The Difference Between What You Do And How You Do It

Everyone is a salesperson, or a teacher, or a doctor or a truck driver, or mechanic, or a waiter, or a recruiter, or a Vice President, or a developer or a something. Everyone is something. That’s obvious.  When we first meet people, one of the first questions we’re often asked is; “What do you do for a living?”

We always seem answer it right too.

What we don’t often get right is what makes us different at what we do.  Too many of us don’t know how we bring our job to life. We don’t know how we do the job differently.

Yes, you’re a sales person. But what is it about YOU that makes your selling different than everyone else? Yes, you’re a mechanic, but what is it about how you fix cars that is different than every other mechanic. Yes, you’re Vice President of Customer Service, but what is it about YOU that makes you better than all the other V.P.’s of Customer Service?

A job is a static description of tasks, decisions, and action in a particular field or area of knowledge. (Man, that sounded boring. LOL). What brings a job to life however, is how the person doing the job attacks it. A job is a result of how the person doing the job approaches it and that my friends is where the power is.

At A Sales Guy Recruiting (the recruiting division of A Sales Guy), we interview 100’s of applicants and one of the most common questions we ask and our clients ask is, “What makes you a badass sales person?”  Inevitably, few people answer it well. We get the same bullshit, answers. I work hard. I’m detailed oriented. I’m passionate. Yadda, yadda, yadda, yawn!

What we’re looking for and so is the client is, what do you bring to the job that no one else does. How do you do the job in a way that makes it distinctly you? What is it about you that makes your selling different, better, more valuable?

The only way to answer this question is to have tremendous self-awareness. You have to know a lot about yourself and what you’re good at doing. You also have to know how you deliberately apply what you’re good at to your job and why.  It’s the deliberate nature of performing your job and leveraging your strengths as an individual that matters.

How would you answer the question, “What makes you a badass (fill in job here)?

Do you know what distinctly separates you from everyone else who does what you do? What strengths do you bring to the table that you leverage differently than everyone else?  You have to know.

The litmus test is being able to answer the question, “What makes you great at what you do?” And you’re answer could not be able to work for any other person.

If it does, try again.