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Effective Time Management for Recruiters and Sales Professionals

Dan Fisher on Feb. 10, 2010

A hot topic of discussion of late has been effective time management. Many of the sales and recruiting professionals I coach and mentor are sharing with me that they struggle with effectively managing their time. What I have discovered through the course of having these conversations is that sales professionals become paralyzed trying to decide what to spend their time on. They claim that they want to focus on prospecting, but “unexpected emergencies” prevent them from doing so. They claim that these unexpected events or emergencies take precedence over their sales activities. My question is, do they? Really?

2010 Strategic and Tactical Sales Planning

Dan Fisher on Jan. 29, 2010

In January I am often asked, “How do you develop your sales and recruiting strategy and what will your underlying tactics be to ensure you hit your goals in the upcoming year?” “How do you plan for the new year?” “How do you intend to identify new accounts and decide what market segments to pursue?”

These are great questions that require time and attention, but when? Now. Now is the time to be building your strategic and tactical sales plan for 2010. From my sales leadership experience I always found that a strong Q1 always set the tone for the remainder of the year. The activity and foundation you lay down in Q1 sets the table for the rest of the year. Here are my thoughts on developing your strategic sales plan and underlying tactics that support that plan.

Don’t Fret Over The Recession, Embrace It!

Dan Fisher on Sep. 22, 2009

Now is the time. Let me repeat that. Now is the time!

Now is the time to capitalize on a career-changing moment. This truly is (and has been for nearly a year!) your window of opportunity. How can I make such a statement in the face of the worst recession since the Great Depression? It’s in difficult times like these that present the best career opportunities. Period. Leaders become leaders in organizations because they develop track records of solving problems.

Facing a recession like the one we’ve battled this past year presents the ultimate leadership opportunity. This recession will shape your career. How you respond will impact your future and the future of your organization. So, is this recession going to make you stronger or weaker?

How do you respond to the following phrases?

How to Quickly Identify ‘Good’ Accounts, Part 2

Dan Fisher on Aug. 4, 2009

As a company (your client!) grows, it becomes more mature and formal in the way it conducts business with customers, partners, and suppliers.

Your client starts to implement policies and procedures and business processes to optimize their supply chain, reduce redundancy, and take advantage of economies of scale.

What does this mean for us in the staffing and recruiting business? It means it becomes more challenging to sell into the account and conduct business with these organizations.

Let me share with you a real-life example:

Several years ago I started selling into a rapidly growing company with revenues of $1.5 billion. I quickly discovered that the IT and Engineering departments were staffed 3:1 contractors to full-time employees. Yes, it was a â€œcash-cowâ€ of an account to say the least. All hiring of IT contractors was decentralized. There were no HR policies in place. It was the “wild, wild west,” and I (along with competing sales reps) loved it.

I quickly got a contract in place and put a handful of consultants to work in a short period. Naturally, I thought this account was going to be my “bread and butter” for months or years to come.

How to Quickly Identify ‘Good’ Accounts, Part 1

Dan Fisher on Jul. 28, 2009

Out of the millions of companies we have available to prospect for new business, how does one quickly decipher through it all and identify â€œgood accounts?â€ This is arguably one of the most challenging tasks in the staffing and recruiting industry. And we havenâ€™t even started selling yet!

Good Accounts Defined

What is a good account? That depends on your business model and sales objective.

For example, are you selling MSP or VMS type programs or are you trying to get a contract in place to be one of many suppliers to a large managed program? Or is your model such that your goal is to establish one-on-one relationships with the end-using hiring managers? Based on those different objectives, I would define â€œgood accountsâ€ differently, based on each of those unique sales objectives.

But letâ€™s assume (and I think this is the case for most staffing/recruiting professionals) that your objective is the latter.

Your goal is to establish one-on-one relationships with the actual hiring managers so that you can sell value and generate high-end gross profit margins. Your goal is to avoid HR and Procurement at all costs!

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Master the Art of Patience to Yield Big Results

Dan Fisher on Jun. 24, 2009

For as long as I can remember, patience has never been my virtue.

One thing I have learned from my career in professional sales is that patience is a critical success factor. So I thought I would discuss the importance of patience and how it can play a key role in your success in the world of selling IT staffing and recruiting services.

From my experience, there are two core areas in which we as sales people don’t always demonstrate the patience we should in order to maximize our potential. The first area is simply with making sales calls to prospective customers. Most of us tend to just pick up the phone and dial away without any specific goal or strategy for the call. We just dial away until we get a decision maker on the phone. Heck, you can’t close a deal without talking to the customer, right?

Our thinking goes something like this: “We’ll figure out what to say when they pick up the phone and go from there.”

This is often a poor strategy, especially when you are selling staffing and recruiting services.

Why? We sound like every other sales person in the industry because they are all taking the same approach.

The Toughest Objection of Them All

Dan Fisher on Jun. 3, 2009

If you are like most sales and recruiting professionals in the staffing industry, youâ€™re probably frustrated hearing your prospects and customers tell you, â€œWeâ€™re not hiring and we have no budget.â€

How does one overcome such an objection?

Better yet, how does one even engage in a meaningful conversation when you know your prospect or customer is operating under those circumstances? Here is an idea that has worked for me, and hundreds of others.

As we all know, the employment market is currently very challenging and many or most organizations do not have the budget to hire consultants.

Rather than hoping our prospect or client doesnâ€™t bring up the â€œno budget/not hiringâ€ objection, we need to do the opposite. We need to bring it up.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Cold Calling Tips & Techniques for Selling Staffing Services

Dan Fisher on Apr. 22, 2009

Unless you were born into royalty, you are a former president of a country, or a CEO of a Fortune 500 organization, you are going to have to make cold calls in order to be successful in the field of sales.

Itâ€™s fascinating when marketers promote â€œcold calling is dead,â€ â€œcold calling doesnâ€™t work,â€ and â€œstop cold calling.â€

Who doesnâ€™t wish that their network were so robust that they could always generate new business off of referrals from their personal network? To be successful in selling staffing services, one will always to have to cold call for new business.

Below are some proven tips and suggestions that will both help your cold calling be more productive and remove any fear that you may have about cold calling.

Adjust Your Mindset

Donâ€™t approach cold calling with the goal of â€œmaking a saleâ€ or â€œlanding a meeting.â€ If you do, you are destined to fail and you will be in constant objection-handling mode.

Besides, you donâ€™t want to be a transactional vendor.

Closing Job Orders: Project Management 101

Dan Fisher on Apr. 3, 2009

In the IT staffing world, project management is often a popular topic of discussion. Some of the key principles of effective project management include defining the customer requirements, project deliverables, timelines and milestones, and creating a communication plan.

To use the waterfall methodology, we donâ€™t proceed to the next step or phase of the project until the current one is complete. These same principles apply to closing a job order or managing the sales cycle.

Let me explain.

Are You Bird Dogging?

Dan Fisher on Mar. 23, 2009

When does the sales cycle start and end in the staffing industry?

Seems like an easy and straight- forward question, but ask 10 different industry professionals and youâ€™re likely to get 10 different answers. My experience is that many staffing organizations and sales professionals think once the job requirement comes in and sales â€œhands over the orderâ€ to the recruiting team, the sales cycle ends. I couldnâ€™t disagree more.

Many staffing and professional services organizations deploy this philosophy as their customer-service model. I like to call it the â€œbird dogâ€ sales strategy or â€œbird dogging.â€

What this means is the sales representative goes out and finds job orders and brings them back for recruiting to work on and fill. Once recruiting has the job order(s) itâ€™s the sales representativeâ€™s responsibility to go find additional job orders and let the recruiting team fill the existing order(s). This strategy is akin to a hunter who shoots a duck. The hunting dog fetches the duck in the field and brings it back to his master. After fetching and retrieving the duck, the dog runs back into the field to fetch the next duck.

Staffing organizations like to deploy this service model because they want to keep their sales people focused exclusively on prospecting for new business (or fetching ducks). Prospecting for new business is critical to success, but this is a poor strategy.