Self Assessment – Prospects

Perhaps sales hasn’t been a focus recently. If business has been good, sometimes new business sales activity can take a back seat. If you are new to your market then you could still be on a journey of qualification. Either way, there is a definite need to turn some attention to prospecting. Even if you are a delivery consultant, focused on resourcing you should be creating future clients through your candidate conversations, passing leads to the sales team. If you haven’t been focused on sales as you’ve got enough customers, beware. The danger is that complacency and assumption kick in. I have seen many consultants take their eye off the sales ball for so long that they had no idea where any business opportunities existed. Then their existing clients stopped hiring and it was like a game of snakes and ladders. From square 99, down the massive snake to the beginning of the game. DO NOT let this become you. Prospecting is a daily activity – building pipeline, growing your desk and creating opportunities to hire more consultants to work with you keeps you moving forward. Attempts to stand still often result in going backwards.

RECOMMENDATIONS

• Continue with the Bounce Back Pack
• Build three prospect lists (just on a sheet of A4 is fine) who, outside of your existing customer base will be hiring this month, next month and next quarter. Of those on your lists which will work with you? Which of them have you qualified as a potential customer?
• Dig out all of the leads you have generated in 2020 – make two lists. Leads discovered pre Lockdown and leads discovered during Lockdown. How many of these have you put energy into converting? Which can you say, with certainty, are now dead? No assumptions. Make a sales list.
• Write a 60-second elevator pitch as to why a prospect should work with you. Be clear as to what your value proposition is or your super power as a recruiter.
• Make a sales plan for next week. Allocate a minimum of 60 minutes a day to selling and prospecting even if you have a healthy pipeline of work now. Where will your business come from for the rest of 2020?
• Look at your current WIP (Work In Progress). How many CVs do you have out under consideration? What about people at interview? Temps finishing? Contractors nearing renewal? What if these events don’t happen? Where will you place them? Set a goal to get every candidate a minimum of three interviews and every finisher a job and every contractor looking at an extension a back-up plan. Sell candidates you’ve already got in the cupboard.
• Watch The Pillars Cardio, Planning and Qualification

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A good score that could be better. You could benefit from putting more energy into your sales activity. Perhaps you’ve been guilty of maintaining contact with your customers and the usual suspects you talk to when doing sales. It’s healthy to step outside of your comfort zone. There could be more business out there than you realise. If your current prospects aren’t hiring or giving you access to their hiring plans then maybe you’ve been making friends with the wrong people? Take a step back and look at who you choose to call when doing your sales. Are you calling the same faces?

A well-qualified market should give you between 100 and 250 hiring managers to work relationships with and build a pipeline of business opportunities. If you’ve got a database full of contacts and only a handful of prospects you’d describe as fully qualified where you know:

• Team size and key skills
• Current route to market to hire people
• Manager’s hiring preferences
• Line of supply possible without going through RPO
• Future hiring plans mapped and reactive hiring process (sign off and agency selection)

Set yourself up to keep in contact with the right managers in the right businesses. Code you client database so you can find your prospects based upon what they hire for. To convert your prospects to customers you will need to be sure on what your process is and how you will track your progress. Your database should be your best friend for this task.

RECOMMENDATIONS

• Complete the Bounce Back Pack
• Review your prospect list – how many qualified managers do you have on it, across how many companies
• Prospect off the database as well as planning sales activity on it. Find the companies and managers who are not on your system, qualify them and track them
• Define what a good prospect looks like and how they will behave with you
• Create a sales plan each week to create holy time for selling. Time spent prospecting will build you a pipeline of future customers
• Write a sales diary. At the end of each week note how many prospects you’ve identified and what you’ve learnt about your future customers
• Develop a conversion process – from prospect to customer. What would a manager need to see, hear and feel to describe you as a prospect supplier (rather than suspect)?
• Watch The Pillars on Urgency, Planning and Cardio
• Start the mission on I need more jobs

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Great score! You’ve clearly been working hard to qualify and build relationships with the prospects in your market. Get ready for the coming tsunami of jobs to work on! Who are your strongest prospects? What is your plan to ensure that you convert them into long term customers? With a good portfolio of well qualified prospects it’s important that you are positioning yourself as a partner of choice to work with. Consider this – it could be possible to build strong relationships with prospects that revolve more around social interaction, mutual interests and likeability. It could be possible to get friend-zoned. Getting caught in the friend zone can happen if we click with a contact and then the need for recruitment and business talk becomes less important. Let’s go back to that list of your strongest prospects. Write their names down.

Have a look on the CRM system, how many times have you spoken to them? Write it next to their name.

Is there a pattern?

How much business have they given you?

How much have you missed out on?

Is someone else closing your friends?

Look at your sent items in your inbox. When did you last email them? What was it about?

Finally, if I were to phone them on your behalf. Like a customer service call to ask them about who you are, what you do, how you add value to your clients and what makes you a prospect supplier, what would they say? What if I asked them why they hadn’t given you any business, thus far? What do you think they would say it would take to work with you exclusively?

If the answers to the above don’t make you stop and think for a moment, that’s totally cool. You obviously rock. Respect.

RECOMMENDATIONS

• Complete the rest of the Bounce Back Pack
• Review your prospect list (managers) and pick out those that you consider to be the strongest based upon business value (rather than warmth of contact). What has stopped them from giving you work so far?
• Put together a sales plan for your prospect list. How are you going to get them out of the friend zone (if that is where they are) and bring them into the customer zone. What do you want to be famous with these prospects for? Make it happen. Up your business proposition and make sure they know what you do, how you do it and why it should be important for them to want to work with you
• How many of your prospects have you virtually met since the beginning of Lockdown. Book client meetings with those you feel are most likely to be hiring and you would want to work with. Put together an overview of what you do and it’s value in a format that you can screenshare it with them on a Zoom meeting
• Watch The Pillars on Planning and Cardio

Download these recommendations as a To Do list