Stand Apart and Create Demand
Most sales excuses from staffing professionals
become reality due to one overwhelming reason:
They have done little—if anything—to demonstrate why they are different from the competition. If clients or prospects have no other way to
differentiate potential service providers, then they
fall back on the only thing they can—price.
What sets your firm apart? What are your
strengths? What recent successes can you share
to prove your points? Examples of differentiators
include:
n Industry specialization or niche
n Service team experience and tenure
n High-profile clients and outcomes
n Company awards, such as Best in Staffing or
other quality or service awards
If a staffing firm hasn’t created demand for its
services, then it has little to no leverage for
the negotiation process.
Eights Close-the-Deal Tactics
Once your firm has educated the prospect on
why you are the best choice and you’ve created
demand, you are ready to begin negotiating. Here
are eight techniques you can use to level the playing
field and preserve your profit margins.
Make the first offer. Conventional
wisdom tells us that we should try to
get our prospects to make the first offer.
This, in theory, gives us an advantage because it
exposes a starting point. In the staffing industry,
this usually means asking prospects what their
current mark-ups are, what fee percentage they
are used to, or what bill rate you need to meet to
win their business.
However, several recent studies have shown that
the party that makes the first offer actually is in a
stronger position because, even though it may be
rejected, it tends to set the bar on which all future
negotiations are based. Subconsciously, both sides
will tend to be influenced by that initial offer, so
it is to your advantage to set your price early and
confidently.
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Additionally, if a staffing firm hasn’t created
demand for its services, then it has little to no
leverage for the negotiation process. You know
you want a prospect’s business, but you have
to assume that the prospect doesn’t really care
whether it works with you or another staffing
firm. Therefore, creating demand for your services—and your firm’s services in particular—is
critical.
Create demand by identifying your differentiators and presenting them in a way that matters
most to the prospect or client. In other words,
there’s no turnkey solution; you must do the work
of customizing how you present your firm’s value
each and every time.
As a sales representative early in my career, I
used to lead a pitch with our technology-related
services and the ability for our clients to run
reports anytime they wanted. Turns out the vast
majority didn’t care and really still wanted us to
run reports for them. Make sure your differentiators truly make you better than your competition, and that these factors resonate with your
prospect.
Make an aggressive counteroffer. If you
can’t make the first offer in a negotiation, then your next move may be to
make a strong counteroffer. This can be coupled
with a visible response of surprise, as if to infer
that the offer is unreasonable. “Wow, that’s going
to be pretty difficult to even get in the ballpark
of that number. I might be able to get in the ‘X’
range.” Remember from tactic No. 1 that the bar
is set with that first offer. With this tactic you are
trying to reset the bar, and the best way to do that
is by casting doubt on the validity of the first offer.
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Home in on what the prospect wants
to accomplish. We have a tendency to
automatically assume that a lower price
is the primary objective for our prospect or client.
While that is the case in some situations, often
there are other goals that are driving the other side
of these negotiations.
Several years ago, amid a contract renegotiation
with a client, the procurement manager and I came
to impasse on price. Finally, he confessed that he
needed a “win” because his performance review
(and eventually his bonus) would be based on his
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