I received an interesting email this morning … A contact I made a few years back was interested in making a career change. The victim: His current advertising career. The opportunity: A job that allowed him to work in product or project management. … he asked me for some advice … “Do you have any advice on how to make a career change and/or anyone in those types of fields/roles I could talk to as well?” It took me a few minutes as I thought on his question: What advice did I have (if any)? After I compiled my thoughts and sent an email response, he thanked me for my time and mentioned the tips were super helpful and I should share them with others.  … which brings us to to this point … I’ve copy/pasted my three tips from that email. In no particular order, they are: Find Similarities & Connect the Dots Discover what type of company you want to work for “Become a PM with a focus on [insert job function here]” Tip #1: Find Similarities & Connect the Dots For example, my girlfriend is in revenue management at hotel companies. But honestly, once you know pricing and revenue strategy and get some experience, in that field you could work at a hotel company, restaurant chain, retail company (Old Navy, for example), etc etc the list goes on! Basically, find the foundational elements of what you do now that could be transferred to a new industry, field or career path. Tip #2: Discover what type of company you want to work for It’s really important to discover the industry or company (by name) that you want to work for. This leads into #3 and is critical because you want to really love what they are doing before you approach them with an offer to “make them skinnier”, “make you happier”, “make you more money”, etc by bringing you on as a FTE. Tip #3: “Become a PM with a focus on advertising” I have a friend in Los Angeles who used to work at a large ad agency in town. He didn’t necessarily love being at an agency, but he did love the advertising elements of his job. Ipso facto, he marketed himself to large companies who needed global advertising experience (as a PM) and got hired at a Fortune 50 legacy software company to run their North America advertising division. What does this mean? He basically oversees all FTE/contractors/agencies that support advertising for HP. In english: he’s a boss-man director who does very little work but gets to lead advertising processes, strategy, needs and performance reviews by leveraging his ad agency experience. In Closing: What did I miss? There are surely other tips that I failed to mention in this story. Drop them into the comments section and I’ll make sure to pass them along to my...

There is tons of research available to help companies craft employment opportunities that attract and retain the best-and-brightest in their field. This article will not be adding to the clutter. Instead, I wanted to share a personal experience about managing our talented (and growing) team here at MKG Media Group. My Number 1 Rule to Retaining Rock Star Employees: Specific Recognition A recent Society for Human Resource survey found that a major source of employee happiness comes from being recognized for all their hard work from the management team. Additionally, a story from Graham Winfrey on Inc.com found that one of the top reasons rockstar employees are annoyed with their company is from a lack of recognition for their hard work. So why aren’t companies recognizing their team members more often? I won’t even begin to attempt to make a blanket statement for all companies across the globe, but I can share a few of my own personal struggles in recognizing the rockstars here at MKG: Eventually Superman becomes … Just a man: What I mean by this is that after you get used to your team doing amazing things, it almost makes it tough to recognize how awesome they are on a regular basis. It becomes the norm! Unfortunately, this means your brain only recognizes when a mistake is made and a discussion is needed, which is not a great practice for leaders to get into. Busy = Head Down: Sometimes I get so busy that I mentally recognize something amazing, yet don’t have the wherewithal to congratulate the team member Specificity and Recency is King: Expanding on my second issue, if I don’t give the feedback immediately and as specific as possible, it’s less likely that I will pass along the praise. Okay, okay: I’ll give my rockstars some love. But how do I avoid doing it the wrong way? There’s a great Forbes article that breaks this down into a few problems with type of feedback: Wrong Recognition: This is defined as recognizing team members in the wrong way. For example, praising shy team members who would prefer a private ‘good job for …’ by sending an all-office email and standing them up at the quarterly company meeting in the middle of their peers. Non-Specific Praise: While giving a ‘way to go!’ comment is nice, leaders need to be specific in the praise that they deliver. ‘Great job drawing up [specific example] for [example client]…’ is way better than ‘good job’. Recognition is a “Check the Box” Exercise: It’s almost become a boring routine for leaders — wake up, check email, say good job to ‘check off the box’ on your daily to-do list. Two examples from the team here at MKG: Our team is filled with creative marketers who never cease to amaze me. Every day I literally catch myself say ‘Wow! Now why didn’t I think of that…’ — it’s amazing! While we don’t have too many processes here, there are a few ways that we recognize our people for their accomplishments. Recognition Practice #1: Praise During Friday Stand Up Meetings Every single day the team stands up (physically) and we discuss what we are going to accomplish that day. Don’t mistake this for a long meeting: we literally speed through everyone’s day and anything that requires more than a 10 second conversation is scheduled as a meeting at a later time or date. On Friday’s, we take the opportunity to say what we are grateful for; this can be anything personal, professional or otherwise. That being said, often one of our team members will speak to a specific event that happened earlier in the week and thank a team member for their support.  This is a great way to recognize teammates accomplishments in a public setting and has worked out well for us over the past three years. Recognition Practice #2: Digital SWAG and Badges Earlier this summer, one of our teammates did something totally above and beyond their pay grade and everyone was blown away. Almost on cue, somebody created a fun little MKG ‘badge’ to recognize their hard work and posted it in HipChat, our group chat tool, and bragged on them. Immediately the following things happened: Everyone burst into laughter and jumped on a group Skype call to talk about how cool the badges were The team member who went above-and-beyond blushed and thanked everyone for their recognition We were left with something tangible for that teammate to recall their hard work The MKG badge resurfaced this week when our Content Strategist Adam Bullock completed something he’s been working on for the past few months:   Post by MKG Media Group.   Recognizing rockstar employees is critical to growing your company I’ve stated my case above about the benefits our team has seen with regular praise and recognition processes. What is your opinion about recognizing your team members?...

This negotiating advice was given to me many moons ago (too many to count …) The first, and still to this day best, sales advice I ever heard was: “There are only 2 good answers in sales: ‘yes’ or ‘no’. ‘Maybe’ is a waste of your time.” If you’ve never heard this expression before, you may be experiencing the reaction I first had when I heard it: “What are you talking about? Maybe isn’t a no … so that’s good right?” Wrong. After working my tail off for the past three years starting MKG Media Group, I’ve learned how to break down the three answers you may receive: Yes is pretty self-explanatory; as in “yes, I’d like to give you a pile of money or valuables to perform XYZ…” No is a little bit more nuanced. No can be “no, not right now”, “not ever”, “not until you prove that you are better than your competitor at doing xyz” …. You get the picture. The list goes on. No is really just a great time for you to say “Thank you for your time, what was it that threw you off if it’s not too much to ask?” Maybe is a whole other beast; one that I have gotten to know (too) well over the past three years. If I were to sum up my top two ‘maybe’ experiences they would probably go something like: “Maybe if you reworked the numbers and then re-presented to my entire team a few more times” is the same as “we sort of like your ideas and are going to actively rip your creative thinking and execute this ourselves or literally hand it off to our existing supplier/vendor/partner/what-have-you” “Maybe you should talk to our colleagues in the other department” is the same as “we’re going to try and get them to buy this with their budget but we will totally use the product/service when they do” Why is maybe a huge problem? Because ‘maybe’ doesn’t get you close to a yes or a no; that is, a definitive answer. ‘Maybe’ results in you doing a bunch of extra work to try and get to a no or a yes. ‘Maybe’ often means you didn’t do a thorough enough job during the preparation (stage 1) and exchanging of information (stage 2) stages of the sales process (see chart below)   Last but not least, maybe is often used as a negotiation tactic: “Maybe we can move forward, pending you reducing price by x% …” or “…delivering the service faster” or (my favorite) “billing us on accrual for services rendered on a net 60 payment cycle” (in English: you have to do all the work and then wait 60 days to actually receive a dime). How do you get past ‘maybe’? By no means should you follow these ideas to a T — I’m just a normal guy like yourself and no rainmaker like Rick Robarge (or insert other stud sales guy/gal’s name here), but here are a few tricks that I’ve picked up over the years. Contract term length Payment schedule Deadlines & Ultimatums Contract Length I’ve experienced prospective clients asking our company to do more work for proposed costs/less money quite a few times. Oftentimes, these are clients who say things like “I’d love you to prove yourselves; if you can bring me $XYZ amount of revenue we’ll increase your budget no problem.” (side note: uhhh duhhhhh) In this scenario, I usually ask them to guarantee a certain length of the contract. I’ll use a line such as: We are happy to consider your request, but in return would you consider guaranteeing us 180 working days to hit our agreed-to success metrics? Notice how I didn’t agree to anything; it’s important in conversations or written communications never to agree to anything (I call this the Japanese ‘yes’, which I’ll write about in a different post). I’m simply asking that in return for considering this request, I’d like something in return. Payment Schedule Particularly for brand new clients, I’ll ask them to pay the first month of the contracted amount (or a larger portion, depending on the circumstances) entirely, 100% up front. What does this tell me? It shows our team that they are ready to invest in the proposed services and, quite frankly, gives me confidence that they are serious about their needs. Deadlines & Ultimatums Deadlines and ultimatums are helpful for a few different reasons: Deadlines inherently imply urgency; they force the hand of your negotiating partners timeline so that they get serious about making a decision *this lifetime* Ultimatums are great when price is a real sticking point; an ultimatum such as “what is the number you are willing to spend?” cuts through the clutter and tells you what they are willing to spend on a given product, service, etc. Once you have “their number” you can align the exchange accordingly on your side of the table. Those are just a few of my favorite tactics: What tips have you found helpful in the past to get from ‘maybe’ to ‘yes’ or ‘no’ during a negotiation?...