In our previous posts, we talked about how to hire top performers, how to motivate our teams, and how to develop our teams and prepare them for leadership. All three of those topics are critical to building long-term success within your organizations. What is equally important is the ability to succeed in new client acquisition. You will never achieve the growth necessary to meet your people’s goals without having a steady pipeline of new business coming in.

First, it’s important to have some context on why it’s important to focus on bringing new business in. The typical company will lose 10 percent of their customer base every year. What that means is that over a 10-year period, if you did nothing, you would have a customer base of zero. Additionally, the staffing industry is plagued with high turnover — often with rates ranging from 35 to 70 percent. That level of turnover within the industry has some severe negative implications on the potential customer pool. Most of your target customers view staffing reps and companies as commodities that have no significant differentiating characteristics from any other staffing firm. It’s critical that staffing firms bring in new business but even a cursory evaluation of your customer landscape reveals that you’re fighting against really challenging odds.

Given the challenging landscape you’re facing, what’s the critical path to bringing in new business? I’ve always been someone who’s oriented towards systematizing the sales process. That becomes even more critical in staffing where you’re dealing with infinitely variable variables (people).

The first step in the process of new client acquisition is to understand their operational reality. Before you can ever present what you have to offer, you need to understand the current state of your prospects’ internal recruiting process, what changes they would like to see, how those changes would impact their business, etc. Once you’ve taken the time to understand the current state of your clients’ operation you’re ready to determine if they’re a legitimate prospect. During my time in IT staffing I took the added step of only targeting firms that had 75 to 250 million in revenue, multiple divisions, and a history of having three to six temps/consultants working in each division — firms which allowed me to work directly with hiring managers.

The next step in the process of new client acquisition is to build out your target lists and develop your strategy for contacting them. Your contact strategy needs to include a schedule and volume component as well as a content component. I would argue that the content of your outgoing campaigns is more important than the volume component of your strategy. As a result it’s critical to understand the prospect’s industry, competitors, trends, etc. Additionally, your messages should be focused, relevant, and add value to the recipient.

Once you’ve made contact, a process that usually will take 12 to 18 attempts, how do you make that initial meeting or conversation productive? The conventional wisdom in staffing would tell you to focus on orders that the company has right now that you can tackle. I took the opposite approach and focused on what that client has coming up six to 12 months from now. I knew that I didn’t have a strong enough understanding of what that client was looking for in my initial meeting and would need some ramp up time. As a result, I focused on their mid-term and long-term projects and initiatives. By taking the time to understand the organization, the hiring manager, the projects, and their business implications, I was much more successful in getting assignments. Additionally, I was never afraid to tell the client that a particular role wasn’t center of the circle for my organization.

If you’ve executed the first three steps in the process, the final step is to measure and make adjustments to the process as you go along. The metrics component of the measurement is relatively easy. If a salesperson is making 175 to 250 touch points a week, has 50 to 75 conversations, and 10 to 15 visits,  they will generate one or two new accounts per month (assuming a six-month lead time). Unfortunately, this phase of the process is where most firms go wrong.

Oftentimes firms will implement an initiative or process but won’t be disciplined enough to give ample time for evaluation. In fact, I’ve been a part of many change initiatives that were rolled out one month only to be forgotten the next month. From an implementation perspective, it’s critical that any new initiative be given 12 months “in the wild” before any evaluations are made. Additionally, there is a patience component that is required in order for reps focused on new business development to be successful. If you want to focus on building a pipeline of new business, you must be ready to accept that it will take six to 10 months before you start seeing results.

The approach to new client acquisition in staffing is fairly straightforward: target, qualify, meet, and measure. The challenges are in the details of the process. If you want to build a consistent engine for new business growth, it’s critical that reps understand their prospect’s operational reality, develop a coherent and relevant contact strategy, keep a long-term view in their approach to clients, and make data-driven decisions and adjustments to their processes. Taking a systematic approach to this process will allow your teams to be more effective and will allow you to identify the areas that need shoring up from an operational perspective.

And remember, the software tools your sales team uses are critical to their success. Bond can help with staffing software that cuts wasted time and effort, simplifies the daily work, and unifies all of the information needed to acquire new clients.

This blog series is available as a single whitepaper. Download Sales Team Success: Four Strategies to Grow Your Staffing & Recruiting Firm for more insight into how to hire top performers, motivate and develop your internal sales team, and acquire new clients.

One of the most important responsibilities you will have as a staffing leader is finding the right salespeople for your team. We addressed how you can solve that issue in our previous post. Finding the right person is only the first step in the process of transforming an organization and represents one small facet of a complex hiring system.

Once you have selected the right person, what then? How do you continually motivate your sales team? Unfortunately many firms approach this in a decidedly one-sided manner and end up in a constant cycle of peaks and valleys in employee performance. So what’s the right way to get out of this “boom and bust” cycle we often find ourselves in as staffing firm leaders?

Well, one thing I can tell you for sure is that sales contests are not the answer. In fact, this “one-size fits all” approach to motivating a sales team often does more harm than good. I’m sure many of you have incentive-based contests at your firms and yet many of you still struggle with keeping your team engaged and on board. The reality is, from both a research and practice perspective, sales contests have little to no positive impact on your overall performance in the long run. What is particularly interesting is that while you may get a slight short-term “bump” the long-term negative consequences far outweigh the slightly positive outcomes. The core problem with a contest-driven culture is that it relies on external stimuli to drive performance. When that stimuli is removed, the performance increases (if any) disappear.

If contests aren’t the answer, then what is? If you want to build a team of self-motivated, high performers, the process will be a decidedly long but simple one. First, you have to recognize that most of your people are not there simply because of the money. In fact, I would suspect most of your people are looking to make an impact and make a difference within your organization. Unfortunately, many of us in staffing don’t take the time to uncover the real reasons why people are with us and end up losing really talented people. The organization that can retain their best people in an industry where 30 to 75 percent turnover is the expectation will have a huge competitive advantage.

Second, leaders within staffing have to recognize that in order to fix the issue they must look at themselves as agents of change and consider the needs of each team member. That may seem like an abstract concept but what we’re really talking about how to lead our people. We in staffing need to get away from always managing by metrics and move towards leading through inspiration. This requires each staffing leader to understand what motivates each and every member of their sales team and manage to those things instead of arbitrary weekly metrics.

Third, leaders need to do a much better job of empowering their troops. The biggest challenge in making this shift in approach is that we all know how to get results. In fact, we could probably create a “paint by numbers” workflow and dictate that everyone else follow that process. Unfortunately, this approach may not be the most effective thing we can do. We need to learn to take our hands off the wheel and let others drive. At a certain point we have to recognize that our role has shifted from mapping out the steps to pointing the way. Workflows, as helpful as they can be, should offer guidance, as each customer relationship may be unique. The idea is to talk about the value of the mission and the goal and let your people get there on their own. In order to keep your sales team motivated and on board, your role needs to change from task manager to cultural leader.

The last and arguably the most important step is that we have to recognize that one-size-fits-all approaches don’t work. We have to take the time to meet with each of our people and talk to them about their vision for themselves. Furthermore, we have to create an environment where we can tell our troops our vision for them. The most critical aspect of building a long-term culture of self-motivation is to meet your people where they are and try to understand what is important to them. Only at that point can we move forward and build sustained performance and engagement within our organizations.

Finally, with a well-motivated sales team it becomes a necessity that they have the tools needed to produce results efficiently. That’s where Bond can help. Give us a call and let’s get started.

In a recent survey we asked nearly 80 staffing professionals to share insights into how they choose, train, and support sales teams. Read the results in the Bond US Sales Selection, Training and Development Report 2014.

Turn Your Sales Team into Thoroughbreds With A Training Plan and Top-Notch Tools

What happens on the first Saturday in May? America’s best three-year-old thoroughbred racehorses compete for one of the biggest crowns in horseracing: the Kentucky Derby.   When you see these magnificent animals primed for the fastest two minutes in sports, you can’t help but think of the high-tech tools and extensive training that got them there.

What do training racehorses and training sales teams have in common, you ask?

Both require a long-term comprehensive commitment and top-notch tools.

Break In Your Team For Onboarding Success

Although they won’t begin racing until late into their second year, young thoroughbreds begin their handling training at birth.  They learn their manners (hopefully) and get used to the activities around a busy barn that will prepare them for the hubbub of the backstretch.

Sales training for new team members within a recruiting firm is somewhat the same.  Managers need to get their new charges used to the corporate culture of their firm quickly and get them settled in with procedures, goals and expectations.

Drill Them on the Basics

From schooling in the starting gate to galloping on the track each morning, trainers cover all the skills young horses need to be successful constantly.

Take a look at these points for training techniques you can replicate for success with your recruiting sales team:

• The Client’s Challenges Are Yours – Chris Burkhard, President of the recruiting firm CBI, gives this tip in his article for Staffing Stream: “Consider your staff and your client as being members of the same team. Know the client’s priorities as well as your own. Be able to anticipate client feedback instinctively… as fellow team members often do.”

Training your team to intimately understand the client’s needs and problems enables them to respond more quickly and cohesively with a solution.  In a popular webinar on Sales Best Practices for Bond, Leslie Prince of Roth Staffing encourages teams to assess the impact of the problems your clients face, which will help your team to craft a fine-tuned solution.

• Focus on High Value Actions – In her article “Stop Being Scattered And Start Selling,” Dr. Janet Lapp shares this telling statistic, “Top sales performers spend between 75% and 95% of their time on high-payoff or ‘worth-it’ actions.  Low performers spend between 25% and 40% of their time on ‘worth-it’ actions without even realizing it.”

Lapp offers this advice: “Schedule the behavior you want to increase by pairing it with a habit already established. Habit strength will transfer to the new action.”  That could be as simple as to make five sales calls every time you fix yourself a cup of coffee.

This principle applies to day-to-day time management and the benefits of recruiting software.  The more familiar your sales team is with your recruiting software, the better they can manage daily tasks quickly, leaving more time for finding new candidates and networking with referral sources.

• Get in the Habit of Positive Energy – Obviously positive energy between team members is essential, but positive energy directed at clients is crucial, too.  Sales expert Jeff Shore addressed the benefits of positive energy in his article, “Misery Loves Company,”

“Think of encounters with customers as having a finite amount of space. Your job is to FILL that space with positive energy, leaving no area for negative energy to exist.”

Give champions a chance to mentor them

The delicate art of training thoroughbreds includes replicating the training regimen of their triumphant relatives.  Adapting training to a horse’s inherited traits means copying proven successful methods — bringing the youngsters along in much the same fashion as their winning parents and grandparents.  For example, some family lines include later-maturing horses, so training has to move at a slower pace.

Trainers also use experienced racehorses as training partners to settle younger horses—a great strategy for training your recruiting sales team, as well.

Creating a mentoring system pairing high level and extra-successful sales team members with newcomers can provide valuable insight in a supportive environment.  In addition, scheduling educational seminars and brainstorming sessions for the whole team builds relationships and fuels creative energy.

In addition to training practices, whether it’s the right bridle or the best supplements, trainers of the top equine athletes have all manners of sophisticated tools at their disposal to help their horses stay healthy and happy because that’s the foundation of a stellar performer.

Likewise, hiring companies should provide their sales team with the best recruiting software to make their jobs easier.  Add that to the platform of strong training and your sales team will end up in the winner’s circle more often.

Discover insight into more staffing sales best practices with our webinar and video, “Staffing Sales Best Practices.”