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Creating Certainty in Uncertain Times, Part 5: Integrate Your Content

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This series is all about creating certainty – in sales, recruiting, and cash flow.

You need to build a sales and recruiting engine that powers your company, enables your salespeople and recruiters to achieve greater results (without incessant cold calling), and strengthens your business so that you thrive in the months and years to come. 

Not sure where to start? This is the last post in this series, walking through the steps you need to take – but if you missed the beginning, start there.

Related Posts in This Series:

Creating Certainty in Uncertain Times, Part 1: Define Your Positioning 

Creating Certainty in Uncertain Times, Part 2: Define Your Brand

Creating Certainty in Uncertain Times, Part 3: Build Your Visibility (And Authority!)

Creating Certainty in Uncertain Times, Part 4: Optimize Your Conversion Paths 

How to build your sales and recruiting engine

Step 4: Integrate your content into your sales process

While I’d love to tell you that you can build a sales engine in staffing and recruiting entirely with digital marketing, I can’t. Our industry is too competitive to ignore the role and importance of salespeople and recruiters. 

However, in an industry as competitive as staffing and recruiting, adding content into the mix can make a HUGE difference in the effectiveness of your sales efforts. Here are a couple of strategies for integrating content into your sales process for maximum impact: 

1. Integrated Direct Marketing

With this technique, you create a structured, multi-step sales process that integrates outbound marketing (mail, email, social messaging) with sales calls to make your sales efforts more productive.

You use direct marketing to capture the attention and interest of targeted prospects (essentially, to warm sales leads). Then marketing is used after the sales call to keep your company top-of-mind, demonstrate your positioning, and build your authority. After all, staffing is rarely a one-call close!

 

Here’s a webinar we did a few years back about integrated direct marketing:  Watch our Lunch with Haley webinar: Direct Marketing Campaigns  
 
 

2. Assignment Selling

This is a concept I learned from that Marcus Sheridan book I noted earlier. According to Marcus, assignment selling is the process of using educational content to resolve the major concerns and answer the burning questions your prospects have (before the sales call), so they are much more prepared for a sales appointment.

In some cases, you are literally giving your prospects a homework assignment (required reading or videos to watch) before you agree to a sales meeting. And if it is not required homework, you can still provide prospects with lots of information to show that you: understand their concerns, have answers to their likely questions, are honest and transparent, and that you are an expert at what you do (your content demonstrates that warmth and competence mentioned earlier).

In looking at buyer trends, one of the things Marcus learned was that his salespeople had two groups of prospects with very different close rates. One group had a close rate around 25%, and these people had only visited a small number of web pages prior to the sales call. The other group had a close rate of 80% and they had visited 30 pages or more prior to the sales call.

In other words, the more people know about you and your services, and the more they have engaged with your content, the more likely they are to buy. So in your sales process, you want to be leveraging all that content you are creating to build your authority.

 

Want to read more about Assignment Selling? 
Check out this article: https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/what-is-assignment-selling

(And yes, I am promoting content from another company that provides marketing services. They are smart and have great ideas. I’d be doing you a disservice if I did not share! )

 

Creating Certainty for Your Staffing Company 

I’d love to conclude this series by taking out my crystal ball and telling you exactly what the rest of 2020 and 2021 will look like. Sadly, my crystal ball appears to be broken! 

However, regardless of what the world throws at us during the coming months, we can make it positive. We may not be able to control the future, but we can control how we react! 

  • We can choose to maintain an enthusiastic outlook for the possibilities of the future. 
  • We can refine our mission and vision to be laser focused on where we are going and how we want to get there. 
  • We can build on each of our company’s strengths and find more ways to deliver value. 
  • We can determine our positioning and better control our brand message. 
  • We can build authority around topics that matter to our clients, prospects and candidates. 
  • We can increase our visibility through content creation and digital marketing. 
  • We can provide tools and processes that make our salespeople and recruiters more productive. 
  • We can choose to outwork, out smart and out hustle the competition. 

I hope you find these ideas helpful. And one last giveaway to wrap up this article. If you need help developing your plan, please download a copy of our 2020 Vision workbook here. This will guide you through the process of creating a strategic sales and marketing plan for your business. 

The next several months will undoubtedly be challenging, but opportunity is everywhere. 

We’re here to help you seize it.

To brainstorm ideas or get expert advicecontact us today. 

Our Services: 

 

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