IT Staffing Sales Effectiveness

If you follow my blog then you know that I’ve written plenty about sales onboarding.  One very important topic that I have not written on however that is key to making successful sales onboarding repeatable and predictable is the use of sales competency certification exams.

One of the most undervalued (and often unknown) formulas staffing executives miss is ramp rate.  Ramp rate is the rate at which your new hires including your sales reps and recruiters are ramping up to achieve quota attainment. Knowing your ramp rate is critically important for several reasons. As you add new reps and recruiters your growth goals inevitably increase which means you have to build a credible budget and forecast to justify the investment and demonstrate the ROI. You can’t do this without knowing your new hire ramp rate. 

Poor sales onboarding is a recipe for an expensive disaster. As I have posted in the past, market leading organizations treat sales onboarding as a continuous revenue generating activity, no different than sales prospecting.  They’ve made sales onboarding an internal core competency because they know it gives them a competitive advantage.  When you look at the data, it is easy to understand why.

The Covid-19 pandemic and the shift to a remote workforce has exposed the weaknesses of organizations that have relied on traditional, outdated employee training and onboarding processes including shadow training and "event" training in which employees are lectured to by a department head, manager or corporate trainer.  While these methods are created with the best of intentions and contribute to a positive and engaging learner experience, there is also no data indicating that they increase overall team quota attainment or revenue per sales rep/recruiter or that they accelerate time to quota attainment for new hires. 

With the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic we’ve already seen businesses adapting to the “new normal” by instituting systems and processes that minimize human contact.  We’ve especially seen this in the B2C world in which contact is minimized between workers and consumers, but also within the B2B world.  With corporate America adopting a virtual workplace and more employees working remotely, the Covid-19 pandemic has forced us to accelerate adoption of new processes and new technologies in areas such as contactless customer service, product delivery, order fulfillment, and robotic warehouse management. 

Many staffing firms have taken a hit because of the COVID-19 pandemic. With all the changes and millions of people being furloughed, it seems as if the economy has hit the pause button. While it may be difficult to drive revenue right now, it is imperative that staffing firms continue to consistently cultivate sales leads.  When staffing firms struggle to generate enough quality leads for their sales team, they're forced to be perfect at everything else they do because they leave themselves no margin for error.  Specifically, 

As a professional recruiter, think of all the times you have to negotiate. You negotiate with your candidates over salary and benefits, vacation time, start date, you negotiate with your salespeople and account managers, and of course you negotiate with your clients including hiring managers. No one wants to ask for too little, undervaluing their work, or ask for too much, potentially ruining the chance of an agreement.  Effective negotiation takes finesse, awareness and social acumen, self-awareness and self-confidence.  One thing is for certain, if you're a recruiter, you have to know how to negotiate. This is non-negotiable.

Your candidate pitch can make or break your deal, so it's a good idea for recruiters to have their pitch nailed down before meeting with their account manager or customer.  I've coached thousands of recruiters and have heard my fair share of both great and not-so-great candidate pitches.  For this post, the recruiter's guide to making the ultimate candidate pitch, I'd like to share with you the anatomy of a good candidate pitch including our seven-step framework.

In order to properly address and overcome candidate objections, recruiters first need to understand why they occur in the first place.  To understand why candidate objections occur in the first place, you need to understand the concept of the candidate-recruiter alignment framework and how candidates evaluate you. 

For many recruiting professionals, the goal and expectation of the introductory candidate call is to secure a candidate submittal. For many other recruiting professionals, the goal and expectation of the introductory candidate call is to either conduct the candidate interview or schedule the candidate interview with the end client. Pretty lofty goals eh.