Do You Know What A Buyer Really Wants With Your CV?

Here’s a situation I was party to recently.

Drafting the finalities of a Proposal. Surprisingly then asked by the ‘client collator’ to submit a CV. As is the modern way, it was via a sentence of terse text.

The inexperienced seller grasps hold of such a bone. They rush to comply, hurriedly crafting what they consider the ‘perfect’ response. In this specific case, a stunning resumé.

Sometimes, you get asked for such as part of a formal tender response.

You should already know what works for you here.

It reminded me of my youthful cubrep days.

For a Prop or two in my early days I was asked out of the blue to add one-pager profiles of all the sales and install team in just this way. Standard docs existed for each person to slot in for just such occasion, but I never liked their format.

You should never blindly follow this path though.

When asked for this info without warning, it should ring alarm bells for you.

In the worst case, I found that someone, somewhere is not happy with something. Even in the best case – perhaps where it’s part of an official ITT (invitation to tender) procedure – it reveals there’s a potential hazardous factor at play you need to fully understand which you currently do not.

In this recent scenario, I recommended to the writer a reply that chirpily became;

“you’re kidding, who’s not comfortable with me?!”

A flurry of messages later, it was clear that the requester was pretty much following a business-case-for-dummies style template, was possibly shielding important, relevant buying detail, and couldn’t be bothered to do the graft themselves. All telling findings in the context of the bid.

Salespeople will strain to suggest their resource is a tight, close match to the desired expert of a prospect’s dream colleague.

So are you certain of what track record and traits such a wondrous person would exhibit?

Alerting your prospect formally to the outstanding calibre of your people they’d be working with is a winning idea. Yet top-trump-card, boilerplated LinkedIn-aping CVs are a lazy, misleading, redundant buying device anyway.

Next time you’re asked for your life story in such manner, you’ll know what to do.