How-To Tips

Stop overspending on customer acquisition and underspending on customer retention! Did you know that companies are more likely to allocate 6 times as much to the expense of generating new customers than they do to the much less expensive process of trying to retain their customers.

This article offers ideas on how to stop losing customers to your competitors.

Tired of hearing this from your prospects?

In this issue of the Idea Club, we tackle one of the toughest challenges you’re facing–clients who have no plans to hire.

So what can you do to create more opportunities to sell your services?

Who are the top five users of staffing services in your market? OK, that’s an easy one. But can you name the top five small companies that are about to expand and need flexible staffing solutions? Stumped? Here’s how you can find out—for FREE!

In your market, there are undoubtedly hundreds (if not thousands) of small businesses. While most probably don’t need your services today, they will—at some point. Your challenge is to discover the rising stars, and hitch your wagon…before the competition even knows they exist!

Let’s say 2004 turns out to look a lot like 2003 (or even worse, 2002). What will that mean to you? It means that business will be harder to find. And it means that you’re going to continue to have to work harder for every dollar you earn.

To thrive in this kind of environment, here a few rules you need to follow

This article explores the kinds of paradigm shifts that you can initiate to build and manage a process of quality. It is a process that once instituted can insure your staffing service a leadership role in your market.

Strategic selling is much more than taking and filling a specific order. It involves developing a deep-rooted commitment to understanding what challenges are creating roadblocks for your client, to exploring these problems, and to supplying solutions that will help your customer be more successful. Read on to explore strategic selling and how it can strengthen your relationships with your top client companies.

Your customer places 10 orders per year for the services you provide—what percentage of them go to you? If the answer is anything less than 100%, you’re missing an opportunity!

The cost of getting business from an existing client is a fraction of the cost of getting business from a prospect. To boost sales, without dramatically increasing expenses, focus on maximizing customer share—capturing a greater percentage of each client

Your service does not differentiate you.

When it comes to service, anything you can do, your competitors can copy. And anything they do well, you’re going to copy. As a result, all the best staffing companies tend to do things in a very similar manner, making it nearly impossible to differentiate service quality among the top performers. While exceptional service will distinguish you from average staffing companies, it won’t separate you from the top 10 or 20 percent of staffing firms in your market.

So what can you do?

"We made 100 cold calls this week, had twelve really good face-to-face appointments, and still we closed no new business. What are we doing wrong?" Sound familiar?

Pretty easy to see why sales people feel frustrated. They’re using transactional selling techniques (cold calling and order taking) in a market that isn’t buying. And rather than changing their techniques to deal with market conditions, they’re being told to simply do more. These poor people are fighting an uphill battle and relying on outdated tools. It’s time to change

Familiarity breeds stagnation. Often the more we know about a subject, the less we are open to new ideas or innovative concepts. When you hire a new employee, that person generally starts with unique, creative ideas but after a few months their innovation gets lost within the culture of the organization. His naivete disappears. How do you get your employees back to that naïve point of view and why should you care about encouraging this kind of thinking?