Selling Staffing & Recruiting in an Upturn:
Are your sales people prepared?
Full steam aheadÂ…well, almost.
We're finally coming off of the Great Recession. And business is improving. While we're certainly not back to a boom time, companies are hiring.
Right now, we are seeing that the staffing and recruiting firms that worked hardest to differentiate their services, and continued to market over the past 18 months, are reaping the biggest benefits (some of our clients are up more than 100%).
But what if you, like so many others, were not that aggressive? Good news, it's not too late!
Six Sales and Marketing Strategies
for Selling Staffing & Recruiting During a Recovery
- Be selective in choosing companies to target.
Sounds obvious, but many staffing sales reps have little, if any, plan for going after the market. They spend way too much time chasing companies that either won't use staffing services or will be demanding price buyers.
So while every company could be a user of staffing and recruiting services, train your team to be strategic about prospecting. Start by making three lists:
- Current and former clients - Get out and learn what's going on in their businesses. Where are they short staffed? What initiatives would they like to tackle, if they had the resources? What departments aren't they currently servicing?
It's always easier to sell to someone with whom you have a relationship, so make the most of your relationships. Look to expand your network of contacts inside each client company. Ask probing questions to better understand their business needs (not just their staffing challenges), and become a resource in providing creative solutions.
- Ideal clients - Who are your best prospects? They are the companies that need your help, value your expertise, and don't haggle over your invoices.
How do you find these companies? Start by profiling your current clients. What characteristics define your best clients today? What industries are they in? What locations? What sizes? What kinds of staffing needs do they have? Build a detailed profile of your ideal client, and then teach your sales team to look for other similar kinds of companies.
- Your "Dream 100" - In The Ultimate Sales Machine, Chet Holmes advises readers to develop a list of the top accounts they'd like to land. His theory is that your best buyers, "Buy more, buy faster, and buy more often than others."
Once you've developed a list of your "Dream 100," you then create a plan to get the attention and interest of these firms. According to Holmes, with "pigheaded determination and discipline you can take this list from 'I've never heard of this company' to 'Yes, I do business with that company.'"
- Stake out a unique place in the market. Right now, everyone is out beating on the doors of prospects--and mostly saying the same things to the same people. What will distinguish you from the competition?
Unfortunately, it won't be great service or quality candidates--everyone promises that. So where do you start? Become a specialist. You might decide to focus on a very specific job discipline or service a specific industry. But for even stronger differentiation, become an expert. An expert is someone who has a great deal of knowledge focused on a very specific subject. For example, an industrial staffing firm that really understands lean manufacturing (and how to eliminate waste in staffing) has a big advantage over an LI firm that just fills orders. A financial staffing firm that's an expert in tax or financial analysis has an advantage over a generalized accounting and financial staffing firm. And a commercial staffing firm that understands workforce planning can outsell any firm that just offers traditional temp help.
Another way to find your point of differentiation is to research the problems your IDEAL clients are experiencing right now and become an expert at solving those problems.
- Plan ahead. It's time to break the traditional cold-calling mentality of the staffing industry. Rather than just dialing 100 prospects this week, develop a plan to accomplish the following four things:
- Break through the clutter. What will you do to grab people's attention? Brainstorm specific ways you can get through to your target audience.
- Educate your target client about the problems you can solve. Employers don't think they need staffing now, so instead, focus on problems they have. By identifying specific challenges your prospects are facing and offering solutions, you will become a trusted resource.
- Generate interest in HAVING a CONVERSATION. If you start your conversation with "need staffing?" or "just checking in," you'll probably wind up with the door slammed in your face. Instead, give people a compelling reason to meet first, sell staffing LAST.
- Nurture relationships. Staffing is almost never a one-call close. To maximize your sales results, you need a process for relationship nurturing--an organized system of communication to educate, add value, reinforce your value proposition, and keep your firm top-of-mind. On that noteÂ…
- Stay in touch with every client and prospect AT LEAST once a month. Staffing needs can happen at any time. Make sure that you are in regular contact, and continually reminding prospects (and clients) about the value you can provide, so that when a need arises, you're the first one called.
- In addition to sales and marketing, focus on improving your client and candidate experience. Start by putting yourself in your clients' and candidates' shoes. For a candidate, think about how they are treated when they come to your office. Are they kept in the loop or are they left hanging after an interview? Would they refer a friend to your firm? For clients, review your sales, service and recruiting processes from start to finish. Ask what could be done to simplify the process and make people feel special. Look for holes, problems and communication issues and find solutions to those issues.
- Train your sales team to confront the price objection head-on. Margins are tight coming out of a downturn, and they are always slow to recover. Unless you want to constantly hear "the other guy's price is lower," you need to train and retrain your sales team to be strategic in their approach to selling. If you start by getting them to focus on the right clients, and work to help them sell solutions rather than just staffing services, you'll face fewer price objections.
When you do hear the price objection, make sure your sales team knows how to respond. At times, you may want to cut your rates--typically in exchange for longer assignments, higher volume, or a first call guarantee. Other times, you may want to stand your ground and provide data to back up your additional value. And sometimes you just have to walk away. As Kenny Rogers would say, your sales people need training to know "when to hold 'em, and when to fold 'em."
And 10 Specific Tactics to Drive Staffing Sales
- Listen to our webinar on lead generation. One of our most popular webinars is now available on demand: Leads. Leads. Leads. Getting prospects to want to talk to you!
- Target smaller employers. They are the first ones to create jobs--and have the least time to hire.
- Target industries that were the MOST hurt in your local market. They probably cut the most people and will need people to pursue new opportunities.
- Use direct mail in advance of your sales calls. Do something to get people's attention and give them a reason to take your call. The extra cost of the marketing will be more than offset by the additional sales.
- Use LinkedIn Groups to expose your company to more prospects. Post news, provocative discussion topics, or offers for free information on groups frequented by the people you want to reach.
- Start recruiting for jobs that are hard to fill. In staffing and recruiting, the best database almost always wins. Build your talent pool for positions you know are hard to fill in your local market. You can then proactively market these people to employers, and you'll be more responsive to staffing needs when they arise.
- Implement an email marketing campaign. Yes, people get too much email, but it's still the lowest cost, highest ROI way to nurture relationships, position your company as an expert, and stay top-of-mind.
- Become a source of optimism and happiness. People are drawn to optimists, so become an evangelist of hope by constantly sharing ideas to improve morale, tips to build business, and success stories that make people feel good. You might also want to share great jokes, videos, or other things that simply make people smile and help your clients take a break from their stressful days.
- Sell the economics of staffing and recruiting. Be ready to demonstrate how your services will lower costs and improve productivity for your clients. Show them that your fees are very small when compared with the value you deliver.
- Use marketing to leverage your time. There are not enough hours in the day to keep in touch with every client, prospect and candidate. That's where we can help. By integrating marketing with your sales efforts, you can reach more people, more often, and with more valuable content to make your sales efforts more effective!
Don't Be One Dimensional.
Integrate multiple tactics to maximize response.
There is no "one size fits all" when it comes to marketing. Some people respond to sales calls. Others respond to mail. Some read every email you send. Others live on social media.
To maximize the effectiveness of your sales efforts, combine sales calls, direct mail, drop offs, email, online marketing and in-person networking into an organized campaign that systematically targets the people and companies you want to sell. It takes a little planning, but nothing else will put you on a faster road to recovery (and this is exactly what the fastest growing companies in the staffing industry are doing!).
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