Jumpstarting 2010
Time for a fresh start. And a renewed sense of optimism!
Staffing indicators are looking up. And more importantly, temp job orders are on the rise. So what should you do to get ready for a great 2010? Here are three ideas:
- Account plans. Get out and visit every client. Sit down with them to review their business plans and anticipated hiring needs for the year. Then ask them two questions: 1) What will happen to your plans if business increases by 10% or more than you expect? 2) What will happen to your plans if business decreases by 10% or more than you expect?
Your goal is to help your clients plan ahead--to be more proactive about their staffing and to consider the implications of unexpected changes in the economy. By helping clients plan farther ahead, you can become a true strategic recruiting partner--helping your clients to pre-recruit for future hires and giving your firm an unbeatable advantage over the competition.
- Service differentiation. Based on what you learn from speaking with your existing clients, evaluate your own business to see where you can further differentiate your services from what everyone else is doing. Maybe you can create new niche specialties, or maybe you will discover new ways to improve your service, or you might just be able to position your firm as better problem solvers.
As business picks up, employers will start to evaluate staffing vendors. Now is the time to strengthen your answer to the question, "Why should we use your firm for our staffing needs?"
- Better marketing. Okay, you knew I'd write this, but now is truly the time to get aggressive with your marketing. Now is the time to make 100% certain that prospects know who you are--and to give them a strong reason to want to work with your firm.
Here's an overview of what you should do with your marketing in 2010:
a. Improve your website. Every client and candidate is going to visit your website, so make sure your site conveys the right message. Also make sure that your site is easy to use and that it encourages people to interact with you by offering features like a searchable job board, staffing education, a job order submission form, a refer a friend form, and social media integration.
b. Get more candidates for Free! Take advantage of job aggregators Indeed and Simply Hired. Get them to index the jobs on your website, and you will see a large increase in well-qualified candidate traffic.
As an FYI, we just updated our job board software so that it can automatically post your jobs to Indeed, Simply Hired, and even social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. For less than the cost of one job post each month, our software will get every one of your jobs posted to all these sites!
c. Get more clients from Google. Are you on page one of Google? If not, it's time to get serious about optimizing your website for search engines. With the right optimization strategy, you will generate MANY more sales leads--and the best part is that they come to you when they are ready to buy!
d. Take advantage of social media. If you have not already started, now is the time to start blogging and maximizing the value of LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. These tools will act like a silent sales person bringing new clients and candidates to you at a fraction of the cost of hiring or traditional recruiting methods.
e. Stay top-of-mind. Use email and direct mail to enhance your communications efforts. These tools can help you add value, teach clients and prospects about the real value of your services, and keep your firm top-of-mind. They also give your sales people new reasons to make calls every month!
f. Give your sales team tools to be more effective. Cold calling and networking are the most common ways that staffing firms generate sales leads. But your clients hate to be cold called! As an alternative, give your sales team great information to share. By arming them with articles, booklets, videos, webinars and other tools that they can use to share education and nurture relationships, you make their sales job infinitely easier--and you build a MUCH bigger pipeline.
In his book The Ultimate Sales Machine, best selling author Chet Holmes notes that at any given time, only 3% of your prospects are actively in the market for your services. He recommends using educational marketing as a means to connect with an additional 67% of the market who are not currently active prospects, but will be prospects for your services at some point. (Unfortunately, the remaining 30% of the market will never be viable prospects.)
Just in case you are not convinced about the value of marketing, check out the recommendation below that we received from one of our clients last month--we could not have written a better endorsement of the need for, and value of, marketing:
"We have been extremely pleased with Haley Marketing. They are a first class organization.
Our firm uses their HaleyMail program. Basically, they write the content, send it to us for approval, and then it gets sent out to about 2500 clients/prospects each month. They make us look far more sophisticated than we actually are!!! As part of our program, we also are able to send out 'instant mail' emails at any time--this is usually an e-postcard that can wish a client a Happy 4th of July, holiday, or pretty much anything. They assign a 'marketing advisor' to you, and ours is a great guy & is always accessible and quick to respond to questions.
As far as return on investment, we do usually get one "new order" from each mailing that gets sent out. Regardless, it pays for itself. Our team really has no other way to reach over 2500 end users with the click of a button. And, the tracking is really easy & is done all thru Haley's 'mail processing center' website--it gives us stats on who read it, who forwarded it on to a friend, who deleted w/out reading, etc. And, the best thing is, you can make your mailing list as big as you want. David Searns' constant message is to stay "top of mind"...I'm really not sure how we'd stay top of mind without this program."
Meg Sherman, CTS
VP of Sales and Marketing
Contemporary Personnel Staffing, Inc.
|
