Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Transcription:
(Prefer to read? Here is the transcription. Please excuse any typos.)
Are you a commodity or are you a true consultant? As a recruiter, you have that word ‘consultant’ in your title. That’s the topic of today’s blog post and podcast. We answered a question for Jane last time around LinkedIn company pages and this question came from Ian who shot me a quick question saying “You answered Jane’s will you answer this one for me? I consistently get knocked down on price and fees when I go along to a client. What can I do about that? Is there something wrong that I’m doing with our marketing or what am I doing? That is the question for today and it’s the one I’m going to answer. So let’s get into it!
Hello again listeners! Here we are looking at commodity versus consultant and I suspect for Ian it’s how he raises his prices or how he gets his clients to actually accept his fee structure. It can be a challenging one and it depends I think where you are in the lifecycle of your business as well.
Being forced down the commodity route means you’re just a service provider, one of many recruitment companies that an organization can use. Especially if you are pretty new, a little bit of scarcity goes on, a little bit of fear, and there’s a concern that if I don’t take this fee at 10%, how am I going to pay the bills this month? What am I going to do?
I think that fear thinking kicking for people at all different levels. That’s probably a subject for another podcast. For those of you who know Nicky Coffin very well, you want to head over to her site because Nicky does an awful lot of stuff around mindset and how we could work with our mind and that whole point about belief and positive thinking. There are some other things you can do that actually will position you as the consultant rather than a commodity in recruitment. Those are the things that I want to talk about today.
I’m going to go over 3 key areas that in my experience will start to position you Ian and make a big difference. I do know your website and I have had a look at it. First of all, let’s think about that visual representation. How are you presenting yourself on your website, on LinkedIn, on your literature, or anything like that that is going in front of a client? The first thing that people are assessing whether they want to work with you, they are going to go and check you out.
Visual Representation
We talked about this many times before but I’m still going to say it again – if you’ve got an old website, they can’t view it very well. No matter what, they’re going to make a judgment on you. Think about having a more modern website. It’s all about the branding.
I’ll be honest and say I’m a bit of a snob when it comes to places that I might want to eat or go and have a nice glass of wine or anything like that. When I’m on a holiday, it’s a classic thing that happens is we cruise up and down our favourite little street. We have a particular place in Turkey that we absolutely love it and we wander up and down the street and we think “Where should we go? Should we go here or should we go there?” We know that there are certain places that we really like. The reason that we like them is we’ve had a great experience there but we know we are open to trying somewhere new. However, they’ve got to have some criteria. They’ve got to look nice. They’ve got to have nice tablecloths. The waiters have got to appear quite friendly and chatty.
Now, this is just us choosing a meal when we’re on a holiday and it’s exactly the same when our clients or our candidates are looking for us. If they come online and they have a look at your website and it’s not representing you in the best possible light then you become just another “me too” recruiter. You start to slip down into that commodity status.
One of the things that I would always say and advice people is don’t put prices on your website. We are not talking about ASDA here or Tesco. We’re talking about a service provider. The minute you start putting prices on your website then you fall down the pecking order because you’re fighting down there at the bottom end of the market.
If you can say “We can do your recruitment at a knockdown rate.” Well, you’re not going to get the high-value clients that are willing to pay for your expertise and maybe your search expertise.
Thinking about your visual check, if you look at good-looking websites, what does your LinkedIn profile look like? Have a professional image done. It costs buttons to do something like that and it can make such a huge difference. Imagine if that could impact how much people were willing to spend with you? So there’s that visual check.
Specialism
Now the other thing is ‘specialism’. It’s being a specialist in your sector rather than being a ‘catch all’, a ‘me too’ recruiter – “Well yeah, I can do anything and everything for you.” It’s about niching down. Be sector specific. That way it’s so much easier in that people like experts.
There’s a great marketing guy called Seth Godin. He talks about the fact that people love to be led. That after leadership and people equate leadership and expertise with specialism. So if you can say, “Well actually, we are the most well-known secretarial recruitment agency in Manchester and we have won X number of awards or whatever.” Then when a company in Manchester is looking for great new employees, they are more likely to choose you and they are somebody else. Why? Because you are a specialist, that’s why.
Ask Questions
Now, this might be counterintuitive for some people – it’s about asking questions. True consultants go in and ask questions. What they’re doing is they’re finding out if there are a fit and a match culturally between you and them. They’re actually finding out if they can help you. They’re finding out if there’s some sort of synergy. Asking questions of your clients, particularly if you find somebody has turned around and said to you “That’s a good question”, then you know you’re on the right track.
Make a mental note and maybe ask the question again because when you start to ask questions and you listen to the answer, you automatically will profile yourself in a completely different league for that individual. What you’re doing is you’re challenging their thinking and if you’ve ever brought a consultant in to work on your business, they will ask you a lot of questions. They do this to elicit your needs specifically what it is they can and can help you with. That will really help to profile you.
Be Prepared To Walk Away
Now I said I’d share 3 things here but there’s another thing as well about commodity versus consultant is – be prepared to walk away. A good mentor of mine always says “If you say yes to that Denise, you’re saying no to something else. You are saying no probably to that bigger client that could come your way.”
What you do as a recruitment consultant is fantastic value for people. Get your branding all correct. Get your blog posts, your LinkedIn profile, and get them all aligned communicating your amazing value proposition. That will start to position you and then you go in and do a consultant’s role. Don’t just grab at things but make them appreciate the value that you can bring.
You’ve set that up visually straightaway. You profile yourself as a specialist and now you’re asking the question. That Ian will make a huge difference for you.
This is Denise from superfastrecruitment.co.uk. You can find this recording on our website and on the blog and it’s probably going to be titled “Commodity or Consultant”. This is Denise saying bye for now and we’ll see you next time!
This podcast was hosted by Denise Oyston. Follow us on Google+
Important
To accelerate your marketing at speed, you need to know your starting point and be clear on what good marketing looks like.
That is why we have designed a complimentary Marketing Audit Checklist that you can download here.
As an ambitious recruitment organisation, THE marketing strategy to master is email marketing. It will consistently deliver both candidates and clients.
In a special complimentary training Webinar, we give you the template for writing emails we use for our clients and the exact 4 campaigns that are working now.
You can register here.
