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Is it time for your yearly company-wide master resume updates?
I've helped a few firms with this over the years and here's the typical responses I see from technical professionals:
Option 1: "Sorry, I just didn't have time to do this."
Option 2: "I used my lunchtime and updated a few dates. Other than that, nothing else changed."
Option 3: "I made LOTS of great edits! I added tons about what services I provided and got really technical on the scope of the overall project. I'm sure this will help out the marketing department!"
Option 4: "Uh...I have a master resume??"
I firmly believe most everyone at your firm wants to be helpful and provide good info to your marketing department.
I firmly believe technical professionals think they know what's best for proposals...and they often don't. As an engineer myself, this was true of me for a long time before I moved into marketing.
And...I firmly believe we don't engage our technical professionals in a way that helps them offload information efficiently, often due to our own busy workdays, creating a lack of incoming data that will help your firm win more work.
The main problem
There's one main problem that creeps up in this typical yearly project...we marketing professionals rely on technical staff to be able to do this themselves.
This rarely works out well.
Here's why technical staff are typically unable to do this task well (or at all) by themselves:
- Technical staff tend to be poor sales writers
- People tend to avoid tasks they're not great at
- Technical staff are rarely taught to pay attention to the story of their project
How to get better outcomes
How do we get past this common industry issue? Here are solutions we've used repeatedly to gather and log multiple new resume data bits that made client proposals much stronger:
- Spend 60-90 minutes 1-on-1 with your key technical staff. Ask them leading questions to get the type of input you need.
- Record the entire interview.
- Pull out details from the transcript after the interview.
- Put that new info into their master resume for them; they don't even touch the document.
Need help?
If this sounds great, but you and your staff are slammed, contact us. We can interview your technical staff and help update the resumes. We can coach your team on what to ask for from your technical staff and how to tease out the juicy tidbits. Or we can do any combination of the above that works for you.
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