Maximizing Your Career Earnings: Expert Tips on Personal Branding, Self Marketing and Negotiation

Eric James Eden: 0:59

Welcome to today's episode. Our guest today is Jacob Warwick. Jacob is a top negotiator, a top voice in negotiation. He helps people take their careers to the next level. He's been a CMO and a marketer himself and he's going to join us today to talk about the behavioral psychology of negotiation and marketing overall. Welcome to the show, hey.

Jacob Warwick: 1:23

Eric, happy to be here and always happy to talk to my people, my marketing people. I spent a lot of time talking to salespeople recently and let me tell you I much prefer the presence of marketers. Just don't tell them.

Eric James Eden: 1:36

Welcome to the cool kid side of the playground. You have a great story for us today. Let's jump right into it.

Jacob Warwick: 1:45

Yeah, I heard. You and I were talking in the green room, so to speak, about some areas where marketers have trouble marketing themselves, which reminds you of, I guess, the old idiom that the cobbler's children have no shoes. It's always difficult to market for oneself. It reminded me of a story about when I had my switch personally and how I switched more towards entrepreneur and teaching others this mentality. Really, what I did for a long time was go to market for usually boring software companies that I didn't care about too much, for whatever reason, found the right systems and processes in place to actually find some success in doing that for again boring software that I didn't care about. It got me thinking as I was growing in my own career and moving my career forward. What if we could apply go to market strategies to ourselves as a product instead of a business? As an example? I've been adopting this mindset shift for about a decade now and supporting others building go to markets for themselves where, as you think about your career, you're thinking about the pieces of who you are, where your best fit, what the alignment in the market is, so to speak, who your ideal customer profile is. You could use every acronym and every buzzword that you've learned in your marketing career and apply it to yourself as a product and then think about how should I be positioning this? What type of brand should I put out there into the world? How can I position myself, either as a premium product or as a commodity, as an example? We know this in the work that we do every day, whether we're a high velocity or a PLG type land and expand marketer or we're a big let's say, enterprise marketer where we're influencing six and a half decision makers and we're going through this. When you think about it, if you make a quarter million dollars a year or 800,000 a year, or you're on the million dollar range, like many of my clients, when you think back to the principles, if you are a marketer in charge of marketing a million dollar a year product, how long would that pipeline take to create? How many touch points would you need? How many people would you need to influence? These are things that I think is relevant for you to think about so that you can apply those principles to your own career and recognize some of this stuff is going to take time. It's going to be a premium sales process. We're going to need to influence a certain number of decision makers, create advocacy and allies and those types of things. The main thing is we know what we're doing for companies. What if we can apply it for ourselves?

Eric James Eden: 4:13

Yeah, having that approach is important because it's not something that happens with the snap of the fingers. It doesn't happen right away. You have to do all the same sort of work in motions that you do when you're running remarkable marketing campaigns. You have to plan it out. You have to assume that people that are going to take you to the next level in the career aren't just going to immediately do that the first time you chat to them right away. It's going to be a process Just like buyers. You have to put eight pieces of thought leadership content in front of them before they even engage for the first conversation. The sales cycle can take many months sometimes. For the timing to be right, I think some people put off or delay their executive branding or their personal branding activities because there'll be time to do it later. The right time to start is probably now if you need to make a change anytime in the near future six months, 12 months.

Jacob Warwick: 5:20

The best time to start was 10 years ago and the second best time is today. That's something that's frustrating. We almost have this like some cost on what we should have been doing. It's definitely tough because when you're working a full-time job, you don't often have a lot of time to promote yourself. When you get seen promoting yourself quite a bit, then you're that guy, you're that gal who's spending more time promoting themselves and helping the company that they're with. There's a delicate balance that you have to strike there To your point. If you wait until you're out of work and then you set this expectation on yourself that now I'm going to go after it, I'm going to apply for things, I'm going to start networking now, that was when I'm going to tap into my network, if you're setting expectations with your boss on a product launch or a go-to-market strategy on the marketing side, would you tell your boss that you're going to get results in six weeks or 12 weeks or whatever that looks like, especially SEO folks? You're going to say, oh, we'll start seeing results in three months? If you apply that same expectation and pressure to yourself, you're setting yourself up for a bad time. What I found is one it's incredibly frustrating to continually lose, when you try to start a campaign and then it drops back, or then you start a job and then you stop the efforts. What I found more appropriate is that you don't need to launch a full-blown go-to-market strategy for Eric Eden, as an example. It's little habits that you pick up over time, that you start to invest in throughout the entire length of your career. Those that are more successful from those that kind of job hop a lot or they get stuck in. What I call the meat grinder of finding a job every 12 to 18 months is that those that tend to be having a more successful career, at least on the outside, have these habits and they've developed this network and they've been building their marketing engines, so to speak, for years and years.

Eric James Eden: 7:08

Yeah, and so you have this great email newsletter execs in the city, and I assume when you started that your expectation wasn't oh, I'll just start this and it'll immediately blow up and I'll get tons of opportunities right away from it. It's the sort of thing where you're positioning yourself as a thought leader and building a community, and that sort of thing takes time, and then eventually you do get goodness from that.

Jacob Warwick: 7:34

And actually I never really used that as an intention to be a thought leader in any way, so I never had that expected. Oh, I'm going to build this list and I'm going to get clients. And it's funny, I use the newsletter as a habit for myself because writing is some of the best thinking that you can do. So I would be focused on client problems. Occasionally. I have 10, 15 clients at a time during that period. Now I've toned it back a little bit. I have higher profile clients, but less at any given time, and we'd be dealing with some complicated scenarios. So I would block Wednesday off every day of the week and I would spend that time writing through a client challenge and what we talked about and what we hope to solve. And ultimately I was writing for myself. It just so happened that other people care about that and that's just generally a plus. And I also wrote about it in a way and continue to write about it in a way where I'm a petchial little bitch when it comes to writing. I almost called the blog Spotted Elephants. If there's an elephant in the room, I just call it out and I kind of bitch about it, and a lot of folks will read my content and they can't share it. They're not incentivized to share it in any way, because if they share it they'll be associated while being bitchy or complaining about something. So I specifically design content that can't be shared, but everybody reads it and goes yeah, he's absolutely right. And it grew this like cult following, where I'll post something in the newsletter covert and I'll just say, hey, I'm not going to, I'm thinking about taking a couple of weeks off, and then I'll get a bunch of folks hey, don't do it. I read every week and I haven't ever engaged with these folks before. I have no idea. They've never shared, they've never commented, never replied. I don't really dig into the analytics that much, but then they say I share this every week and I share this with some of my friends and it's like our little guilty pleasure and I always found that to be interesting. It wasn't intended to be thought leadership content. I specifically didn't gate it to try to collect email addresses. I don't monitor the open rates or how much the subscriber count goes up. So it happens to be successful, which is cool, or at least successful enough, and it's always been my greedy place to put work out there and I'm a big fan of creating a little bit more than you consume.

Eric James Eden: 9:53

Yeah, I think that it's successful because you have a unique viewpoint and so, sans even all the other standard marketing tactics, that's enough on its own to drive things a lot of the time. I'm curious some of the clients that you work with because you work with a wide range, some of them very high profile, like you said, and you've helped a lot of people who are in career transition and you've helped them get a higher premium or, to be said a different way, paid what they're worth, and I'm interested what that takes, if you can share that, because I think everybody wants to be paid what they're worth, but a lot of people don't know how to get there In a high level. what is the secret to that? So there's a couple of pieces here.

Jacob Warwick: 10:46

One is you should never negotiate against yourself. So a lot of the times it's a mindset piece on our own where even, for example, you said I want to be paid what I'm worth and I don't think anyone's paid what they're worth. I think they're paid what they negotiate. That's why some people make millions more than others, when you can't really tell them apart on paper. There's a lot of different things where they've clearly identified a gap and they can expose that gap and negotiate for it and create more pie. Now, the mindset piece here is I don't want you to compare yourselves to others. I don't want you to go look for compensation reports and say, oh I, as a CMO, at this stage I should expect a 300 to 350 base salary with a bonus of 20 to 30%. In this, much equity. Like when you're comparing yourself to the mean, whether it's the 10th percentile or the 90th percentile, you're still comparing yourself to criteria that fits most people and you try to fit into that box for some reason. And good negotiation is really about saying there are no boundaries, there is no box. Every situation is unique and it's your job to explore what that value you can provide in that situation is Occasionally. It means, as a marketer, engaging more on revenue activities or scooping up another piece of another department or simply proving the impact that you're going to have across the function of the entire business and working through that. But you should never assume that you know what you're worth. You want other people to say what you're worth and then push them forward with that. So that's step one. Just never be so sure of what you're worth that you wouldn't accept more. That's a Chris Voss quote too, and I think it's actually ripped off from Shakespeare, and there's a Shakespeare quote that's never assumed it. You don't know that you wouldn't accept more, like this Very similar kind of quote there from Shakespeare. You don't give yourself the opportunity to see what more could look like. That's something to think about through the process. Also, there are tricks that we can do and I'll give a tangible one here to set the expectation that you are valuable. So, eric, let's say that you're interviewing me for a VP of marketing position and you're looking for someone 10, 15 years of experience and I have 18. I might say something like Eric can you tell me a little bit about why you'd talk to someone like me, someone with a little bit more experience versus maybe promoting someone internally or hiring somebody more inexpensive, right. So I didn't tell you I'm expensive, but I'm asking you about what are your alternatives? I'm giving you the psychology that Jacob is a premium resource and I'm going to be more expensive than said inexpensive. I didn't give you any details on what that might be, but I'm priming the stage for you going. If I'm going to work with Jacob, I should expect expensive, right. And so we can set just in the types of questions we ask, we can differentiate ourselves from the competition. Now what may happen too is, eric, you might say you can't promote anyone internally. They're a little too junior, they need some handholding. Or we have C players and B players and we're just not quite sure if anyone's there for leadership. Great. I might say, why not hire an agency? I don't like to work with agencies because of XYZ. Why not hire somebody with a different industry profile? You say I don't want that because of XYZ. And what you're doing is you're telling me everything that I need to do to close you. Ah, it makes sense to why you and I are on the phone today, because I am that senior here I can handle these problems. I've seen this before. I can tell and tap into some stories from before and I can really focus in on what you care about most, versus only talking about my experience in the past. So I want to focus on solving your problems and then also psychologically working to say I am a premium solution, I'm better than all your alternatives. There I've differentiated myself from the competition and now, when you're ready to make an offer, you don't have any other choices or at least no choices that I don't know about and so you can significantly increase your leverage right from the very first conversation. And that's about as high level as I can get right now, because obviously the process is pretty complex.

Eric James Eden: 14:53

Yeah, that makes sense. A lot of the psychology behind it is just setting the right expectations and then understanding what people's options are and setting things up in the right way. I think everybody always has options right, but a lot of times the options are worse. However, the psychology of it, as you said, is if you go in and you don't position yourself of you get what you pay for and you come across instead as over-eager or desperate, then you just set the expectation wrong before you even get to the point of they want to hire you and they're going to start negotiating the salary. So, even very early in the process, the psychology and the expectation and understanding what their options are so that you can close them it starts pretty early in the process and maybe in the first conversation, like you're saying right.

Jacob Warwick: 15:48

Yeah, and there's a lot of mistakes that marketers make often, and some of it's their fault and some of it's not. So markings often last a higher first to fire. People see it as a cost, not an investment. And so, with that mindset going into the conversation, you feel like you have something to prove. You have to prove that marketing is valuable. You have to prove all of it. You have to prove you're valuable, and when you're setting out to prove yourself constantly, you're diminishing your leverage from the get-go. We need to assume that it's valuable and talk to the point that they get it and that it will be valuable. And so that's one mistake that markers particularly make. And then markers that are out of work obviously have very little leverage. They might be interested primarily in paying their mortgage and doing these other things. So they shift the way they talk into more of I'm excited and I'm eager, and they do this fluffy bullshit that makes them milk toast with all the rest of their competition and nobody stands out. So the one that pushes back and is more assertive and focuses on the challenges less about, oh, I'm really excited about this opportunity, especially with companies that are pretty fricking boring, which we all know them. We're feigning excitement for bullshit, like people can see right through that and you're not even fooling yourself and that creates a lot of loss of leverage and desperation and all of those things work against you. So the initial offer you get is significantly lower, should that even work through the process. And that's only going to work for middle to bottom tier opportunities in the first place. So you're groveling for the weaker parts of it, not earning the greater ones. There's a little bit of a rubber band effect in a push and pull. I'll do one final little trick, because I know you promised behavioral psychology in the intro and we only touched on a little bit of it. This is a trick I like to use. I might say, eric, I want to give you a positive reputation, whether you've ever behaved like that in the past before. So I'd say something like Eric, I appreciate that you've always been an advocate for me and that you share the good work that we've done together with some of your clients, and I just want you to know that I recognize that and I appreciate it. And so what I'm doing is I'm trying to give you a positive mentality, a positive reputation, to entice your brain to keep doing that to live up to that reputation to be. Oh yeah, when I think about Jacob, I do think about promoting him in this way or talking highly of him or doing this, and you could do that in the interview process. When they're talking about compensation and things, you could say look, what's most important to me is finding alignment, and I appreciate that, as a hiring manager, you're going to do the best that you can and you're going to be a great advocate for me, and I'm thankful for that. And so we give them the reputation you're going to go to battle for me. Now we know that they might still cut you back 20% or those types of things, but we influence them every step of the way to be thinking how can I be a better advocate for this person, and we use them to coach us on other interviews through the process and continually collaborating as an advocate. That's the person that they're going to want to hire, the one that's naturally already part of the team. So just a couple of tips there.

Eric James Eden: 18:41

You've been able to generate some not limited results for clients through some of these strategies. Without getting into specific examples, obviously directionally, how much more have you been able to help people earn with these types of strategies so people get a directional sense for how effective this can be?

Jacob Warwick: 19:05

Yeah, I feel very confident that just a handful of tips could make someone a million more in their career, some cases, if they're positioned correctly. I've made that in one career transition. We had one, not too specific, but we created a biddy war in the Fang group to get someone from 800,000 a year to 2.4 million a year, which was fascinating to me. I got a bottle of wine as a thank you for that, so I wasn't too happy, but that's what helped me trigger value-based pricing afterwards. There's been. I had a moment earlier this year where we had talked through six months of severance and it was on target earning severance, which was about, let's say, 350,000 for six months of on target earning for this particular executive. The deal was almost signed. It went to legal change the definition from on target to base salary, so that essentially cut the severance package in half. In the 11th hour my client said, oh, I'll talk to the CEO and I'll just propose a compromise. I'll go right in the middle. I said wait, hold on, just take a moment, talk about where you're coming from, propose it this way and say, hey, this is why the decision, this is why I chose on target as an example. I think it just got mixed up in legal. The CEO said, oh yeah, you're right, no big deal, and signed it back to on target, just like that. So in one particular conversation it was about a three minute conversation we saved $350,000 in severance where we were going to just immediately go to compromise for no reason. So sometimes we just have to think through things and position them in a different way. It's not what you say, it's how you say it, and you should never be so sure that somebody's going to say, no, I don't want to compromise, or that it was malignant and intent. When lawyers get a hold of things, you never know what's going to happen, so it can be a little tricky to get things back. But that's just an example. In 10 minutes making $175,000, something like that, or the difference between that, whatever half of that, is just in taking a quick psychological break. That's a big difference when you're out of work to get that much more severance pay as an example. I know marketers are out of work all the time. You can imagine the pressure that's taken off when you get four, five, six months of mortgages taken care of. So you can take your time to find a better job, not just grovel into whatever's next.

Eric James Eden: 21:21

That's right. That's awesome advice. One more piece of advice I want to ask you to share is because this is a process for marketers to think about. They go to market strategy for their career. How do you advise people to get started? Sometimes the inertia of getting started on it. It's hard, you're busy and the time to start, like we talked about, is today. How do people get started? How do you tell people to get it in motion? Because I think some people just don't know where to start.

Jacob Warwick: 21:55

That's a great question. I would start by talking to experienced CMOs like yourself, eric, as an example, and connecting with others and having more transparent conversations about what's working and not working in their career and how they're positioning themselves. One of my favorite questions to ask is to force empathy and compassion. I might say, eric, here's what I'm going through. If you're in my shoes, what would you do? If you want to get real specific to your industry, talk to folks that have done it. Don't overcompensate as a CMO, as an example, because if you're the best marketer in the world, you grow up to be a CMO. You're going to lose your job if all you are is the best marketer in the world. You need to be in alignment with the product officer, the sales team, you need to be in alignment across the entire company. They all need to know that they can't do their jobs without you, otherwise you'll lose your job. Reach out to chief people officers and product officers and technology officers and say what are your expectations of marketing? How should you like to see them position? Start by asking a lot of questions and making it a habit to connect with folks. One of my favorite KPIs for getting started is Conversations a Week. It doesn't have to be specific to somebody that's going to hire you. I want to have three new conversations a week. That's my habit. You can start by reaching out to Eric, having a 30-minute conversation. Focus on what Eric's advice is Really, not just pick your brain because everyone hates that word. Understand, see if you can help Eric, provide some resources for him, and then, near the end of the conversation, say hey, eric, do you have another two or three other folks that I can reach out to? That's going to help you hit that conversation metric. Moving forward, I really want to find something that's tangible, because people are really what make this work. If you just go out and start posting stuff on LinkedIn, you're going to lose. It doesn't matter. You can post every single day and start to figure stuff out eventually, but I like to start with people over more of those tactical pieces there.

Eric James Eden: 23:54

I agree 100%. I think the key is to be curious, have those conversations, approach it. Even if you're mid to senior level in your career, there's still a lot more to learn. Getting out there and talking to other people, things are always changing. Having a certain number of conversations every week, having that habit, I think that's the right place for people to start. If you have that curiosity and desire to figure it out, then you'll get there. That's amazing. Thank you for all this advice today, Jacob. It's been amazing. I encourage everyone to reach out to Jacob if you'd like to know more. He does lots of amazing work in this area. I'm going to link to his profile and website in the show notes so you can easily get there. I encourage everyone to also share this episode with your friends, because people should know how important it is to market themselves as much as they market their company. Thanks very much, Jacob. We appreciate it. Thanks, Eric. Good luck everybody.