Tom's Talent Blog

When I started in the staffing business more than 20 years ago, every Monday morning my colleagues and I would get out the classified ads in the newspaper and start calling all of the companies that posted jobs to see if we could help them fill their positions. In some cases, we had a specific candidate we were presenting to them—this was an early iteration of what we now call skill marketing. Of course, every other staffing company used this same strategy, so I can imagine Mondays weren’t much fun for the people posting those jobs.

Today, skill marketing is still an important revenue driver for many staffing companies. And with talent at such a premium now, marketing hard-to-find, in-demand candidates can be more effective than ever.

I had the opportunity to talk with Travis Arnold, the CMO & Co-founder of Herefish. We talked about beer... and more importantly 6 steps to building a great sales team at your staffing firm. 

It’s easy when you have a new employee starting and you have an orientation schedule for a new sales person or recruiter.  The goal is to ramp them up for success as quick as possible.  You have this person start from the beginning, learning each internal process and procedure, and then sprinkle in some outside training sources that add variety and promote skills for increased performance.  But, how do you incorporate training with existing employees?

We're excited to announce our new partnership with Moore Essentials to help you find prospects and candidates from the 2 BILLION people on Facebook.  We have dozens of training sessions on staffing sales and recruiting, focusing mostly on sourcing through LinkedIn. Now the experts at Moore Essentials can show you how to source from Facebook!

Why did I write a book?  Because, sales is harder now than ever before.  Your prospects aren't answering the phone or calling you back, there is more competition than ever, and you just seem to be running up against one brick wall after another.  In this 100-page quick read, I explain why sales has become increasingly more difficult, the key mistakes that most staffing sales reps are making, and details a systematic sales process that is proven to get more appointments and land more new business in the staffing industry.

Learn another way to sell to prospective clients in the staffing industry.

Every Saturday morning, our six-year-old son comes crashing into our room with the same earnest request; “Daddy, can we play games on the TV together?” Since the time he was able to hold a controller in his hands, Brady and I have spent part of Saturday morning playing video games together. It's become a ritual that is a reward for him, and a fun way for us to spend some dedicated time together.

I just received at least the 10^th email this week from a different sales rep trying to sell me prospect leads – and its Tuesday. Now as a sales professional, trainer, and coach, I tend to probably be at the same time more critical and more sympathetic to sales reps trying to do their job. I’m critical in that I dissect their message and approach more than most. But I also feel sorry for many of them because I can tell by their email that they are either new, untrained, or misguided. And when I talk to sales reps about their sales activities, most sheepishly admit that they know what they are doing isn’t working, but just don’t know what else to do. Unfortunately many of the sales activities that we utilize cause more harm than good, labeling us as “salesy” and irritating the prospect.

What do these people have in common: Michael Jordan, Thomas Edison, Brett Favre, and Abraham Lincoln. Yes, they are famous. They are considered to be among the greatest of their respective professions. But the primary link is that they all failed frequently, some historically.

Like an assembly line, sales is a process that builds on itself. Regardless of how many stages are in your pipeline, the sales process boils down to four essential areas;

• Prospecting – The initial stage of identifying your potential clients, reaching out to them, and getting them to agree to meet with you
• Understanding and analyzing prospect needs and wants – We need to know what the prospects challenges, opportunities, and desires are to best align our solution
• Creating demand for our solution – This part of the process includes building credibility and interest, presenting your solution, showing how it addresses their challenges, and ultimately how working with you is the best choice for the prospect
• Closing the sale – Converting the prospect to a customer and generating revenue