). Blog posts can be created relatively quickly (though not as quick as some social media posts), and definitely benefit your bottom line.
Social media. Social media such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn can also be used before, during, and after the event. Social media excels at capturing the atmosphere of the event, as well as significant activities. When done right, it lets people experience the event who were never there.
E-mails. Don’t forget about e-mails before, during, and after the event. I forgot about e-mails once and paid the price. I attended an event but neglected to tell my e-mail subscribers that I was going to be there. When I got to the event, I realized that hardly any of the attendees understood the product I was offering, and were not the people who were hungry for my product. If I had stocked the event with people from my e-mail list, the event would have been more productive for me.
Data sheets. Are you announcing a new product at an event? Have the data sheet ready.
Demonstration scripts. Are you demonstrating a new or existing product at the event? Script out your demonstration so that your demonstrators start with the same content and make the points YOU want them to make.
Case studies and white papers. While these usually come into play after the event, you may want to release an appropriate case study or white paper before or during the event, tied to the event topic. Are you introducing a new product at an industry conference? Time your product-related white paper for release during the conference. And promote the white paper with blog posts, social media, and e-mails.
Other types of content. There are many other types of content that you can release before, during, or after an event. Here’s a list of them.
Approving your event content
Make sure that your content approval process is geared for the fast-paced nature of events. I can’t share details, but:
If your content approval process requires 24 hours, then you can kiss on-site event coverage goodbye. What’s the point in covering your CEO’s Monday 10:00 keynote speech if the content doesn’t appear until 11:00…on Tuesday?
If your content approval process doesn’t have a timeline, then you can kiss ALL event coverage goodbye. There have been several times when I’ve written blog posts announcing my company’s attendance at an event…and the blog posts weren’t approved until AFTER the event was already over. I salvaged the blog posts via massive rewrites.
So how are you going to generate all this content? This brings us to my proposed solution…and the second secret.
The rest of this post talks about one of Bredemarket’s services, the Bredemarket 2800 Medium Writing Service. For those who haven’t heard about it, it’s a service where I provide between 2,800 and 3,200 words of written text.
“But John,” you’re asking. “How is a single block of 3,200 words of text going to help me with my event marketing?”
Time to reveal the second secret…
You can break up those 3,200 words any way you like.
For example, let’s say that you’re planning on attending an event. You could break the text up as follows:
One 500-word blog post annnouncing your attendance at the event.
Three 100-word social media posts before the event.
One 500-word blog post as the event begins.
One 300-word product data sheet prepared before the event and released on the second day of the event.
One 500-word blog post announcing the new product.
Three 100-word social media posts tied to the new product announcement.
One 500-word post-event blog post with lessons learned.
Three 100-word social media posts after the event.
For $2,000 (as of June 2024), you can benefit from written text for complete event coverage, arranged in any way you need.
So how can you and your company receive these benefits?
Read about the Bredemarket 2800 Medium Writing Service
First, read the data sheet for the Bredemarket 2800 Medium Writing Service so you understand the offer and process.
Second, contact Bredemarket to get the content process started well BEFORE your event. Book a meeting with me at calendly.com/bredemarket. Be sure to fill out the information form so I can best help you.
When I write about space aliens, there’s a reason. And that reason may be to warn identity vendors that silence is NOT golden.
Fake LinkedIn stories
As a frequent reader and writer on LinkedIn, I’ve seen all the tips and tricks to drive engagement. One popular trick is to make up a story that will resonate with the LinkedIn audience.
For example, the writer (usually a self-proclaimed career expert who is ex-FAANG) will tell the entirely fictional story of a clueless hiring manager and an infinitely wise recruiter. The clueless hiring manager is shocked that a candidate accepted a competing job offer. “Didn’t she like us?” asks the hiring manager. The wise recruiter reminds the clueless hiring manager that the candidate had endured countless delays in numerous interviews with the company, allowing another company to express interest in and snatch her.
Job seekers have endured countless delays in their own employment searches. When they read the post, they hoot and holler for the candidate and boo the clueless hiring manager. Most importantly, readers like and love the writer’s post until it goes viral, making the author an ex-FAANG top recruiting voice.
Even though no sources are cited and the story is fictional, it is very powerful.
Well…until you’ve read the same story a dozen times from a dozen recruiters. Then it gets tiresome.
My improvement on fake stories
But those fake stories powerfully drive clicks on LinkedIn, so I wanted to get in on the action. But I was going to add two wrinkles to my fake story.
First, I would explicitly admit that my story is fake. Because authenticity. Sort of.
Second, my story would include space aliens to make it riveting. And to hammer the point that the story is fake.
Now I just had to write a fake story with space aliens.
Or did I?
A repurposed and adapted fake story with space aliens
I just needed to make one of the characters a space alien, and since Jones was based on the striking Grace Jones, I went ahead and did it. If you can imagine Grace Jones with tentacles, two noses, and eight legs.
As the space alien’s tentacles quivered, I snuck something else into the LinkedIn story—some facts.
Kids who watched Fat Albert on TV not only enjoyed the antics, but also learned an Important Life Lessons. Now I don’t have multiple advanced degrees like Cosby, but then again I never had multiple degrees rescinded either.
But my life lesson wasn’t to stay in school or pull your pants up. My life lesson was to blog. The lesson was in the form of a statement by Jones’ humanoid colleague Smith, taken verbatim from the Pizza Stories post.
“Take blogging,” replied Smith. “The average company that blogs generates 55% more website visitors. B2B marketers that use blogs get 67% more leads than those who do not. Marketers who have prioritized blogging are 13x more likely to enjoy positive ROI. And 92% of companies who blog multiple times per day have acquired a customer from their blog.”
When marketing your facial recognition product (or any product), you need to pay attention to your positioning and messaging. This includes developing the answers to why, how, and what questions. But your positioning and your resulting messaging are deeply influenced by the characteristics of your product.
If facial recognition is your only modality
There are hundreds of facial recognition products on the market that are used for identity verification, authentication, crime solving (but ONLY as an investigative lead), and other purposes.
Some of these solutions ONLY use face as a biometric modality. Others use additional biometric modalities.
Similarly, a face-only company will argue that facial recognition is a very fast, very secure, and completely frictionless method of verification and authentication. When opponents bring up the demonstrated spoofs against faces, you will argue that your iBeta-conformant presentation attack detection methodology guards against such spoofing attempts.
Of course, if you initially only offer a face solution and then offer a second biometric, you’ll have to rewrite all your material. “You know how we said that face is great? Well, face and gait are even greater!”
It seems that many of the people that are waiting the long-delayed death of the password think that biometrics is the magic solution that will completely replace passwords.
For this reason, your company might have decided to use biometrics as your sole factor of identity verification and authentication.
Or perhaps your company took a different approach, and believes that multiple factors—perhaps all five factors—are required to truly verify and/or authenticate an individual. Use some combination of biometrics, secure documents such as driver’s licenses, geolocation, “something you do” such as a particular swiping pattern, and even (horrors!) knowledge-based authentication such as passwords or PINs.
This naturally shapes your positioning and messaging.
The single factor companies will argue that their approach is very fast, very secure, and completely frictionless. (Sound familiar?) No need to drag out your passport or your key fob, or to turn off your VPN to accurately indicate your location. Biometrics does it all!
The multiple factor companies will argue that ANY single factor can be spoofed, but that it is much, much harder to spoof multiple factors at once. (Sound familiar?)
So position yourself however you need to position yourself. Again, be prepared to change if your single factor solution adopts a second factor.
A final thought
Every company has its own way of approaching a problem, and your company is no different. As you prepare to market your products, survey your product, your customers, and your prospects and choose the correct positioning (and messaging) for your own circumstances.
And if you need help with biometric positioning and messaging, feel free to contact the biometric product marketing expert, John E. Bredehoft. (Full-time employment opportunities via LinkedIn, consulting opportunities via Bredemarket.)
In the meantime, take care of yourself, and each other.
Of all the technologies I don’t know about, jobseeker technology is the most important. Between July 2000 and today, I’ve spent over 30 months searching for full-time employment. So it helps to know how employers search for potential employees.
And a lot of those 30-plus months have been filled with self-styled experts advising people “how to beat the applicant tracking system (ATS)” (as if there were only one) and “how to access the hidden job market” (because of course employers don’t want anyone to know that they’re searching for talent).
So when Melanie Woods of CGL Recruiting offered 20 jobseekers the chance to see how their LinkedIn Profile appears to users of LinkedIn Recruiter, I really wanted to win one of those 20 slots.
If I could boil all 7 tips down to 1, I’d emphasize that recruiters have limited time, and something a recruiter can understand in 0 seconds is much better than something that would take a recruiter 5 seconds to understand.
Instead of spending money on advertising, my team is going to be taking a different approach and it involves YOU #jobseekers!
Sounds like a plan, since a word-of-mouth testimonial converts more effectively than copy written by a marketing hack. (But what if the testimonial is FROM a marketing hack?)
The offer
She then described the offer.
We are going to be offering 20 free 20 minute sessions to job seekers who are currently out of work. During your session I will pull you up live in LinkedIn Recruiter and test your profile to show you where you are coming up in searches and where you are falling out. I will help you adjust your profile so you can appear in more searches for the jobs you are targeting.
What is LinkedIn Recruiter?
As you can probably guess, LinkedIn Recruiter is the premium-priced service that recruiters use to search LinkedIn for job candidates. The top-tier package (“contact Sales” for the price) includes:
Unlimited LinkedIn network access: Find and engage anyone on LinkedIn
150 InMail messages/month per license and bulk messaging
40+ advanced search filters, including “Open to work” and “More likely to respond”
Multi-user collaboration tools
Prepaid slots to rotate job postings in and out as needed
If your company is recruiting more than 4 positions a year, the high-end version of LinkedIn Recruiter could be the tool for you.
But when recruiters use LinkedIn Recruiter, they don’t look at a candidate’s LinkedIn profile—they look at the LinkedIn Recruiter view of the candidate’s profile, optimized for their purposes.
Hence Melanie was offering job applicants the opportunity to see how their profile appears to a recruiter. Valuable information to have.
What CGL Recruiting wanted in return
But remember that the lucky winners had to provide “advertising” to CGL Recruiting in return.
Here is where the advertising piece comes in….if you feel that the 20 minutes was helpful to you and your job search, we would appreciate you doing a review of our services on LinkedIn and one other social media platform (your choice), sharing how the time spent was useful to you and your job search.
Melanie and I met via Zoom early Monday afternoon Pacific Time (late afternoon Central Time), and I received a firehose of information during the 20-minute session. I’m not going to cover ALL the information she provided; instead, I’ll confine myself to the top 7 tips.
The first job on the LinkedIn profile is the most important.
Use all 5 “job title” slots.
Some employers AREN’T 1st and 2nd degree connections.
You can have 6 on-site job locations, not just 5.
Consider listing at least one college-related date.
Ampersands are bad.
Temperamental writers shouldn’t fall in love with pet phrases.
Tip 1: The first job on the LinkedIn profile is the most important
For my job search for a Senior Product Marketing Manager role, my Incode position is (maybe) more important than my current Bredemarket position. On my resume, I take care of this by listing Incode BEFORE Bredemarket. But because LinkedIn profiles are chronological, and Bredemarket is my current “employer,” I can’t reorder like that.
The LinkedIn Recruiter view of the profile doesn’t show all the positions, but only the top 3. And the first position takes great prominence.
LinkedIn Recruiter view of my LinkedIn profile, Monday, May 13, 2024, 1:30 pm PDT.
In the default view, the recruiter can’t see my fourth position (Strategic/Product Marketing Manager from 2015 to 2017), but only the first three. And only one of those three positions is product marketing-related.
Melanie zeroed in on my “Sole Proprietor” position, which tells a recruiter nothing about what I actually DO at Bredemarket. Sure the recruiter could click through and read about the marketing and writing services that Bredemarket provides…but recruiters have limited time.
I thought about her advice after the call, and for LinkedIn (and resume) purposes I’m changing my Bredemarket job title to “Product Marketing Consultant.” My work for my clients is all product/service-related, so the job title makes sense.
Now recruiters will see that two of my three most recent positions were product marketing-related, which makes me more attractive to the one position that I’m targeting.
One position? Wait a minute…
Tip 2: Use all 5 “job title” slots
That’s right. In my “job preferences,” my only listed job title was “Senior Product Marketing Manager.”
I can list up to 5.
Why not use all 5?
So now my job titles include the following:
Senior Product Marketing Manager
Product Marketing Manager
Marketing Content Manager
Global Product Marketing Manager
Product Marketing Consultant
So I have the position title from Incode, the consulting title from Bredemarket, two product marketing title variants, and a content marketing title for good measure (Bredemarket readers know why).
Now some people question why I’d list all these similar titles, since anyone who takes a few seconds can figure out that I’d be interested in a global product marketing manager position or whatever.
That’s the problem. Recruiters DON’T HAVE a few seconds. When hundreds or thousands of people apply for positions, recruiters need to get through the profiles as quickly as possible.
So Melanie wanted me to make her job easier.
Tip 3: Some employers AREN’T 1st and 2nd degree connections
You can control the visibility of your email address and your phone number on LinkedIn. While I don’t list a phone number on my LinkedIn profile, I do make my jobseeking email address (which is separate from my Bredemarket email address) visible. In fact, I configured my email address visibility for viewing by my 1st degree and 2nd degree connections.
But there was a fallacy in that tactic.
It became obvious in the session because Melanie (not a connection since her LinkedIn connections are maxed out) could NOT see my email address. Therefore, if recruiter Melanie wanted to contact me, she could ONLY contact me via InMail.
If you want ANY potential recruiter to see your email, increase its visibility to all connections. Obviously there are risks to this, so you need to judge what visibility is right for you. (Especially for phone numbers.)
Tip 4: You can have 6 on-site job locations, not just 5
While all of Bredemarket’s work is remote, and my previous work at Incode was remote, I’m not averse to on-site work. As long as it’s within driving distance.
To help local companies, I listed a selected five cities (the maximum) where I am available for on-site work:
Ontario, California, United States
San Bernardino, California, United States
Covina, California, United States
Pasadena, California, United States
Anaheim, California, United States
But Melanie pointed out that I didn’t need to list Ontario, since my profile already states that I live in Ontario. That freed up one slot to add another city. I chose to list Riverside, although I could have listed Brea or Fullerton or Industry or Pomona or Corona or many other cities. (LinkedIn, your on-site locations feature needs work.)
Tip 5: Consider listing at least one college-related date
Now let’s get into age discrimination talk.
If a company desires to discriminate against job applicants due to age, one effective way to do so is to look at the dates the applicants attended college. It’s pretty easy to quietly filter out the geezer applicants with no one the wiser.
For this reason I didn’t bother to add my college attendance dates to my LinkedIn profile. Why give the discriminating (in a negative way, not a positive way) firm the ammo they need to get the young, cheap workers they really want? (Of course those workers are inexperienced, but that’s another topic entirely.)
But Melanie pointed out one truth about companies that want to discriminate: if they don’t discriminate against you when they read your LinkedIn profile or resume, they can easily discriminate against you when they SEE you.
Oh, and there’s one more thing: if recruiters search for candidates based upon their graduation dates, profiles without graduation dates will never been seen by recruiters.
So I mulled over her advice.
I decided not to list the date that I started attending Cal State Fullerton’s MBA program.
And I decided not to list the date I graduated from Reed College.
I certainly didn’t list the date I started attending Reed College. (But I will confess that this song blasted from the Old Dorm Block. And I’ll also confess that I could lose the last 4 1/2 minutes.)
But I did pencil in my 1991 graduation date from Cal State Fullerton’s MBA program. Since my LinkedIn profile includes ALL my biometric positions going back to 1994, this isn’t a shocking revelation.
Tip 6: Ampersands are bad
LinkedIn profiles can include skills. I’ve listed near the limit of 50 skills, some of which are tied to particular positions, LinkedIn Learning courses, and other education and certifications.
Among many others, two of my listed skills are “identity & access management” and “sales & marketing management.”
Technology experts immediately see where this is going. So why didn’t I?
Melanie immediately noted that the ampersand character in those two skill descriptions can wreak havoc with some computerized systems.
I swapped out those skills for some new ones: identity and access management, and sales and marketing management, removing the problem.
Tip 7: Temperamental writers shouldn’t fall in love with pet phrases
Melanie’s biggest concern about my LinkedIn profile involved the very first sentence.
The one that appears below my profile, name, and preferred pronouns, but above my city of residence.
John Bredehoft LinkedIn profile, public view, Monday, May 13, 2024, 1:30 pm PDT.
Senior Product Marketing Manager in identity/technology who is expert in describing why customers benefit.
She read that sentence word for word.
“Senior Product Marketing Manager”? She liked that.
“In identity/technology”? I guess she liked that; at least she didn’t comment on it.
The rest of the sentence? Not so much.
Regular Bredemarket readers are familiar with the last three words of that sentence, and realize that every one of those three words is critically important. Why rather than what, customers rather than producers, and benefits rather than features. I’ve devoted a post (plus another post) to those three words. If I only had a few seconds to explain the importance of those three words…
Um, yet again, recruiters aren’t interested in taking a few minutes to read everything I have written about Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle, customer focus, or benefits. They don’t even want to watch a short reel on the topic.
So I have to rewrite the last part of that first sentence. As I write this post, I’m still mulling over alternatives.
CGL Recruiting’s expertise was highly beneficial
The 7 items above were just some of the tips that Melanie Woods imparted to me, all in the space of 20 minutes.
Again, the common theme is that recruiters have limited time, LinkedIn Recruiter lets them maximize that limited time, and jobseeker data also has to let recruiters maximize that limited time. If you can do something in 0 seconds, don’t take 5 seconds to do it.
I haven’t even explored some of the other features that CGL Recruiting offers, including Melanie Woods’ YouTube channel.
But the 20 minutes I spent with her were certainly valuable.
Now I just have to figure out another way to say “why customers benefit.”
I recall one product in particular (not a Segway, but a biometric product housed in a tower) that was an impressive fusion of algorithmic and mechanical excellence. The complex design that went into developing the tower product resulted in a device that performed its function superbly.
The complex engineering also caused the product to have such a high price that no one would ever buy it…but I digress.
But there was another issue with the product. I was writing proposals at the time, and we certainly could have written up a product description that emphasized the product’s lengthy set of features.
But the people receiving our proposals wouldn’t have cared one bit.
Prospects don’t care about lengthy feature lists
You see, prospects don’t care about lengthy feature lists.
If your product stops terrorists from boarding airplanes, then and only then will they care about your company or your product.
If your product can’t stop terrorists from boarding airplanes, or if there is another product that is better at stopping terrorists from boarding airplanes, then your prospects won’t care about your product.
So how do you get prospects to care?
You don’t get prospects to care by talking about your extensive feature lists.
Let me give you a tip. If you find an employee at the prospect’s company who wants to spend a lot of time talking about your extensive feature lists, that employee probably DOESN’T have the authority to approve the purchase.
The people who DO have the authority to approve the purchase don’t have time to talk about extensive feature lists.
The approvers want to know, in 30 seconds or less, how your solution BENEFITS them.
Do you need help explaining your benefits?
Talking about benefits rather than features is just one tactic to successfully appeal to your prospects.
If you need help ensuring that your written materials (blog posts, white papers, web pages) resonate with your prospects, you can ask Bredemarket to help you.
Bredemarket 
