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Welcome to Episode 427 of the Recruitment Marketing and Sales podcast. I’m recording this as we approach the end of June, which, for those of us in the UK, US, Canada, Europe, and Europe, is the end of Q2 in our calendar year. For multiple listeners in Australia, it’s the end of your business year.
When Sharon spoke to many Australian NPA members at their event in Marbella, they were talking about the end of the year and how things had gone as they reviewed their results, ready to plan for next year.
[This is a direct podcast transcription, so please excuse rogue typos!]
The end of a quarter and the end of a year is always a good time to sit down and review where you are. One of the challenges for smaller businesses is that we don’t automatically do that as a process.
Particularly if we think things haven’t gone as well as we wanted!
Rather than sitting down, looking at the data, and asking.
- What did we do?
- What didn’t we do?
- What do we want to do next?”
We often avoid it, and this is where the problems start.
It doesn’t matter the size of your business. Whether turning over six or seven figures, you have to sit down and look at what’s working and what isn’t working. That’s the premise of today’s podcast.
Let’s discuss your plans, what’s happened this year, throughout the year, or the first six months, and what you want to do next.
What I’ve got is seven questions for you, seven areas that I want to cover that are useful.
Take half a day, or even go wild and take a full day. Bring in people from your team who will be involved, sit down, and go through these questions together.
1. What Are Your Goals For This Year?
I’m a great universe girl; the universe responds to people who pay attention. If you pay attention to what’s happening in your business, you can move forward.
Number one is, let’s look at your goals for this year. We are discussing marketing here, but marketing and sales are your business’s drivers and growth engines.
From a marketing point of view, consider what goals you had this year.
These are all the outputs you wanted, but I recommend looking at some of the inputs that will create the outputs around your goals.
Maybe it was, “Okay, we want to bring on board X new clients,” depending on the size of your business. I know that some of you only need half a dozen clients to give you multiple roles, and that will provide you £/$200,000, £/$300,000 a year, and that’s what you want. For others, it’s going to be more than that.
Just make sure you’ve got a list of the actual goals you set this year. Some of you may be new to setting goals; for some, your goals may have been completely off or either too low or too high to achieve.
We often get very excited about our goals and think, “Right, I want to get this goal done,” it’s just not possible from where you are starting and with your current resources.
This leads to point two: wants versus expectations.
2. What Did You Want/Expect To Achieve?
Now, number two, that aligns with this is, what did you want, and I like this word as well, /expect to achieve? Because there’s always this thing in our life.
We get what we expect, but it is not always what we want. If you went into the situation expecting it not to work, then surprise, surprise, it doesn’t work. It’s interesting. Sharon had a call with somebody a few days ago who’s considering working with us.
This individual asked, “Well, what if it doesn’t work?” We always tell people to go in with the expectation that this will work; it does, provided you do.
The system we support our clients to use has been tested for over 17 years with all our various clients, and it will work as long as people put the work in. What did you expect versus what did you want to achieve?
3. What Worked Well and Why?
That then links us to number three, where we start to look at the data and review things because let’s focus on the positive first. As business owners, we are always looking at that gap; we’re always looking at things that we haven’t done, but instead, look at what worked well and why. If that worked well, why don’t we do more of it?
I was listening to a Frank Kern video. For those of you who don’t know Frank Kern, he’s a bit of a godfather in the internet marketing world; he has been around for 25 years. He’s a lovely guy.
One of Frank’s favourite topics is the fundamentals. I can’t do a Southern Georgia accent, but he always talks about the fundamentals and doing more of them because that’s what works.
Many people forget the fundamentals.
Here is something a client said to me the other day; “When I do more reach-outs on LinkedIn, that works. If I stick to my KPIs, well, that works too 🤦♀️”
Inputs don’t work overnight, but they do build over time. Think about the things you did that worked well.
We have had several clients set up cold outreach campaigns. We did a whole session on this at our Superfast Circle event at the end of last year. Several people jumped on the process and did multiple things.
Did they get massive results during the first couple of months? No, but these are starting to kick in now because there’s a clue in the title. If you are doing cold outreach, these people don’t know you and need much more contact with you.
Now, they are starting to get results. People are returning to them, but they put that process in place, and things are working well. Consider, “What am I doing that’s starting to work?”
4. Where are We Off Plan, and What Didn’t Work?
Next, I want to share where we are off-plan and what didn’t work. Combine those. Now, they are similar.
It could be, “I’m off plan because we landed a client, and I’ve got engrossed with filling several roles.” That happens. Hopefully, that does happen.
That could be one reason you’re off-plan. Why haven’t things worked? Maybe it’s because you haven’t implemented them correctly, done enough of them, or given them time.
Marketing can take time.
In nearly every webinar and workshop we deliver, we share the points of contact theory that sometimes people need 20 or 30 points of contact in today’s marketplace. In a B2B setting, before they make a purchase, they need to know you, like you, and trust you before money changes hands. It just might be that you haven’t given that process long enough.
You might only use one channel to communicate your brand when you need to post more in the current market.
If you’re only using one channel, you will have problems. For instance, if you’re only sending the odd random email, you’re not posting on social media, you’re not reaching out and finding new contacts, you’re not mining your current database, if you’re not doing multiple strategies, then that will be a gap for you.
5. Am I Putting In Enough Effort?
Sometimes, this one is a bit uncomfortable, and it’s a question that must be asked: “Am I putting in enough effort?”
This is a question we have to ask ourselves, and occasionally, we might come up with an answer that we don’t like to hear, like, “Well, I probably could be doing more.”
I’m not saying you have to work seven days a week. However, sometimes, in a particular situation, you need to focus your time, get focused, and put in the effort on the right things, which are your key business drivers to make a difference.
If you are completely stretched, then maybe it’s time to review how you are allocating your time, hire somebody, or come and work with people like us who can provide many things that help with your time and implementation.
Ask yourself the uncomfortable question, “Am I doing enough?” This is a reflective question: “Could I be doing more?” Are you allowing yourself to get distracted by different things?
Is your focus on the areas of the business that shift the needle? Or are you getting involved with the type of font you use on your images or whether you’ve got exactly the right colour match? It’s focusing on the things that matter and putting in the effort to start building things. That’s just the uncomfortable question we all have to ask ourselves.
6. What Are Your Key Business Drivers This Quarter?
We were chatting with one of our clients this week about how she’s got a busy business and a busy personal life. She’s coming up to the summer when her daughters are at home and have lots of things to do, such as socializing and business. One of the things we were chatting about with her is that she’s solo; what is the one thing she can do next quarter?
It’s less than that for her, but what can she do in the next six weeks to improve her key business driver?
I have a question for you: “What are three things you can do in the next 90 days that will impact your key business driver?”
If you’re unclear about key business drivers, we’ve recorded two or three podcasts about this; just put that into the search bar on the Superfast blog, and you will find them.
A key business driver is what makes a difference. Now, it might be that your key business driver is to have a face-to-face, Zoom, or Teams meeting with a client because lots of recruiters are very good at selling. Once they talk to somebody, that makes a difference.
The key business driver might be, “I need to make sure that we have systems and processes in place so that I am having at least X number of new client meetings a week.”
It depends on the size of your business and your conversion rate; you will know your numbers. For most people, it will be, “I need to have X number of client meetings. Out of those client meetings, I will convert at least 70%, 80% of them,” which is not unusual for recruiters that we speak to.
It might be from a candidate’s perspective that one of the things that you do is register new candidates. You or your resource consultant will reach out, and you agree on how many candidates they need to speak to, which is a key business driver.
We are heading into July in a few days; what will be your key business driver for this quarter?
7. Stop Complaining and Work Your Plan
Number seven, I’ve got some ideas for you to consider. The first thing to do is stop complaining about the market.
It’s frustrating, AND people are fed up hearing about it.
You are in a volatile market at the moment. Sharon listened to Hung Lee speak about this at the team conference recently.
Don’t assume this market is going to go away. It’s challenging at the moment, and it’s going to be like that for a while. The economy is all over the place. The birth rate is lower. The amount of money put into education and the growth and development of people hasn’t been as high as it should have been, so there aren’t as many skilled candidates.
How are you going to tackle all of that? Just be aware that complaining doesn’t help.
Identify the issues that are going on and then consider, “What are the solutions to these problems? What solutions do I need to implement?”
The other end of the spectrum is, stop beating yourself up. We all make mistakes in business, we all have rough times, and we all know that we probably have not worked as hard as possible.
Maybe we’ve had a few too many holidays. We’ve spent some money on software that hasn’t been implemented how we want, but we just let all that go. You’re a human being having a human experience. Stop beating yourself up, and instead, channel your energy to say, “That was then, this is now. What’s next? What actions am I going to take?”
The human being is such an amazing thing. We, as individuals, can achieve so much. We are success-seeking creatures. When you think about the ideas, the innovations we’ve come up with, and how we have managed to survive some of the things that have gone on in the world, it is just phenomenal.
If you’re having a rough time in business, it is just a drop in the ocean compared to what you can achieve and what you can do.
If you get focused and start doing the boring work that delivers results over the next few quarters, you will see an amazing shift in your results.
Thanks
Denise
How We Can Help You
We support our Superfast Circle clients in designing their plans with effective strategies that work. If you want a conversation about how we can help, book a quick call here.
