The Recruitment Network’s January Huddle brought together 60 business leaders at the Oxo Tower in London to focus on Sales and Marketing strategies to deliver significant growth.
‘It’s like having 60 non-exec Directors who know exactly what your business needs, giving you really good advice’
The day enabled owner managers of recruitment business to access ideas and sales and marketing strategies to drive business forward. The day was a blend of world class experts, successful recruitment entrepreneurs revealing the secrets of their success and peer to peer best practice sharing of ideas.
In a fast paced environment, the clarity of strategic thinking, the ability of business leaders to confidently make decisions is challenging and often lonely. The real value for the members was the quality time away from the demands of the team, the business and the clients and the opportunity to hear about and reflect on proven best practice concepts and thinking and turn them into actions.
As one member shared:
‘The value of the day will impact the way we work immediately. Today was totally awesome, loads of new ideas & ways to grow the business & more importantly our people.’
The programme involved every aspect of sales and marketing looking at how we raise market and client awareness, how we engage, how we convert client consideration and interest into a sale and how we can influence loyalty.
Phil M Jones, the world’s leading sales trainer, did what every great speaker does:
Made it simple and provided a toolkit for sales teams to focus on. He challenged the size of business leaders’ aspirations – think big! – and showed how we can ‘make their own luck’ by getting the basic behaviours right when it comes to selling. The consistent feedback from the business leaders listening to Phil was that while recruitment has changed whether through technology, shifts in generational attitudes to work and life or how clients want to work with recruiters, the basics of selling haven’t and while we need to embrace digital revolution, we also need to compliment that by doing the basics of sales brilliantly. Phil’s experience was that those ‘basics’ revolved around the competency and desire of the team to:
- Give a good representation of self and company (consistently)
- Build rapport
- Create a genuine opportunity
- Give clients enough information to make a decision
- Gain a positive decision
- Establish future opportunities
- Schedule next action
- Ask for a referral
- Get a referral
Johnny Campbell, CEO Of Social Talent, focused on social selling and he shared 3 key messages which in his experience the best recruiters benefit from:
- Social Selling can help augment a good sales process, but it isn’t designed to replace it. Sales is still sales, and at the end of the day you still need to talk to, convince and influence people. So there’s much more to social selling than just sending tweets all day long. But you can leverage social media to make connections, get your brand out there and reduce the wastefulness of the sales process.
- When trying to reach a prospect, accept that your first attempt will always fail. But persevere. You need to be willing to follow up with a prospect 8 times. That may seem excessive, but think of it like this. 3 times is excessive. 8 times is persistent. Use 4 different vectors (phone, Twitter, LinkedIn, email, etc) and follow up twice on each platform.
- When discussing price, if you only give one price, the only way is down. If you give two, people don’t like extremes. Ten price options is far too much choice. The sweet spot is three prices. One is the real price, and two are merely are decoys. For example – most people order the second cheapest bottle of wine in restaurants. Not the cheapest, not the flashy bottle. The second cheapest. So design the sweet spotand use it to your advantage when discussing price.
2 gurus of digital marketing Luke Quilter CEO of Sleeping Giant Media and Dave Hazlehurst (aka Google Dave) from ph.creative challenged the membership to consider their approach to all things digital.
In the ever-evolving digital era, it was clear that however much we think we know, there’s something else out there to be aware of which can add massive value to the business.
Clients and candidates are embracing technology and digital is changing everything and changing all the time, so embrace it or fall by the wayside. Social media is part of it but only part and we need to find the way to outperform the market through the quality of what we do and our ability to truly engage with our digital strategy.
How do you influence Google and effectively gain Google’s trust to push you up the rankings? Sleeping Giant conducted an SEO audit of every member’s website and shared the findings, including a benchmarking of the individual websites against other members and an individual report about how to enhance the website positioning on Google through improving domain authorities, key messages, content and links.
The audit revealed that 15% of the recruiters audited don’t have a mobile compatible website yet 70% of research starts on a phone.
Google Dave focused on developing a digital experience which ‘gave people goosebumps’, influencing and engaging people emotionally rather than creating noise which didn’t. While recruiters have traditionally excelled at selling, many aren’t as strong at marketing and without this will fall behind.
A focus on the client’s pain point allows us to develop content which gives value to the communities in which we operate. The goal of effective content marketing is to tap into clients or candidates feelings – people feel first and then think and the challenge is to make the content and digital communication connect emotionally. The goal is to be perceived reputationally for our ‘EAT’ (Expertise, Authority and Trust) through the content and digital experience that we create.
Finally Graeme Hubert cofounder of Consol Partners shared the secrets of Consol’s extraordinary success.
Like so many entrepreneurs, Graeme was happy to share insights into Consol’s journey with members. Hearing the experiences and lessons learnt from someone who has grown a recruitment business, starting as 2 man operation to become an international success story, overcoming the inevitable challenges, is always inspirational and challenges the thinking. Graeme’s key message was focus, focus, focus.
Graeme also reinforced his view on why peer to peer business leadership networks are so invaluable and how it was critical to shaping his thinking and his personal growth.
So as one member said on the day ‘If you a serious about being a leader in your sector, The Recruitment Network should be on your radar’ The next huddle is March 30th at the Oxo Tower for further information please contact support@therecruitmentnetwork.com
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