This post originally appeared as issue 98 of the Daily Job Hunt email. Sign up for kick-butt career hype in your inbox each morning.

Permission to Fail

What if when you were a kid, and you failed at something, parents and teachers had given you high fives?

“Way to go, Johnny! You failed again! Woo-hoo!”

Instead, you probably got punished. So you learned to be tentative.

But failure is the fastest way to learn and grow. This applies to pitching companies, too.

When you go deep and build a pitch tailored to a company, then run your job hunt like a sales campaign, you become a more empowered person, even if you fail. A fail means you’ll learn SO much about the process, and your next pitch will be even better.

Be bold. Let yourself fail.


How to Get a Sales Job, Part 3

In Part 1 and Part 2, we talked about

1) choosing a cool company
2) researching them
3) building a leads lists
4) making a pitch video

The final steps are:

5) Find the hiring manager. Go to the company’s profile on LinkedIn, and click on People. Then find a decision maker (or two), such as a recruiter, the VP of Sales, or Sales Manager.

6) Email and follow up. Look up the person’s email address on Hunter.io. Then email your leads list and pitch video. Follow up every 2 days until you hear back (just like a sales pro).

That’s the 6 steps. A little more energy is required compared to clicking apply. But you’ll get way better results!


Quote of the Day

“…the best possible way to prepare for tomorrow is to concentrate with all your intelligence, all your enthusiasm, on doing today’s work superbly today. That is the only possible way you can prepare for the future.”

― Dale Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living