Overcoming Staffing Sales Objections – a Strategic Approach

ThinkstockPhotos-87346172According to Staffing Industry Analysts, The US temporary staffing industry will grow 6% in 2015 to reach a market size of $115.0 billion and placement and search growth is projected to reach 10% this year, as the economy improves. 

Staffing, search and placement are up – and that’s great news! But it doesn’t mean that your account managers are finding it any easier to close sales. In fact, they probably encounter staffing objections like these every day:

“We’re not hiring.”
“Your price is too high.”
“We can do this on our own.”

As the economy, employment market and the nature of work change, so will the staffing objections your team hears – but your approach to overcoming them shouldn’t.

So today, rather than providing specific scripts or answers to sales objections, I’m sharing four higher level, long-term approaches. If you invest the time, energy and resources now in a strategic approach for overcoming objections, you’ll position your sales team for success in any market conditions.

1. Properly train your sales team. I can’t stress this first point enough. Provide formal and ongoing training to ensure your account reps:

  • Understand the nuances of today’s complex staffing industry.
  • Know how to diagnose clients’ “pain points” (i.e., their biggest workforce challenges).
  • Understand how your services solve business problems for clients.
  • Know how to use your marketing arsenal (explained below) to address specific client challenges or objections.

PREMIUM CONTENT: Most Attractive Staffing Markets

2. Build your marketing arsenal. Develop a variety of resources your sales team can use to:

  • Support its claims with statistics and case studies – the solid evidence skeptical buyers need.
  • Educate prospects about the strategic value of staffing and recruiting services.
  • Demonstrate how your firm solves business problems (and doesn’t merely “fill orders”).
  • Build relationships by sharing information that makes prospects more successful.

What should your marketing arsenal consist of? Here are a few of the elements in PrideStaff’s toolkit:

  • Dynamic website with responsive design
  • Content and email marketing, featuring custom e-newsletters and e-books
  • Research reports on national staffing, hiring and workforce management trends
  • Regularly updated, customized sales collateral
  • Direct mail programs to open doors for sales reps
  • Comprehensive blogging and social media marketing programs

If it sounds like a lot, it is. We know from experience, however, that sound marketing investments pay for themselves many times over. They help sales professionals leverage their time more effectively, build stronger relationships, effectively overcome common sales objectives and close more business.

3. Integrate sales and marketing with a formal plan. Here are a few tips for aligning your sales and marketing functions to maximize effectiveness:

  • Break down silos. Remove the cultural, management and process barriers that isolate your sales and marketing teams. To increase buy-in, explain how working in tandem can help everyone achieve better results.
  • Strategize. Bring sales and marketing together to discuss key sales targets and the biggest obstacles to achieving them (including sales objections sales reps are encountering). Work as a team to brainstorm tactics for both departments to achieve the goals you establish.
  • Outline follow-up plans for account managers. Too often, sales professionals don’t know how to effectively leverage the tools marketing develops. Give them the direction they need. For example, if marketing creates a campaign to address the “we can recruit on our own” objection, have them write up a detailed, corresponding action plan for sales people to make the most of it.
  • Hold your sales team accountable. The most creative marketing program in the world won’t help your account managers overcome objections if they don’t use it. Follow up to make sure sales reps are executing steps properly. Find out what’s helping them to address concerns they hear in the field – and what’s falling flat – to refine marketing’s efforts. In time, your sales team will become adept at using your company’s marketing machine to neutralize objections.

4. Stop playing the commodity game. PrideStaff decided a long time ago that we wouldn’t focus on low-price, high-volume staffing business. Instead, we continually develop ways to deliver better talent and more value to our clients.

Though positioning your firm as a value supplier in the market requires a sophisticated approach, you can do the same thing – and overcome common sales objections related to price or margins. Move out of the role of “vendor” and into the role of “partner,” by training your account managers to:

  • Refocus conversations about price or margins to the strategic value your services offer.
  • Provide solutions that improve a client’s profitability by either driving revenues or reducing expenses.
  • Explain how your recruiting, screening or selection processes enable you to deliver higher quality talent. This last point is exceptionally important in today’s candidate market. According to research cited in a recent HBR.org post, a top performer can deliver up to 400% more productivity than an average employee. If your firm can place talent that is even 50% more productive than another staffing service, price-related objections will disappear.

MORE: How to raise your NPS score

 

 

Tammi Heaton

Tammi Heaton
Tammi Heaton is COO of PrideStaff. She can be reached at theaton (at) pridestaff (dot) com.

Tammi Heaton

Share This Post

Tweet

Recent Articles

21 Responses to “Overcoming Staffing Sales Objections – a Strategic Approach”

  1. … [Trackback]

    […] Read More on|Read More|Read More Infos here|Here you can find 9536 additional Infos|Infos to that Topic: thestaffingstream.com/2015/04/06/overcoming-staffing-sales-objections-a-strategic-approach/ […]

  2. … [Trackback]

    […] Read More on|Read More|Find More Informations here|Here you can find 74949 additional Informations|Infos on that Topic: thestaffingstream.com/2015/04/06/overcoming-staffing-sales-objections-a-strategic-approach/ […]

  3. … [Trackback]

    […] Find More here|Find More|Read More Informations here|There you can find 13034 additional Informations|Infos to that Topic: thestaffingstream.com/2015/04/06/overcoming-staffing-sales-objections-a-strategic-approach/ […]

  4. colege11 says:

    … [Trackback]

    […] Find More here|Find More|Read More Informations here|There you can find 76160 additional Informations|Informations on that Topic: thestaffingstream.com/2015/04/06/overcoming-staffing-sales-objections-a-strategic-approach/ […]

  5. … [Trackback]

    […] Read More on|Read More|Read More Infos here|There you will find 17194 additional Infos|Infos to that Topic: thestaffingstream.com/2015/04/06/overcoming-staffing-sales-objections-a-strategic-approach/ […]

  6. … [Trackback]

    […] Read More here|Read More|Read More Infos here|Here you will find 84672 more Infos|Infos on that Topic: thestaffingstream.com/2015/04/06/overcoming-staffing-sales-objections-a-strategic-approach/ […]

  7. … [Trackback]

    […] Find More on|Find More|Find More Informations here|There you will find 93798 more Informations|Infos on that Topic: thestaffingstream.com/2015/04/06/overcoming-staffing-sales-objections-a-strategic-approach/ […]

  8. … [Trackback]

    […] Read More here|Read More|Find More Informations here|There you will find 80817 additional Informations|Infos on that Topic: thestaffingstream.com/2015/04/06/overcoming-staffing-sales-objections-a-strategic-approach/ […]

  9. … [Trackback]

    […] Read More on|Read More|Read More Infos here|There you can find 71515 additional Infos|Infos on that Topic: thestaffingstream.com/2015/04/06/overcoming-staffing-sales-objections-a-strategic-approach/ […]

  10. … [Trackback]

    […] Read More on|Read More|Find More Informations here|Here you will find 4475 more Informations|Infos to that Topic: thestaffingstream.com/2015/04/06/overcoming-staffing-sales-objections-a-strategic-approach/ […]

  11. iq home says:

    … [Trackback]

    […] Read More on|Read More|Read More Infos here|Here you will find 61712 more Infos|Infos on that Topic: thestaffingstream.com/2015/04/06/overcoming-staffing-sales-objections-a-strategic-approach/ […]

  12. Arab_Eng says:

    … [Trackback]

    […] Find More on|Find More|Read More Infos here|There you can find 95238 more Infos|Infos on that Topic: thestaffingstream.com/2015/04/06/overcoming-staffing-sales-objections-a-strategic-approach/ […]

  13. ADME Assays says:

    … [Trackback]

    […] Find More on|Find More|Find More Informations here|Here you will find 25710 additional Informations|Infos to that Topic: thestaffingstream.com/2015/04/06/overcoming-staffing-sales-objections-a-strategic-approach/ […]

  14. … [Trackback]

    […] Read More on|Read More|Read More Infos here|There you will find 23347 more Infos|Infos to that Topic: thestaffingstream.com/2015/04/06/overcoming-staffing-sales-objections-a-strategic-approach/ […]

  15. … [Trackback]

    […] Read More on|Read More|Find More Infos here|Here you will find 60746 more Infos|Infos on that Topic: thestaffingstream.com/2015/04/06/overcoming-staffing-sales-objections-a-strategic-approach/ […]

  16. … [Trackback]

    […] Find More here|Find More|Find More Informations here|Here you can find 16439 more Informations|Informations to that Topic: thestaffingstream.com/2015/04/06/overcoming-staffing-sales-objections-a-strategic-approach/ […]

  17. … [Trackback]

    […] Find More on|Find More|Read More Informations here|Here you will find 51435 additional Informations|Infos on that Topic: thestaffingstream.com/2015/04/06/overcoming-staffing-sales-objections-a-strategic-approach/ […]

  18. … [Trackback]

    […] Find More on|Find More|Find More Infos here|There you will find 4244 more Infos|Infos to that Topic: thestaffingstream.com/2015/04/06/overcoming-staffing-sales-objections-a-strategic-approach/ […]

  19. mold removal says:

    … [Trackback]

    […] Read More here|Read More|Read More Infos here|Here you can find 85893 additional Infos|Informations on that Topic: thestaffingstream.com/2015/04/06/overcoming-staffing-sales-objections-a-strategic-approach/ […]

  20. … [Trackback]

    […] Read More here|Read More|Read More Informations here|Here you can find 11207 more Informations|Infos to that Topic: thestaffingstream.com/2015/04/06/overcoming-staffing-sales-objections-a-strategic-approach/ […]

  21. My Homepage says:

    … [Trackback]

    […] Find More Informations here: thestaffingstream.com/2015/04/06/overcoming-staffing-sales-objections-a-strategic-approach/ […]

Powered by staffingindustry.com ·