How To Sell Yourself For Executive Roles
If you are a high achiever who aspires to Director or vice president roles, you need to master one skill.
You need to become a great salesperson.
Wait, Maya, but I’m not in sales…
That’s where most people get it wrong. No matter what you do or where you work, if you have aspirations for growth, you’ll need to sell yourself.
You see, what 10 promotions in 15 years taught me is that it’s not the best performer who gets the promotion. It’s not the hardest worker who gets the promotion. It’s the person who is perceived to be the best who is promoted.
Your ability to sell your potential determines how you are perceived and creates long-term career success.
Fair? Maybe not. But that is how it works.
So today, you’ll learn how to sell yourself for executive roles to increase your chances of getting promoted.
Master The Art of Selling Yourself
We often confuse selling ourselves with shouting the loudest, but that’s not how you level up. Selling yourself isn’t a random action you take to stand out once. It’s the consistent action you take every day that creates the right perception.
In the book “Who Gets Promoted, Who Doesn’t, and Why” author Donald Asher lays out the 6 skills required to become a great salesperson at work:
Attitude
The ability to think like someone else
The ability to prepare for a meeting
Persistence
The ability to overcome objections to get to “yes.”
Creativity of message
Let’s break these down.
1. Attitude
Have you ever worked with someone so nasty you did everything to avoid them? That is what happens when you have the wrong attitude. No one wants to work with you.
As an executive, you need to attract people to you, not repel them. You need top talent, cross-functional leaders, mentors, and advocates.
You don’t need to be a ray of sunshine 24/7, but you need to stop complaining to your manager and peers. Stop whining about how much work you have. Don’t gossip, and keep your negativity to yourself.
2. The Ability to Think Like Someone Else
This is one of the Indicators of emotional maturity and the secret weapon of all top sales professionals. If you want to influence others, you must first understand their thoughts, feelings, and motivations.
You do it by understanding WIIFM (What’s in it for me?).
What can you offer them, their team or department, or the organization as a whole? You need to be able to understand what someone else wants to motivate them.
When I worked as a consultant at Google, I had a problem. I needed a team member to work on something they didn’t want to do, and I couldn’t get them to see things from my perspective. So, instead, I put myself in their shoes.
The next time we spoke, I asked them about their career aspirations, and when they laid them out with sparkling eyes, I casually mentioned how the work I had asked them to do could contribute to their career progress.
Just a few hours later, this team member started working on the project they had been putting off for weeks.
So before you try to influence someone, spend some time looking at the world from their point of view. Try on their mindset. Understand where they’re coming from.
What do they want? What do they fear? How will your suggestion impact their world? How will promoting you benefit them in any way?
3. The Ability to Prepare for a Meeting
Whether you are pitching a client for business or pitching a boss for a promotion, anticipating motivations and objections and preparing your responses in advance will increase your chances of hearing a YES. It will also allow you to better shape how others see you.
Preparing requires more than writing down a few questions. The best salespeople show up with information about the situation (the topic of the meeting) and the people (what the stakeholders need).
They use their insights to ask the right questions, offer the right value, and connect with their audience deeply.
They also spend a good amount of time preparing. I used to spend 10-15 hours preparing for VP role interviews. That's how I landed the job even though I didn't have the title yet.
4. Persistence
Do you know what sets apart the best salespeople? It’s not their pitch or their charisma. It’s their persistence. They just try more times instead of giving up.
As an executive, you’ll hear a lot of NOs; if you give up immediately, you won’t get far.
That doesn’t mean you need to stalk your boss or send countless emails about your ideas. It just means you keep trying. Come up with a different angle, engage with different stakeholders, ask for feedback, and improve or change the message.
5. The ability to overcome objections to get to “yes”
Objections and pushback are quite common at the executive level. There are a lot of ideas, limited budgets, and KPIs that need to be achieved. Hearing no doesn’t mean you have a bad idea or that you (your skills) are not good enough.
If you want to be seen as executive-ready, you must endure objections and learn how to turn them into a yes.
You can do that by listening to understand the real objection to defend your ideas. Is it the wrong solution to the problem, or is it that your plan will change the power dynamic?
6. Creativity of your message
If selling yourself was easy, everyone would do it. Your proposal may not be on point immediately, but it just means you must test different variations. Nike’s first slogan was “There is no finish line”, it was not "Just do it".
If your ideas are rejected, you may need to reframe or reposition them a few times to improve your chances of acceptance.
Your next steps
Noticed something interesting? The skills required to sell yourself are also some of the skills required to become an impactful executive. It’s not a coincidence at all because selling yourself is an executive skill.
Hoping to get noticed rarely works.
You can either shy away and tell yourself you’ll do fine without it (you won’t) or learn how to become a great salesperson and sell yourself with every conversation and every action you take.
I believe in you, and I’m rooting for you.
Maya ❤️
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