Sales Team Success:
Four Strategies
to Grow Your
Staffing & Recruiting Firm
A Bond Operational Excellence White Paper
Sales Team Success:
Four Strategies to Grow Your
Staffing & Recruiting Firm
“There’s no better time than now to be in the staffing industry”
By Jim Kanichirayil
About this paper
This paper provides
strategies that you can
adopt to put your
company into the right
position to succeed.
T
hanks to jobless claims that are
at a seven-year low and a
growing contingent workforce
that’s up 8.5 percent over last
year, it’s a favorable time for
staffing agencies. Savvy leaders can
position their companies to take
advantage of the growing industry so
they can thrive.
Professional staffing companies
should start implementing strategies
now to get in place to grow. That includes hiring sales team members who are hunters –
wolves, so to speak – by following a four-step process that sets a strong foundation. The
next step is motivating your hunters and retaining them; no simple task in an industry
where normal turnover is between 30 to 75 percent. And finally, bringing in new business
is crucial to your success when most companies lose 10 percent of their customer base
each year.
There’s no better time than now to be in the staffing industry, and there’s no time to wait.
Here are strategies that you can adopt to put your company into the right position to
succeed.
Selecting Sales Candidates: How to Hire Wolves
I have found that one of the more
common problems staffing firm leaders
encounter is finding and hiring top-level
salespeople. More specifically, it seems
that hiring the farmer profile seems to
be much easier than hiring hunters. It
seems that this challenge applies to not
only startups and small firms but large
firms as well. So what’s the solution?
Believe it or not, this is a challenge
that’s common in many industries. I’ve
been involved in the hiring process in
the retail, technology, and automotive
sectors and hiring managers struggle
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with overcoming the same challenges. What I have found, through observation and
experimentation, is that there is a fairly simple four step process that can be used to
identify and hire sales people who fit the hunter/wolf profile you are looking for.
Sales interviews…
Organizations looking
to hire hunters need to
gauge performance
under pressure and
should be interviewing
candidates with that in
mind.
The first step in the process is to look within your organization and identify your own
hunters and build a baseline profile. Hunters and farmers work differently so it’s important
to document the way both types of salespeople work—you may choose to utilize your
recruiting software for insight. This step in the process requires some level of business
process analysis and the ability to look at every step in the sales cycle and how the
individual behaves in each step.
The next step in the process of hiring sales people is to incorporate psychometric testing
into your selection process. While this may seem like an unnecessary expense to some,
it’s important to keep in mind the costs associated with making the wrong hire. Research
has shown that firms can spend two to three times the first year salary of the “wrong” hire
to fix the mistake. Adding psychometric testing reduces the risk of making that wrong hire
and adds a research-backed instrument to your hiring process. I have found that both the
Predictive Index (PI) and the Life Styles Inventory (LSI) are effective diagnostic tools with
documented reliability and validity. Conversely, stay away from Meyers-Briggs or similar
tools since their predictive capabilities have recently been called into question.
The third step in the process of hiring sales people is to understand the psychological
profile of the hunter mentality. I have found that the candidates who best fit the profile
have the following attributes: patience, resilience, confidence, humor, curiosity, serviceorientation, learning-orientation, and competitiveness. There are wide-ranging research
opinions on what attributes carry the most weight but the key takeaway is that your
“perfect” hunter profile will have all of these attributes. As a result, your interview process
needs to include behavior-based questioning that distills out the presence or absence of
these attributes.
The fourth and final step in the process is interviewing and selecting the hunter profile.
Like just about everyone else, I’ve been on both sides of the interview table. What I’ve
found particularly interesting is how sales interviews are conducted. Generally speaking,
interviews have been structured in such a way that hiring managers aren’t testing for
capability or profile. Oftentimes the process itself really doesn’t gauge if the candidate
has the necessary competencies. Organizations looking to hire hunters need to gauge
performance under pressure and should be interviewing candidates with that in mind. A
simple approach would be to tell the candidate (in a polite way) that they’re not good
enough and see how they respond. Most sub-par candidates will crumble. The ones left
over provide you a “semi-qualified” pool of candidates to evaluate further.
The process of hiring sales people is a complex one for most organizations. Hiring for the
hunter profile can prove to be one of the bigger challenges a sales organization can face.
As a result, it’s critical that firms take a systematic approach to the process that includes
both quantitative and qualitative criteria. This four-step process should provide a good
foundation to build from. Then, once you’ve found your “wolves,” Bond will be there for
you with the tools they need for hunting success.
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How to Motivate Your Sales Team: Developing a Long-Term Strategy
for Keeping Your Sales Team Engaged and On Board
Contests aren’t the
answer…
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.
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 the previous section. 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
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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-sizefits-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.
Developing Your Internal Sales Team: Retention Strategies That
Prepare Your Best People for Future Leadership
Why do they leave?
The top three reasons
an employee leaves an
organization are directly
or indirectly attributable
to leadership issues.
Now that we’ve figured out how to select top
performers and learned how to keep our
teams motivated we should be in the clear,
right? Well, if your firm is like the vast majority
of those in staffing struggling with turnover in
the 30 to 70 percent range, there’s a lot of
work left to be done. It’s not enough to select
the right people and keep them motivated,
attention needs to be paid to understanding
why they stick around.
Firms in every industry find themselves in
situations where they have found great talent
and invested in them only to lose them when
the employee “was just starting to get good.”
So what really happens in these scenarios?
Understanding why people leave a company
is the first step in stopping the bleeding and
developing strong retention strategies. There
are tons of reasons why someone will leave a
company but the most common reasons
people leave an organization are due to conflicts with their immediate supervisor
(leadership issue) or lack of professional growth (leadership issue). The top three
reasons an employee leaves an organization are directly or indirectly attributable to
leadership issues.
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So recognizing that the most common reasons for why an employee leaves a company
has to do with leadership, how can we fix the situation and hold on to our best talent?
The answer to that question is actually simpler than what you may think. It starts with
understanding that under most circumstances, an employee leaves an organization
because of something they’re missing from us. Simply put, it’s not them, it’s me. When
we think of leadership as a concept, it’s made up of three aspects: supervisory activities,
mentoring activities, and training/coaching activities. As leaders of our organizations and
teams, most of our time should be spent doing mentoring and training/coaching activities.
Unfortunately, most managers end up spending most of their time managing the metricsoriented supervisory aspects of their role.
In order to shift this supervisory paradigm that we’re all stuck in, we must do three key
things. First we must teach a simple workflow for our lowest-level people to make sound
decisions without our intervention. I call it the decision pyramid and it’s made up of three
questions:
1) Is this action good for the customer?
2) Is this action good for our company? and
3) Is this action ethical?
If your employees can say yes to all three questions, they should be able to act without
your intervention. I would add that letting your people know “that there isn’t a mistake that
they can make that we can’t fix” is an important coaching tip that should be part of your
organizational DNA.
Once you’ve empowered your people to make their own decisions, you’ve laid the ground
work to prepare them to grow within your organization. The second step in shifting the
supervisory paradigm is to shift the focus of your conversations from being metrics-driven
to being vision-driven. It’s important to talk about the metrics required for success in our
organizations but that shouldn’t be the focus of the conversation. Oftentimes managers
focus on the numbers without giving consideration for why an employee should even
strive to achieve the numbers. Do we take the time to understand our employees’
passions and vision? If not, we need to. As part of our retention strategy, we need to
meet our employees where they are and understand where they are going before we
ever dive into the numbers. If we do this successfully, no employee will ever ask the
question “why am I here?”
Many firms think of the concept of growth and leadership in terms of promotions and the
organizational chart. While that may be true for some, a real growth culture is a lot more
than just promotions and the vertical hierarchy. The third step in the process of keeping
and growing your talent is to build a culture of inquiry and innovation. This may sound
complex but if you’ve done the first two steps this step is easy. You’ve empowered your
people to make sound decisions, you’ve taken the time to learn what drives them, now
this step allows them to execute. All you’re doing is creating a culture where your team
can look at any aspect of the business and identify the gaps in how things are done.
Then you’re empowering them to find solutions for that problem. By taking this approach,
you are preparing your people to stay with your organization and really make an impact
independent of the size of your company.
Keeping your top talent is a critical issue for many firms. Any staffing firm that can speak
to systems and processes they have in place to get the most out of their people will have
significant competitive advantages. Shifting the focus of leadership from managing
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metrics to inspiring your people and creating an empowering culture will provide the
necessary fuel for your people to keep moving your firm forward.
New Client Acquisition: A Systematic Approach to Bringing in New
Staffing Clients
Understand clients’
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.
Previously, 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% 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, had multiple divisions, had a history
of having three to six temps/consultants working in each division, and I could 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
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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 work. 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 software that cuts wasted time and effort, that simplifies the daily
work, and that unifies all of the information needed to acquire new clients.
Your company has a great opportunity to grow as the staffing industry expands and more
companies see the value of temporary labor. In fact, buyers of contingent labor say they
are more likely to hire project-based, statement of work employees than traditional
employees.
The current environment is presenting you and your team an exciting chance to prosper.
Now you have tactics to implement, from hiring wolves to pinpointing new clients, that
can place you in a position to succeed.
END
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About the Author:
Jim Kanichirayil, Regional Sales Manager, Bond International Software
Before joining the Bond team, Jim worked as a business development manager for a
$120 million staffing firm where he brought on 19 new accounts in 27 months. An
advocate of process-driven sales, Jim has defended his doctoral research on training,
retention, and leadership in the staffing and recruiting industry.
Presented by:
Bond International Software, Inc.
www.bond-us.com
Copyright Bond International Software, Inc. 2014. All rights reserved.