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Straight Talk for the Recruiting Profession


Articles tagged 'ITstaffing'

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How to Read an Industry Publication

by on Feb. 12, 2009


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Odd title for an article, huh? You may be wondering, “How exactly does this tie into sales and more specifically, selling IT professional services?” You would be surprised!

If you are like most recruiting professionals, you read industry publications like The Fordyce Letter to stay on top of trends, challenges, and news. And if you are a top-performing sales professional, you read what your customers read to stay connected with the events taking place in their world.

If you are not currently doing this, then I strongly encourage you to quickly adopt this exercise into your daily or weekly routine. The ability to talk intelligently about the events, pressing business issues, challenges, and industry drivers taking place in your customer’s industry and/or product space is one sure way to build credibility. And we all need credibility in order to sell value.

Let’s talk for a moment about reading the industry publications that your customers are reading and how to leverage that information to differentiate yourself from the competition and create sales opportunities.

For sales and recruiting professionals in the IT staffing and consulting space, industry publications could include ComputerWorld, NetworkWorld, CIO Magazine, or eWeek, among many others.

When reading these publications, keep in mind that not every article is going to blow you away with excitement as if you are about to hang-glide off an ocean-side cliff. In fact, you may find some of the articles boring. You may not even fully understand what the article is talking about.

But trust me on this, read them and keep reading them, because over time, it will start to make sense. You will eventually be able to connect all of the dots and make sense out of both the business issues your clients are trying to solve and the complex technology solutions they are trying to deploy as the solution.

Why is that so important? As an IT recruiter, you need credibility to attract the top consultants.

“Best-in-class” consultants don’t work with rookie recruiters and they can spot them a mile away.

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How-To

Strategic, Tactical Sales Planning for the New Year

by on Dec. 23, 2008


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  • How do you plan for the new year?
  • How do you intend to identify new accounts and decide what market segments to pursue?
  • How do you develop your strategy and underlying tactics to ensure you hit your goals in the upcoming year?

These are great questions that require time and attention, but when? For those of you who are new to working in the IT professional services industry, you’re probably now learning that business slow downs during the holidays.

For you veterans out there, this is nothing new.

With new sales order activity coming to a halt and active orders stalling, what is one to do with all this down time? How about build a recession-proof sales plan for 2009? From my experience in selling IT staffing and consulting, I always found that a strong Q1 always set the tone for the remainder of the year.

First, a few thoughts on developing your high-level sales strategy:

  • Chances are whatever you are thinking of doing, your competitors are, too. Think out of the box. Try something new and go in a new direction.
  • Most IT staffing companies try to be all things to everyone. They often lack the discipline to “walk away” from a potential sales order. Pick a market segment or niche to pursue and commit to it. Don’t stray, because you need to build your niche and your brand within that niche. Besides, this allows recruiting to build expertise in chosen areas rather than recruiting anything and everything.
  • Make sure sales and delivery (recruiting) are aligned. You are only as good as your delivery team. Everyone needs to buy into the strategy.
  • What needs exist in the marketplace that are going unmet? Figure out how you can meet them.
  • Have you interviewed your current customers recently to understand what they like about you and your service offering? Do you understand how your consultants are impacting their business? Get your customers’ input; you will be surprised with what they have to offer. You can build a strategy around this.
  • Build a case-study library (from your client interviews). This will help you build your brand in your niche and sell more effectively.
  • Don’t just understand what type of people (skills/titles) CIOs are looking to hire in 2009 and what technologies they intend on deploying, find out why. This will help you move up the customer value chain.
  • Read business and personal finance magazines such as Kiplinger’s, Money, Fortune, and Forbes. These magazines are loaded every month with advice from the world’s best investment and portfolio managers. They will open your eyes to industries and prospective accounts you have never thought of and provide you with the insight to devise specific strategy for selling into each company they recommend.
  • Cross-sell into new areas within your existing accounts. Chances are, even with your best accounts (unless it’s a very small company) you don’t have 100% market share in that account. Work to increase your footprint within your existing customer accounts.

Developing Your Tactical Sales Plan

A very common exercise (and one that I love) in the field of sales is that of “backing in” to your number. What this means is understanding exactly what and how much activity is required to hit your goal.

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