Looking for a competent sales director? Wouldn’t you rather have an experienced one? Or successful? Or even well-qualified? Or is just about good enough good enough for you?

Looking for a competent page turner

Danish companies love the word competent. Problem is, it isn’t quite the heavy-weight champion of job ads that it might appear to be – and though it can mean ‘qualified for the job’ in certain contexts, it certainly doesn’t carry the weight of Danish ‘kompetent’.

Look up ‘competent’ in an English dictionary. The issues jump out at you straight away. It has two related, but conflicting, meanings. Dictionary.com shows:

1. Having suitable or sufficient skill, knowledge or experience for some purpose
2. 2. Adequate, but not exceptional.

So, competent means ‘suitable’ – a skills-set that’s a good fit. Nice. That sounds like just what I’m looking for in my sales director. But ‘sufficient’? Just about good enough to get by? Mmm, not so good…

The second definition, though, really starts to get to the heart of the problem. Adequate. Not very inspiring, is it? I wouldn’t recommend anyone build their job interview strategy on how adequate they are. Kicking off with, “I can guarantee adequate results” in a job interview for any managerial position would be as effective as breaking wind.

Saying “I’m competent,” isn’t quite as bad as saying “I’m adequate”, but it’s not much better. It sounds like you haven’t finished your sentence. And the interviewer would finish it for you: “…but nothing special/not very good/a bit slow on the uptake”. There’s no escaping it, to most people on the street, competent means ‘just about good enough’.

But there’s more.

The negative form of competent – incompetent – is used much more often than ‘competent’ in everyday speech. It’s commonly used to make complaints, especially about people’s work. Calling someone ‘competent’ conjures the shadow of its more popular, darker sibling. And never quite shakes it off.

How do you use ‘competent’? Do you think it’s appealing enough to use in a job ad, or a job interview? Let us know what you think: write a comment.

Walking into a pre-sales meeting armed with a complete and comprehensive power point presentation can be dangerous. Not dangerous as in something to fear. But dangerous in the sense of missing something important – such as an opportunity to provide an important client with something they need.

Marketing is no longer about persuading your prospect to see things your way. Modern business communication is just too advanced for that. Try it, and your audience will almost certainly get restless, if not outright hostile. Dangerous. Something more open-ended and interactive is needed so your prospect becomes an active and more engaged part of the process.

Techie trickery - or not…
I recently made a presentation to give some feedback on a project we’d run with a major client. Unfortunately, we had some technical difficulties – not uncommon when I’m involved. To cut a long story short, I couldn’t access the slideshow I’d put together.

Rather than shout, ‘Look, a baby wolf!’ and run out of the room, my colleague and I sat down and began asking our clients questions. We knew what we wanted to talk about, but by asking questions, we quickly found out what they wanted to talk about. And we had the responses to hand without needing a single bullet point.

Your client will always get the point - if they made it themselves
When we did finally hook up the laptop, we’d already covered most of the points - or our client had covered them for us. As a result, we raced through the slides while everyone in the room nodded their heads in agreement. How could they do otherwise? They’d made most of the points themselves. And there they were, on the screen, as if by magic. It was clear that everyone was onboard: when we all walked out of the meeting together, we were still talking.

In fact, the conversation made it through reception and into the kitchen. The result? Two further meetings have been scheduled already - one of them with top management. It would seem that the ‘Best parties end up in the kitchen’ rule could also apply to business meetings.

While a loose, informal approach may not be appropriate in all business meeting scenarios, when it comes to finding out what your clients need, it never hurts to listen.