Lead Generation Archives - Superfast Recruitment

Today, we’re talking about BD, Why it’s not working the way it was, and, of course, logically, some of the things you could be doing about it now.

Before I get into that, if you’re new here, welcome; this is episode 416 of our podcast and blog post, so there are another 415 you can search through to find what you are looking for.

You can search for any topic related to recruitment marketing, which will help you because it will bring up all the different posts and podcasts we have created.

If lead gen is at the top of your mind, watch one of our on-demand trainings. There is one particular training around lead generation you can watch that is about an hour long.

If you go to superfastrecruitment.co.uk/lgt, which stands for lead generation triad, you will be taken to a web page. Enter your name and email address, and it will be sent to you.

Today, let’s talk about BD and why it’s possibly feeling harder than it has been for some time.

The first thing to consider is that you’ve probably lost a lot of momentum over the last few years. I have mentioned this several times, and it’s well worth saying it again.

Remember, the start of this decade has been a bit weird. As I’m recording this, we’re about to move to the anniversary of Lockdown day in the UK when everything stopped.

If you think about it, many of you were doing BD in 2019, and then the market went a bit crazy, and then later in 2020, the market exploded. Recruiters had some of the best years ever, and consequently, many smaller companies stopped their BD process if they had one.

Then 2023 arrived, and suddenly, things started to change as the UK moved into a ‘soft’ recession, as our PM likes to call it

You’ll notice that you probably have not done much BD for some people for years.

As we all know, you lose momentum if you aren’t doing something consistently.

You start to forget what is involved and what level of input is needed, and therefore, you need to rebuild that momentum if you want anything to happen.

Momentum comes through action.

The more you do, the better you get, and the more you build up your skills. That is a factor to remember that the reason your BD probably isn’t working is you need to do more of it.

Many recruitment startups have entered the market; they are fired up, active and doing BD as well.

They are tech-savvy and get the power of marketing, content, and reaching out to people.

They appreciate that the market has changed and that you must do much more.

There’s a critical mass in doing more and building momentum.

Making four or five LinkedIn connection requests daily doesn’t help; You need to do more.

To start building momentum, go to the maximum LinkedIn will allow. For instance, you need to do more reachouts because if you don’t, momentum won’t build, and you won’t be able to have the conversations you want.

The other thing that’s happened and why BD probably isn’t working quite the same way is that many people are still fishing in the same pond they have had for years.

Yet the pond and the market have changed, and the people you want to work with differ.

If you keep fishing in the same drier pond than ever, it will not work.

If you’re doing BD, and all your current connections are not recruiting, you need to find some new ones.

This is a mental shift to get your head around.

The good news is you need to build a system around it, and it is a simple process; go and watch our lead gen triad system, which gives the basic steps here.

Many of you listening to this are probably experienced business owners. You’re used to picking up the phone, and you may have a team of consultants that only want to email people; They don’t want to use different approaches.

Fact: Using multiple approaches is what you need to do now.

It’s important to ensure you create your daily outreach process and practice and use a multimedia and multichannel approach.

You are picking up the phone and speaking to people. You are sending texts. You are sending messages on LinkedIn, Messenger, or WhatsApp that you’re doing all these different things.

You’re sending video, you’re sending voice notes, you’re doing all of this different approach to people to get people’s attention.

Map this into a process you and your team consistently implement that will work for you.

The next thing that follows this is that your skills will be rusty if you haven’t done something for a while.

Especially if you haven’t done any selling for a while, go in and do the sales-heavy pitch, which doesn’t work in the same way.

We’re much more connected now. People want to get that you understand what’s going on for them.

It may be that your skills, in the words of Stephen Covey, you need to sharpen the saw.

I know people might scream at the thought of that, and over the years, whenever I’ve done roleplay practice, I always get better.

Carry out your skill audit; are you as good as I used to be?

Do I need more practice?

What could you do differently?

I want to mention some critical things in today’s market.

Suppose you send an email or a message through LinkedIn. The first thing the recipient is going to do is check you out.

They will look at your LinkedIn profile to see if it’s that particular medium, Google you and see what they can find, or visit your website.

Many people have forgotten that this happens; you only need to check your profile views to see that what I am saying is true.

And they judge who you are and how you can help them.

If you are one of the recruiters who doesn’t use content marketing, you’re not posting consistently and regularly on LinkedIn with value-added content.

If your website looks like a ghost town, there’s nothing on there and no blogs.

Then, you won’t make the impact you hope to make in front of your market.

If somebody comes across you on LinkedIn, they come across you on your website. You look outdated, and you’ve not got anything there that communicates your value or your level of expertise; people will then move to the next person because there are plenty of people out there with content with a website that communicates value.

Though that’s hard to swallow, it’s true because we judge people by what we see and hear about them.

That could be happening to you.

The good news is, of course, that you can alter that quite easily.

The final thing is people give up too easily.

It is a tough market.

It’s at times like these that you need to do more, and you need not give up.

And please don’t join the pity party with everyone else saying, “Oh, it’s a terrible time. I haven’t had a new job in weeks.”

Well, maybe you are having it rough.

This means you need to have a word with yourself.

If you are having a terrible time, what can you do about it?

How can you take control of this yourself?

BD isn’t hard, though it does take work.

In today’s market, with all the software we have and all the people available, you can even buy a database of people cost-effectively, which is easier than it used to be.

You’ve got tools like Sales Navigator; you can reach out to people.

You need to do more of it more consistently; It’s not all doom and gloom.

Yes, it’s a bit of a tough market, but dial in your BD process because it works and will build your pipeline.

The more you sit and complain about it, it’s not going to help you.

You’ll stay where you are and end up further away from where you want to be. You must accept the situation, move on, and start doing things differently.

I hope I’ve given you a few ideas here.

Maybe it has made you realise why things aren’t working as they were and that now is the time to change.

Thanks

Denise

As a member of Superfast Circle, we support you in getting your lead generation on point so it works for you. We provide all the training and content you need; if you want to find out more, book a call with us here.

The post Why Your BD Isn’t Working Like It Used To appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

As we move towards the last quarter of the year and have that goal of ending the year strong, our minds turn to lead generation.

We all want to end one year and start the next with a string pipeline.

I was looking at some data from Neil Carberry at Rec the other day about how jobs and clients have gone up and down phenomenally over the last two or three years. We bounced out of COVID, and then the last few months, and I think particularly in 2023, it’s been more of a challenge for people to bring on board clients.

That’s why ensuring you have a committed and regular outreach strategy on LinkedIn for your clients is always good.

Let’s talk about your daily practice on LinkedIn and what will work for you. I’m not going to talk about sourcing and reaching out to candidates, though this is the same process you can use.

Our focus today is client acquisition.

We have developed our process for this, called the three R process.

The first part of the process is responding, the second is reaching out, and the third is resharing value. I’m going to go into each of these in turn.

We have our KPIs, Sharon and I, for what we do on LinkedIn because we know when we first started in business, we’d forgotten that you need to do a bit more lead generation than you ever thought you would need. We implement several strategies consistently now, and it helps to fill our pipeline.

Let’s talk about the first R, which is responding. Now, there’s a clue as to why we’re called Superfast, and it’s been the bane of my life.

I’m just one of these people that I love to respond to people, not necessarily immediately, but as soon as possible thereafter.

It frustrates some of my friends that, “Why is it you are always the first one to respond?” I don’t know what it is, and I have this thing that I love to respond fast.

I think it’s the same for a lot of people. One of the first things I do when I go onto LinkedIn is responding to any messages that I have had in my inbox, even if it’s saying, “No, we’re not interested,” I will always make a response because as business leaders we are all salespeople at heart. I have respect for all salespeople out there.

Then, I comment, like, and reshare posts of the ideal clients we want to work with. We use Sales Navigator, so we know when some of our prospective leads and clients have shared posts, it’s very easy to go in, comment, like, and get on their radar.

I like to always respond to people and keep the conversation going. If I’ve been in a conversation with somebody, so say I’ve reached out to somebody I’m going to talk about next, then I like to ensure that I’m nudging people along because we can all get busy.

If I’ve sent a note to say, “Hey, do you fancy jumping on a call? Can I show you how we’ve helped this particular client of ours or this particular client?” Then, I like to nudge people to have people interested. Are they not interested, or if they’re not, maybe we can schedule a call later in the year.

That’s the big thing about responding and not responding because some people avoid responding, and you lose so much. Now, when I talked about responding, comments, likes, and shares, we have target companies we would love to work with in the recruitment sector.

We have our ideal avatars: companies that are independents, solos, small micro-businesses, or smaller SMEs. That’s where we know what we do can add the most value, so we target those people. Those are the people we have in our line of fire in the nicest possible way. If we’re connected to people, then I’m going to go and like their content, I’m going to share it, I’m going to do all of the things so that I am front of mind. That’s the first thing that I do.

The second thing is we reach out.

Fact: You cannot keep fishing in the same pond if you want more clients. You need to continually build your connections so your connections get to know, like, and trust you. Then, when they know, like, and trust you, you stand a sporting chance at some point of money changing hands.

What we do is we have a reach-out process, and we send invitations.

We have a target of how many invites we will send out each day/week and keep within LinkedIn’s remit on that, and we do pretty well in hitting our target.

It’s part of our process. What we also do is reconnect. If you went through your LinkedIn connection, and I know some people have 10,000 connections on LinkedIn, some of whom they haven’t connected with in ages, we reach back out and start a conversation again with that individual.

Maybe we’ve gone off their radar, perhaps they’ve gone off our radar, maybe they’re in a different position now, and they are ready to work with us, and we won’t know that unless we reconnect with them.

We’re reaching out, reconnecting, looking for new clients, and making offers about who we are, what we do, and how we might help them.

This doesn’t take much time; I allocate 60-minute time slots daily.

The next thing we do is reshare value. For potential new clients to have a relationship with you, they need to know, like, and trust you; this is where and why content marketing works.

Now, earlier in September, we ran a webinar for the NPAWorldwide Recruitment Network, and the topic was becoming unstoppable on social media, and we shared some of these concepts.

We shared multiple things that you can do when resharing value. There are three content themes to focus on, but let me give you some ideas about it anyway.

It’s about sharing value to demonstrate your expertise and that you are the recruiter of choice that can help them.

The types of things you can share, blog posts, podcasts, personal branding posts, company branding posts, personal quotes, blog posts, and newsletters, can help position you as a recruiter of choice; you don’t have to overcomplicate things.

When you do this, as you start reaching out to people, you’re going to get back on somebody’s radar. When you’re back on somebody’s radar, they will be searching for you.

Then, if they start searching for you and see that you’re sharing great content on LinkedIn, you’re resharing their content, which will elevate you in their eyes, and you’ll start being front of mind.

These strategies are critical when you’re thinking about BD.

You are responding to people, reaching out to people, and then, of course, resharing content. You’re demonstrating who you are and how you can help them.

It is a straightforward, practical process that you can do every day that works.

Thanks

Denise

As part of your Superfast Circle Membership, we even provide you with messages and content you can use as part of your LinkedIn outreach process. If you want to have a quick demo call on how this can work for you, book a call here.

The post Recruitment Marketing: Your Daily Client Marketing on LinkedIn appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

What are we all expecting to happen to our business in 2023? I know everyone’s talking about the R-word, and maybe you are going into this year with some uncertainty with everything else that’s happening.

That is why I wanted to kick off this year’s podcast with one of the key factors and focus that we all have when it comes to our business, generating leads.

Now, it’s very trendy at the moment, as I mentioned in the intro, for marketers to confuse people!

As marketers, we like our jargon words, and some of you, you will have seen the conversation about demand generation versus lead generation and how we always have to start with demand generation first, and then we move into lead generation.

Do you know what?

Certain members of my profession like to confuse people

I want to let you into a secret; It’s all fundamentally the same.

The premise of marketing is to generate demand for our service; that is its role.

To create demand for our recruiting service, we start with creating awareness among people that have a recruiting or career problem and don’t know who we are and how we can help them.

We then build on this as they enter our marketing funnel; you can find out more about marketing funnels for recruiters here in a previous post I wrote and recorded.

Topline: We are taking someone from unaware to aware consideration and then decision to work with us.

Please do not get yourself confused about, oh, well, is it demand generation? Is it lead generation? At the end of the day, you want people engaging with your business, leads you can talk to, and then you can convert.

I was talking to somebody about recording this podcast the other day actually and what I was going to do, and they suggested that you might want to do that as a webinar, Denise. This is one of our clients.

I want to give you some fundamentals of how lead generation works in today’s market; so you can kick off your activities in the right way this year.

I want to share with you the recruitment lead generation triad, which works especially well in today’s market. Now, some of you listen to this when you’re at the gym when you are walking the dog, or your drive to work; please do not write if you are in a car, go back to this and listen to it later!

Grab an A4 sheet of paper and draw a triangle.

At the top of the triangle, where the pointy bit is, I want you to put;

I am going to talk about each of these elements.

Now, when it comes to lead generation, these are the three areas of focus that you need to consider this year because being a visible brand in the market is becoming critical, and that is where your content machine comes in. I’m going to talk about that in a second.

No matter who you are or where you are, I am sure you have some connections.

We were talking to one of our new clients this morning on one of our Superfast Circle calls, and he was talking about the fact that he’s actually got a CRM database with 40,000 plus candidates.

This is a clean database he can leverage, which currently he isn’t!

I suspect you have a database of connections, both candidates and clients; you aren’t leveraging.

Then the other thing that a lot of people I know are not as keen on doing, however, if you want to grow and scale your business, is cold outreach.

This is where the cold outreach, the current connections, and the content machine all work together because as you focus on each of these areas, I’m going to explain a little bit more about each one in turn, that makes a massive difference to you.

Let’s start with the top of the triangle, with your content machine and getting attention in your market.

I was chatting with a client of ours the other day, and I was explaining the fact that if people can’t see you, you cannot sell to them. You have to be visible in front of your clients and in front of your candidates consistently.

Over Christmas, I sent a series of videos out on social media. One of them was Sharon. I made her go outside and record this video the week when it was something like -9 in the UK!

She was sharing our marketing audit checklist. She told people, “Look if you want a copy of this, drop a note in the comment box. Somebody did that, who’d been watching our videos. I sent him the checklist, and he became a client less than ten days later.

To be transparent, a conversion doesn’t always happen as fast as this, though you might be surprised how fast content can work for you.

Now, if we hadn’t taken that time to share that content on LinkedIn, on our social channels, in our emails, that person, that individual, that company would not be working with us.

That is the beauty of having a brand that is out online because what it will do is help you with your cold outreach, and it also helps you with those people that are already in your sphere of influence. They’re already on your database, and they’re already a connection on LinkedIn by creating content that is going out there that makes a massive difference to them because, suddenly, you are on their radar again.

With our Superfast Circle clients, one of the first wins they get is because they are posting on social media in the way we suggest, and then their past candidates and clients get in contact with them again. They say, “Oh, I see you’re on social media. I’ve got a role. I’ve got this, or can you help me with this job.” All of those different things around content will help you.

Now your content machine is very easy to set up. This is something that we help people in Superfast Circle implement. This is about the emails that you send. This is about what you post on social media. It might be about videos that you create. It might be about added resources and reports that you provide.

If people aren’t seeing you around, people don’t know who you are, that cold call you make, that cold outreach doesn’t have the same impact.

Fact: That you aren’t around, and people aren’t seeing you, your database will have forgotten about you if you are not using content to leverage your relationships with them, so that is number one, you must commit to building a content machine for your recruitment business.

Now, the next thing is using the connections that you already have. These may be connections in your database. I suggest that your CRM is always the best place to start because people there are more connected to you.

Then, of course, you’ve got your LinkedIn connections, and then, you’ve got people that may be on different social platforms that you’re connected to, on Instagram or on messenger or whatever that might be.

Mic drop moment

It is easier to sell to someone who already knows you. The marketing jargon for this is low-hanging fruit or gold around your feet.

These people are probably currently on your database and who you are not communicating with consistently. This is where you are really losing out because if you’ve got a database of people, then you can nurture those people; you can start to pull them through the funnel from being originally aware of you to be on your database to thinking, “Hang on a minute here, maybe we should be working with people.”

Of course, these current connections are probably people that you have placed, people that you currently work with, who are also a great vehicle to get referrals from.

The final part of the triad is cold outreach.

Now, when you are getting referrals from people or talking about you to others about the great experience they’ve had with you, and you’ve got your content machine, cold outreach will impact your business.

I know lots of us don’t like doing it; However, this strategy works.

Sara Blakely is the CEO of Spanx. In 2012 she became the world’s youngest female self-made billionaire.

In a New Your Times article, she shared that one of her biggest clients was Nordstrom, and she got Nordstrom through a cold call that she herself made.

Cold outreach works as recruiters, you know this, and though we all want more inbound leads mastering cold outreach will elevate your reach and the success you rightly deserve.

The good news is there are many ways to use a cold outreach strategy when your content machine supports you.

The first strategy is cold emailing; we share more on this topic in a post I wrote on how to use cold emailing to generate recruitment leads here.

You can send out a cold email; you can still do that in the UK because if you send it to a business-to-business email, particularly for clients, that will work for you.

You can do cold outreach on LinkedIn. There are so many different ways that you can do that. You can do that through direct messaging and paid traffic which is a whole strategy in itself.

Do you know what? You can still do cold calling. Surprisingly, people will still answer their telephone when you ring them, and they will also answer text.

There are so many ways you can do cold outreach that works. Is it harder? Yes, it is.

You need to be consistent and give it longer, but honestly, I don’t know where we would be without doing cold outreach.

Several things for you to consider here. I think almost certainly I’m going to do a webinar on this. Keep tuned because I will let you know when it’s available.

Go back to the triad we shared earlier and review which of the three points you have in place.

You’ve got connections at the bottom left-hand side, right-hand side, cold outreach, and at the top, your content machine.

Start to work consistently on each of those elements; your lead generation and conversion will change completely this year.

Thanks

Denise

With our members of Superfast Circle, we give them a relevant lead generation strategy for their sector, including all the content and campaigns to use in each part of the triad. Book a call with us here if you want to find out how this will work for you.

The post How To Generate Leads For Your Recruitment Business This Year appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Well, hi there everyone, this is Denise Oyston from Superfast Recruitment and today, I want to talk about consistent lead flow. 

I’ll go through some groundwork that you might need to do, some systems that you might want to start considering and thinking about as you develop your lead flow strategy for the rest of this year. 

Now, the first thing I want to talk about is messaging, and with anything that you get dialled in and anything that’s working, there is some groundwork involved. The messages that you were using to communicate your service in January and February are probably no longer going to work because everyone else is in a really different situation.  

I know we are, I know our clients are, so I’m suspecting that your clients are too.  

You know, imagine if you’ve had to make people redundant, if you’ve lost half your business overnight, if you’ve got X number of people on furlough and you’re wondering about who do I bring back? Do I really want to bring that person back? What am I now going to do?  

I wish I had an A and a B rather than the X and Y that I’ve got.  

Because we’ve all been reflecting, haven’t we, about our business and where we want to take it next – so your clients will have done that as well.  

The easiest thing to do – get on the phone, speak to them, talk to them and find out what exactly is going on for them. And that way, you’ll be able to answer those questions, you’ll be able to dial those messages in, as you then start to promote and move forward.  

The second thing is communicating your value.  

Now, I was talking to one of our clients the other day, who was talking to their clients, who had something like 500 job applications for a particular position.  

And though your clients may think they can sit down and sift through CV’s while they’re watching the latest episode of “Holby City” or whatever at night on the TV, they can’t.  

And now more than ever, it’s imperative that you communicate the value of what you do. 

And for some of you, this may be something you’ve not done, you know, at a deeper level for absolutely years, because you’ve not had to. Well, now you will need to.  

So you need to think about your offer and how you communicate it. The third thing is you need to be more visible.  

When people are looking for new players in the market, they’re looking for new people to work with. One of the first places they will go and look is obviously Google, and they will look on social media. 

So you need to make sure that whatever you are putting out there is notched up a few levels when it comes to volume because you need to be everywhere.  

People need to be able to find you, and you need to be able to communicate.  

If you’re not au fait with being on social media in a way that works, we’ve got a report that you can go and grab, just go to our website /smm.  

So, that’s SuperFastRecruitment.co.uk/smm, and you can download this report. 

We’ve actually laid out a whole load of things that you could do when it comes to social.  

So you need to be more visible.  

The next thing is you need to have some credibility pieces. 

Those credibility pieces are basically a website that’s functioning.  

Also, you need to have some case studies there as well, and some testimonials, that you are sharing on social media too. Because people, if they are moving suppliers, want some validation.  

So those are four things. 

And the fifth thing is, yes, it’s picking up the phone, and also cold emailing.  

Email still provides one of the highest ROIs of any marketing strategy that you can implement, and so we strongly suggest this. We’re getting a lot of positivity around cold emailing from our clients, and then you can pick up the phone and follow this up.  

So, that’s five things for you to start with straight away; your messaging, communicating your value, being everywhere, thinking about your case studies and also starting on cold emailing. 

I’ll probably do a deeper dive into all of these over the next few videos for you, but those are some areas to get started now.  

For more information about lead generation, plus all aspects of marketing your recruitment business, click here to read our latest blog posts, or head to our downloads page here to get your hands on our free recruitment marketing guides.   

So this is Denise from Super Fast Recruitment saying, bye for now. 

The post How to Generate Consistent Lead Flow appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

This is a transcription from a podcast and video new created on developing your Avatar. Excuse and rogue typing errors!

Today I want to talk about one of the critical areas that people often forget about when it comes to their marketing. And that is identifying your ideal clients, your ideal customer.

It could be a client; it could be a candidate. As you’re scaling, you’ll be wanting to identify your ideal consultant as well.

That’s what I want to talk about because it’s important that you put these strong foundations in place to really leverage and get that ROI that you really want to get from your marketing.

In this masterclass, I want to talk about three key areas when you start to build a profile of who your ideal customer is. I’m also joined on this particular class by the Superfast Staffy who’s in the background. If you do hear any slight snoring or any noises, that’s who it is!

Back to marketing, though. The three areas that we’re going to talk about today are demographics, psychographics, and then emotional drivers. I want to give you some examples of these emotional drivers because there are 40 to look out for and I am going to share some examples of them.

Let’s start, though, with demographics because when I’m talking to business owners and sometimes marketers, and we talk about who are you targeting? who do you want to get your marketing in front of? Sometimes the conversation is quite big picture, and it might be an organisation of a certain size.

It could be corporate, it could be any size of SME, but really we want to get our marketing in front of an individual inside that business. You know, that could be an MD, an HR director, it could be an operations director; you will know the individuals and the certain rules that are key for you engaging with them so that you can sell your services and know who will commission your services.

When it comes to demographics, we’re thinking about an individual. They could be in a certain age range; they may well have a certain level of education. Also, you’d be looking for someone with a certain kind of business experience. It could be someone in the early stage of their career, or it could be a very experienced person.

Think about all those different elements. Think also about perhaps where this individual lives, what are some of their interests and what are the additional qualifications, perhaps, that they need to have?

Start to build up a general practical profile of this person. Now, psychographics is where we start to go deeper.

Demographics will be all the surface level elements that you want to consider, and psychographics is where we start to get underneath the skin of this particular individual that you’ve chosen.

Of course, it’s always good to look back at your historical data of the clients that you’ve worked with. The ones that you’ve had successful long-term relationships with – those that are in organisations that are growing – because they will give you some really great pointers as well when it comes to both demographics and also the psychographics.

Here, we’re talking about motivations. What’s important to people? What are the problems and challenges that these individuals have as they’re aspiring to achieve some of the goals that they’ve set for themselves, both personally and as a business?

It’s also thinking about some of the behavioural patterns that these individuals have. You might realise that you have a lot of success with individuals who are very strategic. It might be, in contrast, that you work really well with people who are very detailed and processed.

Sometimes, people are motivated towards achieving things such as success in the future, while other individuals are motivated by avoiding certain things. These are examples of what we call ‘towards and away from’ motivational patterns.

Sometimes it might be that you have a lot of clients who are very proactive, others may be slightly more reactive, and you might decide that you want to have a balance of both kinds of clients.

Now, the third area is what we call emotional drivers. What’s interesting here, is we’re going down from level one and level two to a deeper level, in level three. Some of the psychographics will touch on motivations; but in level three, I want to go even deeper.

Now, there are four categories that we can think of around emotional drivers. Bear with me now. I’m going to give you some examples in each of these areas and let’s just start by thinking about people who want to gain something.

This is a driver that will look into acquiring something. Here, it might be ‘we want to gain popularity’, ‘we want our brand to gain popularity in the marketplace’. It might be that ‘we want to gain pride and recognition’ that could be achieved through clients testimonials and case studies. It could also be achieved through awards. Something else might be personal prestige.

Your ideal customer may be, let’s say, a director in an organisation and they know if they work with a real specialist recruiter like your organisation, they can recruit some of the best talent in the market.

Now, if they do that, those individuals will add value and contribute to the organisation.

The knock-on effect is that your ideal customer then gets recognised within their business as being somebody who is able to bring in and identify real high-quality talent that’s adding massive value to the business and is helping them take the business onto the next level. There are a variety of different things that we’re all looking to gain. It could be self-confidence, time; it could be improved appearance, it could be money, it could be advancement.

Think about in contrast rather than gaining, sometimes people want to save something. Now here, time is going to be a really important thing, isn’t it?

When you think about your ideal clients, everybody today is spinning so many plates. We generally lose count in recruitment. But, say, for an HR director, this is only a small element of everything that they do. And so, if they can collaborate and work with a fantastic recruitment partner, then what will happen is you will help save them time, and they can invest time in other areas of their particular role.

Saving time is going to be a really important thing. Let me give you some other examples, though.

Risks; perhaps saving some risks. Working and collaborating with a specialist recruiter who has incredibly detailed processes reduces the risk to your prospective clients of making an unfortunate recruitment mistake. The investment that they make actually saves them money in the long-term.

Let’s come on to number three, though. Now, an example here is if you ask somebody what is important to you about the job that you do and they say, “Well, I want to be a successful HR director. I want to be remembered as the HR director that really supported this business as a business partner through to its next level of growth.” Or it could be, “I want to be proud of the contribution that I’m making within my organisation.”

Think about some of the clients that are good for your business that you currently work with, that you’ve got a long-term relationship with. What are some of the things that they’ve talked about that they want, and that they want to be when you’ve had conversations with them?

Finally, what is it that they want? Now, bear with me because I can’t remember 40 off this list, but I want to be accurate when I’m sharing them with you.

People want to be able to express their personalities. They want to improve themselves.

If you’re thinking about, whether it’s an MD, whether it’s someone going into their first finance director’s role, for example, you might decide that the kind of individual that your business most closely aligns to is an individual who is constantly looking at pushing the boundaries, learning; they’ve got a real growth mindset.

You know that because  your organisation values that growth mindset, that you most closely align with individuals that you can work with that share that. Think about what do these individuals want?

That question that I mentioned, what is important to you about what you want from a recruitment partner? What is important to you about what you want to be in the role that you currently have?

You can use these questions in each of these particular categories. Then it’s about listening for those gems that people share. I think this is worth having conversations with the organisations and the individuals that you currently work with, to tease out as much criteria as you can. Then look at what are the commonalities and can you use those commonalities, or more importantly, how can you use those commonalities to then build this information into your value proposition, your marketing, more generally in terms of your messages, your content?

So that when you’re marketing out, your marketing is calling out. It’s known as a dog whistle. You’re calling out to a specific individual, and to anybody else your marketing justs appear as noise. It won’t appear as noise, though, to the individuals who you specifically want to gain certain things and perhaps they want certain things.

This is an exercise that I’d really encourage everybody to do.

You might say, “Sharon, we’re sorted. We’ve already got our avatars”. That’s fantastic. Now it is fantastic. I stand by that statement, and the reality is that the markets are constantly changing. Our industry’s constantly changing.

What individuals, what your ideal customers – be that client or candidate – are looking for, that may well be evolving as well. Whenever you did this exercise, it’s good to do a couple of things. One is to go back, validate the persona that you’ve got, the avatar that you’ve built up, does it still stand and is it valid today? If not, how can that evolve?

Because the more criteria you can build in, the richer you can make your profile, the more effective your marketing will be as you start to market and message out to these individuals.

I think it’s an exercise that is worth checking in with and reviewing. If I think about mine and Denise’s journey over the last of 12, 15 years, our avatar has just constantly evolved, and it’s evolved because our business model and the services that we provide has evolved over time and what people want in the market has evolved as well.

Marketing itself, online marketing, the strategies that we’re using today, are different and on a different level to what we were using ten years ago. So each year, it’s like we get deeper and deeper knowledge and more clarity about the individuals in the organisations that we know we can add massive value to, to support them, to take their business onto the next level.

Take the time, invest some time, validate where you’re at or actually create yourself a really fresh new avatar that will make the difference to your marketing.

If you enjoyed this podcast and you are ready to take your recruitment marketing to the next level, then check out Superfast Circle. In our Superfast Circle Programme, we are with you every single step of the way as you scale and grow your marketing.

You get weekly calls with us, you get a fully comprehensive training programme online that you can watch and listen anywhere you are in the world. We have events; we have marketing collateral that’s provided for you every single month.

If you want to find out more, then head over to www.superfastrecruitment.co.uk/sfc and read what’s there. Watch the testimonial videos, watch the case studies, and then book your demonstration call with one of us, and we look forward to seeing you on the other side.

Thanks

Denise and Sharon

The post Recruitment Marketing -Developing Your Candidate and Client Avatars appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

This is Sharon Newey from Superfast Recruitment and in the last couple of videos, I’ve been talking about the importance of building a sales pipeline of consistent client and candidate leads.

And of course, it is massively important if you want to smash those targets this year. What we need to remember though, is, as salespeople, that as your consultants start to work that pipeline, you need to think about follow-up. Because the Sales Executive Association in America published some data that many of you will have come across; some of which you’ll remember and maybe other figures that you’ll have forgotten.

Did you remember that 48% of salespeople – and this is going to be inclusive of your consultants – never follow up a lead. That’s 48% never follow up, which is quite staggering, isn’t it?

So think about it: you, as a business owner, have invested an awful lot of money building different ways of feeding that pipeline for your recruitment consultants with both clients and candidates, and yet they’re being lost quite quickly because so many people don’t follow-up.

Now, only 2% of sales are made on the first call or the first contact, which is so tiny, isn’t it? So, what we need to remember, as salespeople, is that we need to really work that pipeline and follow all these individuals up, time and time again.

Interestingly, 12% of your consultants will be following contacts and leads up to three times, okay?

The thing to remember though is if we are going to smash targets this year, 82% of those sales and conversions are going to come between five and 12 points of contact. Now, there’s also some data that says 80% of sales, are going to come between five and 12 points of contact.

But yet, the most recent data does suggest that if, let’s say, the leads are completely cold, we can be looking at 30 plus contacts.

You’re probably wondering, “How on earth are we going to do that?”

Well, think about all the different mediums that we’ve got and the various ways we can communicate with people today. So yes, we can pick-up the phone, that’s the obvious one, although there does seem to be some phone reluctance and I think we need to get over that.

We also need to blend in things like WhatsApp Messenger, all different ways that we can text message people; we can do emails, of course, can’t we?

Now, think about some of the video software that you guys are using for interviewing candidates and sharing those interviews with clients to speed up your recruiting process. How about using some of those video platforms for sending prospects, clients and candidates some sales or follow-up videos?

How about getting back to some traditional methods? Picking up a pen, picking up a card or a note, and writing a client or a candidate a personal note? Nowadays, when you receive something through the letterbox, and it’s not your birthday, and it’s not Christmas; how good is it to receive something that’s handwritten?

It stands out, doesn’t it?

It’s something that I’ve been doing a lot and one of our sales team, Andy, he’s been doing this too. And we’ve had some incredibly positive feedback from people because it is different and it helps you to stand out.

So there are lots of different ways that you can blend, whether you’ve got 12 or 30 points of contact, using all these different mediums, to keep following people up. Add into that some reports that you might have and you could drip-feed those at different points in your follow-up cycle as well.

The important thing is, if you’re going to invest all that time and trouble in building a pipeline, please also invest a little bit more time building up what your follow-up process is, so your consultants know exactly what they can be doing to make sure that you convert those people in your sales pipeline.

That’s Sharon Newey from Superfast Recruitment.

P.S. would you like help with your marketing strategy this year? Then get in contact here.

The post Why Follow Up Will Be Critical For Recruitment Companies This Year appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Hi, everyone, this is Sharon Newey from Superfast Recruitment, and today I want to talk to you about how my goal of drinking more water relates to you and your recruitment business, filling your sales pipeline.

Last week, I talked about everybody’s busy planning and looking at how are they going to achieve their goals this year. And the rate-limiting factor to any recruitment business achieving their financial targets will be how efficient and effective you are as a business, filling your sales pipeline with that consistent flow of clients and candidates.

For those of you who are mega gym buddies, and I know there are many of you out there, you might scoff at what I’m about to say, but one of my personal goals this year is about drinking one and a half litres of water. And I know for many of you, you’ll be thinking, “That is nothing.”

Trust me. For me, it’s a massive goal.

I’d rather have a mug of hot water than this cold one. But it does relate, this glass of water, to you, your business, and your sales pipeline.

Because if I take a sip of this water, it’s going to go down, isn’t it? Now think of my glass of water as your client and candidate pipeline, your sales pipeline. Because I can fill my glass of water up, can’t I? I can put more water in and I can keep drinking it. If I keep drinking my glass of water, though, and I don’t keep topping it up, I am not going to hit my one and a half litres a day because I know how many of those glasses I need to drink. And it’s quite a few.

Think about your sales pipeline, then. If you fill your pipeline and put that energy and effort in and then you have your consultant team, working that pipeline, working those leads, converting them, getting those jobs filled, at some point, you will go back to that glass or that pipeline and it’s empty.

Or there’s only a bit left in the bottom.

Because what you haven’t also taken time to do is to keep topping up that pipeline of clients and candidates that will then fuel the next month and the month after that. So if you are looking for ideas on how you can make sure this year that you can keep drawing from this pipeline of yours and keep filling it up, then book a call with us here-> www.superfastrecruitment/call

Thanks,

Sharon

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