What’s YOUR Brand of Champagne?

Although I’ve been a Certified Personal Brand Strategist for a number of years, I’m still starry-eyed about branding. I love it. I never lose the joy and amazement I feel when a client experiences the power of personal branding with a fabulous job offer.
One of my favorite clients sent me a joyful e-mail today, and I couldn’t be happier for him. He’s just landed his dream job.
My client is a Canadian national successfully working in Singapore. He had what sales coach and fellow CareerHub blogger Pat Schuler calls a “champagne goal.” A goal most people would say was a pretty tough objective.

His objective was to transition to a multi-national finance firm — and in doing so he wanted to up his responsibilities, up his income, negotiate a better ex-pat package, continue to live in Singapore, and have a lot more fun at work.
Problem was he had NO finance experience. Yet he went from successfully working as an executive for a global logistics company, to quickly landing a dream job in one of the world’s largest and most respected financial firms.
A career transition is always difficult, and usually has a long ‘sales cycle’ to bring in a job offer. In this case my client found his position in just a few months. In fact, the company wanted him on-board ASAP, and told him they didn’t care about his lack of finance experience. He was told that they could easily teach him what he needed to know about finance, but they’d have a hard time teaching anyone else to do what he did so well, and so intuitively.
This company was hungry for him. Big time. That allowed him to negotiate a stellar package and he’s now their VP of Sales for Asia Pacific and Australia.
Here’s the cool thing — he got the job because his branded value proposition (how his brand translates to marketable value) is clear, compelling, portable, and he can back it up with numerous case studies of successes.
So what is his branded value proposition?
He’s “the 10% solution.” He is a tinkerer who can’t help but tweak processes. He layers just 10% innovation over already successful products and processes to deliver new customer segments and/or 25% to 90% revenue/margin lift at virtually no cost.
This value prop would make any company in any industry salivate. It sure made this company desperate to sign him.
Yet before we worked on branding he had no clue about what made him happy and successful — and he kept insisting that he wasn’t creative because he “only revved up other people’s ideas.” We worked on that misconception mighty quickly!
But don’t take my word for it — here’s what he told me in his e-mail today:
…I gained two critical capabilities: 1) a confidence in my ability to sell myself as THE man for the job; 2) a strong sense of clarity in the value I can bring to an organization. I have not once regretted the time or the money I invested…Through the re-branding process, I gained the ability to focus on the exact career opportunities in which I was interested and turn down offers that don’t match my skill set.
Two months after finishing…I was able to switch industries, land a job at a multinational financial firm, and watch my salary increase by more than 60%. More than that, though, I firmly believe that the confidence and clarity in my abilities will carry through to any new career opportunity.
As a career and brand strategist, joy in a job well done doesn’t get better than this. I’ve been grinning all day.
What brand is hiding within you, just waiting to pop the cork on your champagne goal?
By Deb Dib and courtesy of CareerHub.com. The Career Hub blog connects job seekers with experts in career counseling, resume writing, personal branding and recruiting.