My job search was conducted across four different workstreams:

• Applying to posted jobs
• Reaching out to LinkedIn connections
• Direct outreach – Researching companies based on industry news
• Interacting with headhunters

Each has their plusses and minuses as I’ve worked through them to land a job. Applying to posted jobs and interacting with headhunters are basically self-explanatory, so this blog post will lean into what I mean by direct outreach.

Direct outreach begins with news sources that will help you identify companies to target. There are tons of news sources out there. You can set up Google Alerts about specific companies or topics. News feeds such as Feedly are easy to set up and maintain. You can also search for newsletters about industry events. Companies such as Crunchbase, G2, or Owler that post reviews and comparisons of products can be very informative. In my previous post about the quantity of choices in the marketing tech stack, I found a lot of repository-with-calendar companies by feeding prompts into Crunchbase. You can also follow industry analyst firms, which has been my sweet spot. Most of them publish reports about companies in a space or discipline. The inventor of the industry analyst game is Gartner. They publish 80+ reports known as Magic Quadrants. These reports (and numerous others, such as Wave by Forrester, PEAK Matrix by Everest Group, and RadarView by Avasant) mention the capabilities of companies in a specific market, giving you a wide-angle view of the relative positions of the market’s competitors. Since I’ve piloted or co-piloted industry analyst relations programs for decades, I have relationships with those firms. I follow them on LinkedIn and look forward to their posts about new reports. The analysts will sometimes tag the companies that have participated in the reports, or at least those in leadership positions. Viewing the LinkedIn profiles of companies that are tagged is helpful because there are many companies with similar names.

Now that you know who the companies are, you’ll need to find out who to write to at the company. Since I’m looking for a role in marketing, I would start with the Chief Marketing Officer if they have one, or Chief Growth Officer (the senior executive who owns both sales and marketing). You can learn who these people are on LinkedIn or the company’s public website. Remember my blog post about email addresses and phone numbers? Here is where such contact details will come in handy.

Next, write to them! Start out with a bit of congratulations on making Everest Group’s Insurance Intermediaries Services PEAK Matrix® Assessment 2024 or whatever the credential is. Starting with something positive says many things – it shows you’re keeping up with current events, you know some recent news, you’re not making it all about you. and you are acknowledging a job well done. Then explain in a few bullets what you can do for them. Read your email again, and make sure you’ve personalized it. Make sure the addressee’s name and company are spelled correctly. Hit send.

Following up on the send is essential. I have a one-week rule. If they haven’t reached out to me first, I am on the phone to follow up one week after writing to them. A quick reminder that I wrote last week to congratulate them on the credential and let them know how I can help. Simple. It takes about 45 seconds to leave this as a voice mail message. Practice it a few times before picking up the phone.

Direct outreach is an approach that works. I’ve landed jobs lasting years with this method. You can too.