Go-to-Market Strategies for Staffing and Recruiting Firms
As staffing and recruiting firm owners, you know all too well how challenging it is to stand out in a crowded market. Everyone talks about differentiation, but creating a marketing strategy to carve out a clear niche and gain brand recognition in today’s staffing landscape is a top pain point for many executives in your position.
We believe differentiating your business in the market has to start with empowering your sales team with targeted messaging that speaks directly to the needs of your prospective clients. That’s where a refined go-to-market (GTM) strategy that focuses on your clients’ pain points and goals can be the key to unlocking more meaningful meetings, higher quality opportunities, and ultimately, accelerated growth.
We’ve been helping staffing firms like yours sharpen their GTM strategy for almost two decades. From that experience, we’ve built this roadmap to help you optimize your GTM strategy to ensure your sales team is well equipped to attract and convert more new business opportunities.
Deal With Data Management and Pipeline Cleanup
Your CRM is probably a mess. This is the ugly truth no one really wants to talk about. First things first: you’re not alone – most small to medium businesses have CRMs that are a mess. Throw in the added complexities of being a staffing business, with a CRM that may contain a mix of clients and candidates that goes back for years, and, well, that’s a whole other level of data mayhem. So, the first step on this road map is improving your ability to leverage your data. That means you need to invest in cleaning up your CRM. By removing outdated info and ensuring your data is up to date, your sales team can zero in on real opportunities and close deals faster.
Cleaning up your CRM helps your sales reps stop wasting time on dead leads and focus on opportunities that can truly move the needle. It will allow you to understand your ROI at a granular level and identify your most effective messaging, channels, and campaigns.
Take Action Now: Allocate the time and human resources to clean up your CRM. (Outsource it to a marketing team if you can’t free up an internal team member.) Set clear parameters for what stays and what goes: for example, if you’ve been targeting a prospect for five years and they’ve never opened an email, do you need to keep them in your CRM? Remove dead contacts, bounce-backs, etc. Refine and validate your dispositioning/status tags so it will be easy to slice and dice data by client/prospect/candidate.
Assess and Understand Your Client Segments
Picture this: you’re out fishing – but instead of casting your line carefully into waters known to be teeming with the fish you’re after, you’re trolling along randomly chumming your wake with bait and hoping for the best. That’s what happens when you don’t segment your client base effectively. For your messaging to really resonate, you first need to understand not just your broad audience, but the subsets of your audience. Each segment has its own needs and, in order to target your messaging successfully, each requires a tailored approach.
Most staffing firms will have three key client segments:
- Current Clients: The ones who are already in your boat. These clients can be upsold or cross-sold with additional services that address and support their evolving challenges.
- Inactive Clients: Think of these as your old fishing spots—they haven’t been touched in a while, but the fish might still be there if you know how to attract them again.
- New Prospects: These are the undiscovered lakes. Finding ways to reach them with targeted, compelling messaging can open up whole new growth channels.
Take Action Now: You’ve cleaned up your CRM so now it’s time to dive deep into your data so you can craft specific outreach strategies for each group. Do the work to identify buyer personae within your segments, map out the buyer journey for each segment, and categorize your contacts appropriately. Explore the trends within each segment – what has been working, what hasn’t been working, where are the gaps and opportunities.
Refine Client Engagement with Multi-Channel Strategies
Let’s face it: the days of relying on a single approach to win clients are long gone. Maybe, back in the day, a creative cold calling strategy was all you needed to build your business, but today’s successful sales teams are using multi-channel strategies to create a broader, more engaging touchpoint experience. The goal, after all, is differentiation. Your GTM is about standing out in the marketplace – and that means generating awareness and consideration that your sales team will convert into new business.
Sticking with the fishing metaphor… imagine each channel as a different lure in your tackle box: email campaigns, LinkedIn messages, phone calls, even SMS. The right lure at the right time in the right place can make all the difference in attracting the right kind of client. The metaphor holds up – you’re going to use different lures for different fish, and the lure that works on a bright sunny day in the afternoon might not work on an overcast morning. It’s the same with your channel mix: you’re going to deploy different tactics as needed, depending on the target and the specific scenario. A well-placed, personalized LinkedIn message might hook a lead who’s been unresponsive to emails. Or a phone call following a targeted email campaign might be the one-two combo that lands your sales exec a meeting.
Take Action Now: Develop a multi-channel engagement plan for each of the audience segments you have identified in the step above. Invest the time in drafting the touchpoints and timing for each audience segment, and then take that one step further and refine by buyer persona. Tailor your approach to where each client is in the buyer’s journey by leveraging the dispositioning/status tags in your CRM.
Streamline Your Sales Process with Automation and Tech Stack Integration
Any (perhaps every) sales exec will tell you that sales is a grind. It’s widely accepted that it takes 8-12 touches to convert a lead to a client. Your sales exec will thank you for automating even a third of those. Eliminating tedious tasks through automation enables your sales team to focus their highest-value activities. Tools like HubSpot and ZoomInfo allow your team to track prospect engagement, automate email and other text-based touchpoints, automatically schedule follow-ups, and ensure no opportunity slips through the cracks. No more guessing which prospect is in an active buying cycle – the data will point the way. No more sales exec time spent logging emails – the system will not only manage the workflow; it will alert your sales rep when a prospect opens or engages with your material. The bottom line is: integrating CRM tools and lead management systems reduces grind, improves sales team engagement, and drives revenue. Win. Win. Win.
Take Action Now: Now is the time to invest in a marketing platform like Hubspot and/or a lead forensics tool like ZoomInfo (if you haven’t already) and then ensure that your sales and marketing tech stack is fully integrated. Your sales funnel should be mapped out clearly, with automated workflows that ensure follow-ups happen at precisely the right time. This allows your team to focus their energy where it matters most: building relationships and closing deals.
Elevate Sales Enablement by Aligning GTM Strategy and Messaging
A go-to-market strategy is your roadmap, providing clarity on who your target audience is, what their pain points are, and how your firm can solve their challenges. This clarity informs your sales enablement messaging as well as informing how and when you deploy that messaging to maximize the conversion of leads to clients.
By crafting a targeted GTM strategy, you ensure that your sales reps go to market with the right messaging, aimed at the right audience, and delivered through the right channels. It’s like giving them a GPS for success instead of having to rely on an outdated paper map.
Take Action Now: Start by reviewing your sales enablement materials. Are they built around your clients’ unique challenges and goals – including specific messaging for each audience segment? Does your team understand how to tailor their message to resonate with each audience? Map the messaging out by target audience, by channel, and by buyer persona. For current clients, highlight how you can continue to add value. For inactive ones, revisit their past pain points, and offer fresh solutions. For new prospects, create a highly personalized narrative that grabs attention from the get-go.
The best GTM strategies are those that continuously evolve based on data and feedback. Implement these steps, and you’ll be well on your way to sustainable, scalable growth. If getting started seems overwhelming or you don’t have available team cycles to tackle the work, reach out. We can help.