Why should a company choose you for their staffing or recruiting needs over your competitors? If you’re still thinking about your answer or good service is the first thing that popped into your mind, keep reading.
Good service, although necessary, is not a differentiating factor and in the super-competitive recruiting and staffing industry, you need a unique value proposition (UVP) that you can clearly communicate to prospects and customers in 10 – 20 seconds. Your UVP is the primary reason prospects should buy from you. Your UVP should:
- Explain how you solve customers’ problems or improve their situations
- Outline specific, quantifiable benefits
- Tell your customers why they should choose you over the competition.
What is your UVP? How do you set yourself apart from other staffing firms to continually win business? The step-by-step process below will help you discover or solidify your UVP and develop a business development strategy that consistently wins business.
Step 1: Develop the Profile of your Ideal Client
The ideal client doesn’t have a universal definition. It’s different for every recruiting firm and is dependent on your situation, resources and goals. But generally, when a buyer’s timeframe, budget and needs match perfectly with your availability, price and core capabilities, you’ve found your ideal client.
Sounds pretty simple, but it does take internal analysis and needs to be based on real data. One way to start is by identifying your top ten clients and then searching for commonalities among them.
Defining your ideal client allows you to invest smarter and narrow your focus to concentrate on prospects that you have a high probability of closing and fostering a successful ongoing relationship with. Your ideal client may, of course, evolve as your company does, so review and update this profile on a regular basis.
Step 2: Understand why Clients Choose you
Recruitment Management software and some CRM systems enable you to perform a win/loss analysis to gain data on what type of content or subject matters your ideal clients were interested in through their buying process. This will help you determine what topics resonate with your buyers and the best way to connect with them during their buying journey.
Look for trends among your won and lost opportunities. Are clients citing a referral, a perceived specialty or your knowledge of the industry as the reason they chose you? Are you losing deals because of pricing or experience? You will start to see trends emerge enabling you to identify the factors that lead to wins and the ones that contribute to losses.
Step 3: Target only your Ideal Clients
Once you’ve defined your ideal client, attracting buyers with those characteristics should dictate your entire business development strategy. Narrowing your focus may seem limiting as you will most likely have won clients that do not fit the profile. However, if you can focus all your energy, messaging and budget on only those that do, you will ultimately be more effective at winning and maintaining business that’s proven to be the most beneficial and lucrative for your firm.
Create messaging that amplifies trends that lead to wins and de-emphasizes factors that are leading to losses. This becomes part of your UVP. If you’re consistently winning clients because your customers or partners are recommending you to buyers, emphasize your strong community in your messaging. Conversely, if you’re consistently losing deals to competitors on price, de-emphasize it in your messaging by changing the conversation to value and ROI.
Step 4: Build and Nurture Relationships with your Ideal Clients
Once you’ve identified your ideal clients and understand what makes them choose you, it’s much easier to develop a strategy to build long-lasting relationships with them. The goals are of building relationships are to build trust and align your business and your customers’ businesses on as many levels as possible. Every interaction you have with clients should be contributing to your goals: trust and alignment.
Differentiating your company based on success rate, process, specialization, knowledge and other tangible attributes is important. However, what in many cases, ultimately wins business and keeps clients loyal is a strong emotional connection to you.
People buy from people. All the analysis, statistics, targeting and messaging is worthless if you are ineffective at using it to build strong relationships with your clients.
Step 5: Develop your Network to include Ideal Candidates for your Ideal Clients
Your ideal client profile should include a description of their ideal candidates. Part of your value to your client is your relationships with their ideal candidates. Focus on developing a strong network of candidates that fit the profile of the types of candidates your ideal clients typically want. Then nurture those relationships, establishing yourself as a trusted career advisor and someone worth knowing within their industries. The better you understand what motivates ideal candidates, the more successful you’ll be at matching them with clients.
Standing out in the competitive recruiting and staffing space is hard. However, if you put in the time and effort truly understand your clients and why they purchase from you, explain and prove your value to them, and foster strong relationships with them, you will stand out from the crowd, allowing organizations to select you for their recruiting needs over and over again.