4 Ways to Radically Improve Your Billing Success
Some recruiters love placing candidates, networking, and looking after existing clients, but fear pitching for new business and proactively selling their services.
This ‘fear of selling’ hugely hampers the potential of many recruiters and ultimately gets in the way of them becoming top billers.
Yet there’s every possibility that you’re going about this all wrong. Your fear of selling is simply because you’re doing it (and thinking about it) the wrong way.
Sales is nothing to fear. Being a great salesperson is something to be proud of. Time to reframe the way you think about sales. This is not as hard as it sounds, so to help you on your way towards your new love affair with selling, we’ve put together a few key points to revolutionise the way you sell.
1. Stop thinking that being a salesperson is something to be ashamed of.
Our society tends to consider salespeople as pushy, talkative ‘used-car salesman’ types who will somehow trick us or railroad us into buying their product- even if we don’t really want it! There’s an excellent chance that that negative view has coloured your thinking about sales, even if on a subconscious level, so it’s time to re-frame your view.
Think about it: your recruitment service is important both to client and candidate, so why do you feel guilty for pitching that valuable service? Salespeople who are comfortable and happy with selling are the ones that succeed, so you need to genuinely embrace and value your selling side.
2. Stop talking about yourself so much and learn to ask and listen.
The brutal truth is that your prospective client or candidate doesn’t really care about how fantastic you and your services are except in how your services can positively affect them. For a client, the only thing that resonates is how your service can fix a recruitment problem they’re experiencing (perhaps a skills gap, high turnover, or a string of poor hires), while for a candidate what matters is how your client network can land them their ideal job.
The crucial key is for a great salesperson is to identify what the customer needs and desires, and recruitment is no different. In order to know, you’ll have to ask lots of good questions, and carefully listen to the answers. When it’s time to make your offering, don’t waffle about the extraneous details and extra services that don’t affect their key needs: just make a tailored, precise pitch that answers exactly their requirements. No more, no less.
3. Don’t go into ‘sales mode’. Ever.
You might be having a nice chat with a new client or passive senior candidate and building up rapport, but then you decide that as it’s going so well, it’s time to close the deal. Your tone of voice changes, you become a bit pushier, and you probably revert to some kind of scripted closing speech you’ve used before.
The target notices the abrupt change and feels tricked, rushed, or pressured, and they’ll immediately back off and start putting up defenses or making excuses about why they’re not ready to use your service. The second you switched into sell mode you created their resistance to buying! The moral of the story: don’t change the style that’s working for you: retain that friendly conversational style (or whatever communication style is working) right through the sales process.
4. Don’t rush them.
Many of us are brought up in the traditional school of sales thinking that if you let the target get off the phone, then all is lost. So we get pushy and try to stop them from hanging up, forgetting entirely that there is an actual person with actual responsibilities on the other end of the line, who might be busy with a project or stressed about something else entirely.
Pick up on the human cues—does the person sound like they’re concentrating on what you’re saying, or are they preoccupied and trying to get away? If the latter, then you have to ask what you possibly think you’ll achieve by having this chat right now? Ask them what a better time to chat is, and reschedule the call to show that you understand they’re busy.
If you can learn to enjoy and value the sales side of your job rather than fear it, you will become a top-billing recruiter in record time.
Until next time,
Cheryl