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[Music] hey what's up everybody it is Dan Mory from the nationville Independent Staffing Association and Staffing monthly I wanted to take a moment just to talk about some of the headwinds that we are moving into as it relates to the selling environment for Staffing as we move into 2024 I know that some of you have already felt the sort of resistance or the headwinds of sales challenges coming out of 2023 however when I was looking at some of the most recent data put out there by the Staffing industry analysts and specifically their pulse reports I wanted to draw your attention to a couple of key things as it relates to sales and maybe give you some insights in how to how to best prepare your yourself or your people for the tough selling environment that is up ahead so first I just want to take a look at this report so this is actually the the Staffing industry analyst pulse survey from November 2023 that actually shows you essentially the last decade of sentiment as sales versus recruiting difficulty okay this is taking a look at this and they survey a whole whole bunch of Staffing professionals and they're really just getting their sentiment about how they feel about how difficult it is to sell versus recruit right and then they plot this on there and the point I want to make is that for the last decade and if you could actually went back a little bit further probably was a little bit beyond that it has been perceived to be harder to recruit than it has been to sell in this industry uh with the exception being during the pandemic obviously we all know that during the kind of the throws of the pandemic in 2020 there was really an 8 to 10 Monon period there where it was really really really hard to sell and that's where you could actually see this Spike which is what I want to I want to kind of zero in on here as we're looking at this you can see that during that period it was really really hard to sell it was a little bit easier to recruit um however something just happened uh in the middle point of the year and it started to to widen it is actually becoming harder to sell than it is recruit based on the actual sentiment of your peers of the Staffing industry responding to the uh the PLL survey and this is only going to continue to widen as we move through 2024 uh and it's actually expected to be the long-term Trend going forward to where the the difficulty in selling is actually going to be harder than recruiting so if that's the case if you are a leader of an organization or a sales leader or even a sales professional you have to be wondering how are you going to hit your goals how are you going to grow your Revenue right and a lot of times people will see this and they'll think that the reason that it's harder to sell is because the market is just hardening you know if you go back to the Great Recession of 0809 you know back to one of the last significant times where the it was harder to sell than recruit it was during those times unemployment was really really high companies weren't adding the jobs you know month over month like they are today so this is a different type of reluctance this is a different type of headwind that we're facing because even if you look at right now at the end of 2023 the the national unemployment rate was 3.7 anything below 4% is basically considered Rock Bottom like it really doesn't get more optimal than than where we're at right this is about as low as it's going to get so the available Workforce is is they're there they're they're there they're working they're placed right so now recruiting is going to have to be moving people from one job to another job more so than it ever has been and in addition to such a low unemployment rate the country has been adding you know on average 200,000 jobs a month for the last all year all 2023 maybe even a little bit higher than that so if you think about that we're not in a situation where employers don't need talent we're not in a situation where our clients our customers don't have demand the demand is there and the supply is not matching the demand we still have nearly 10 million unfilled jobs in this country so when you think about the fact that there is such a low unemployment rate there's a massive gap between of unfilled jobs and there's still steadily adding new jobs every single month in the clip of 200,000 you know adding to that Gap what we have is a market that is ripe for selling staffing yet it seems to be harder and harder why is is that why do you think it's harder to sell today when the demand is probably at an all-time high I'll tell you the main reason why is because there are still legitimate concerns about a recession there are still legitimate concerns about economic volatility right however the demand is there that doesn't need that doesn't change the fact that they still need the people what it changes is company's mindset for spending money and if they look at spending money on Staffing as an expense it's going to get cut however if they look at spending money on Staffing and recruiting as an investment necessary to their growth and a valuable service it won't it'll get prioritized right so what's happened here if you think about coming off the the pandemic not that long ago when it was actually much harder to to sell and then it kind of came back down it was becoming easier to sell the reason why is there was a lot of price competitiveness there was a lot of commoditization and I know we've been commoditizing ourselves for a long period of time but it got even worse going through the pandemic because everybody overreacted everyone started you know dropping their price and doing all of you know these kind of price competition games and what happened is it devalued the service of the industry okay so we got into this this mindset to where we were essentially racing to the bottom trying to capture business because we had the scarcity mindset and we were reducing our price just to try to get business in the door to be able to hit our growth goals right and that's sort of natural to think that way however to be counterintuitive you have to think about it the opposite way because the entire Market did that which is why you see that kind of that downward you know Trend why sales got easier and easier easier and it started getting harder because the market sort of bottomed out as far as pricing goes right and the only way that you can actually sell at a lower price is if you actually offer a lower price but I feel like everyone kind of took their prices down to the floor now the main main reason that we need to look at this is when you're attacking the market this way when you are focused on just kind of competing on price you're essentially commoditizing yourself and there is no strategic advantage to being the second low priced service provider there just isn't right and when everyone's doing that they're sort of racing to the bottom so if we want to break the cycle of commoditization and actually go out and capture this business we have to sell based on value and here's why it's not that the companies don't have the money to invest in Staffing and recruiting and it's not that they don't have the demand what they don't have is the belief that it's worth it and the reason that they don't believe that the staffing services is worth it is because most companies that they've talked to and most that they've worked with have actually commoditize themselves based on not differentiating themselves at all and actually providing a lackluster service right and there's a couple reasons in here that I want to talk about in the next few minutes but before I do that I want to talk about what actually happens when you decrease your price when you compete on price I want to walk you through the psychological process of what you're actually doing and then show you the physical tangible negative impact that it actually has on you your employees and your customers okay when you cut your price when you want to be the lowest price provider and you drop your price in order to compete to get business you actually decrease your client's emotional investment because you don't cost that much right because you actually are not a premium product so like they're looking at you like a commodity and nobody gets super excited about a commodity right so when you decrease your price you're actually decreasing your client's emotional investment in the service itself which means it's going to be a strain or weaken relationship that's going to be subject to higher scrutiny because you're a commodity which means you're interchangeable you're replaceable right so that's the first thing that happens when you decrease your price okay the second thing is you actually decrease your client's perceived value of your service because you're now cheap and or you cost the same as kind of the market so now you're you're kind of commodity pricing and if they feel like you're commodity you're you're basically decreasing their perceived value of your service okay so they're going to think less of you again strain relationship replaceable all that kind of stuff which is never a good spot to be in with your clients right so the next thing that you do when you decrease your prices you actually decrease the results that your clients get from your service because they're not as invested in you right they won't they won't they won't respond to you quickly they won't give you client feedback you know candidate feedback the way that they should they're not as invested or as engaged in the actual process as you need them to be to get the positive results so if you've ever felt like you're you're having a hard time getting candidate feedback or you're having a hard time the responses are just taking longer and longer that's an indicator that your clients don't value the service that you're providing to them right and a lot of times that actually comes just because you you priced at a commodity price point right so they don't they they you you have diminished their perceived value right and that's a that's a major issue right the next thing that you actually do when you actually focus on decreased pricing is you attract the worst clients you actually attract the type of clients that you really don't want to do business with these are the ones that are just never satisfied they literally want the the world for a penny right like that they just they they will keep hounding you and complaining and never being satisfied even if your service was free right like this just you you just attract those kind of clients when you you you know kind of decrease your prices and you just can't do that you know another issue that comes along with actually decreasing your prices and this gets to the tangible negative impact is once you decrease your prices you decrease your margin which means you no longer have the money that you need to provide an exceptional experience and service for your clients you don't have enough money to actually hire the best people in your industry and pay them appropriately you don't have the money to invest in training and development growth and growing your company you're literally trying to squeeze the proverbial blood out of a stone and there's just not enough money left at the end of the day and it creates a terrible experience for your clients a terrible experience for your employees and it's just going to be a race to the bottom for you and your company and you're going to be left kind of fighting for the scraps of all this commodity market pricing that's taking that's taking place right so I'm here to tell you like there is a way out of it you know and if you've actually gone through my value selling session negotiation sessions you've seen that it doesn't take that much of a price markup that much of a premium price to literally double the margin that you're actually getting which means you can have the work that you need to do in order to hit your goals and when you're facing in a market like we are today when there's such a a low supply of talent and a high demand we need to focus on actually being able to make as much money as possible with as little Talent as possible right and that's actually done through premium pricing not commodity pricing with commodity pricing you need to place a whole lot of people in order to make the money unfortunately there's not a whole lot of people to do it and now the clients that that want to pay commodity pricing they're just not as willing they're reluctant because they don't see the value anymore so we sort of did this to ourselves so this is where I want to talk to you about some of the sessions that are actually coming up at the Staffing sales Summit and what you can get from it if you choose to go that's up to you this is not a a pitch to to go to that event I just want to talk about the agenda items that are coming up and how you can use the the content from these sessions to be best prepared to face the sales Market of 2024 and these headwinds that we're running into right so obviously the first session with Tom herb is going to be sales mindset mindset is everything how you approach the market how you carry yourselves the the the vernacular that you have how you talk to clients it all starts with your mindset and if you have the right mindset to to frame your approach for Success you're more likely to be successful right and Tom is going to start the entire uh two-day Sal Summit off focusing on that just getting our mindset right to be prepared to learn all of the other techniques so we can leave the summit and use these techniques to grow and hit our goals and sell based on value and actually educate our clients to why our service is worth it and what they actually get out of it so they see it is a value investment versus an expense that they needs to cut okay so next one obviously we have Kim Henderson talking about how to sell s so Services statement of work services this is incredibly timely if you're not familiar with statement of work or S so this is a one of the fastest growing subsets in the Staffing industry and this happens off rate card if you actually work with a lot of vmss msps things like that and you feel like you're kind of boxed in or maybe you can't break in because they already have approved vendors and they're not onboarding anybody new right s so service is the answer you can still sell to those companies and sell them on a project basis and actually get your your contractors your temps your Associates into that client on a statement of work right so if you want to focus on growing and getting new clients or actually even expanding business with with your existing clients you know the only two ways to grow expanding your s so business is a great way to attack 2024 especially when you think about the buyer perspective thinking about the fact that they want to get value out of it they don't want these long-term expense commitments they they got to manage contracts got a manage spend they're kind of tightening the belt a little bit so Project based work s so-based work is is a way that they're they're tackling that so this is kind of meeting the clients where they're at meeting them on a project base or a statement of work based project to get your contractors in there and grow your business right now we also have uh John ruton from Avante talking about how to sell Staffing Services he's laying out the framework needed to sell Staffing services today in 2024 based on the headwinds that we're facing and John has been incredibly successful in selling Staffing services in his career before moving to aviante right he knows what it takes and he's going to be teaching you how to sell and go get new customers right so if you feel like getting new customers is the answer to your growth goal and facing these headwinds like like learn from John like he's going to teach you the the way to do it more efficiently right so you can be more successful now we also have uh one of one of my favorite topics that I think is underutilized in our industry we've got Jeff stots coming in talking about sales funnels right we this industry For Better or Worse tends to be a lagered with some of the modern themes out there one of which is marketing in sales integration and actually using marketing to drive leads into a sales funnel to nurture them and warm up these leads before your salespeople even make contact with them increasing the chance for a sale so if you actually learn how to build and deploy a sales funnel the right way you're going to be attracting the better clients warming them up before your salespeople even engage with them increasing the chances of closing them based on value not on price earning more money on those clients right just using digital tools and Jeff's going to teach us all about that side of it so that's going to help you grow that piece and it's gonna be another tool that you can run inefficiently it's just software right it's just technology so it's got a low cost High return and as we're navigating these kind of tougher selling times like that's those are the tools that we need to be thinking about deploying right lower cost higher return we're going to lead off day two with Rob gist from simple VMS and he has surveyed all of the users of VMS services that actually use hundreds and hundreds of Staffing services and he's asked them what is it that they're actually willing to pay for what are they buying when they work with us and I will tell you if if you've not heard my story in this industry when I first got into this and I was introduced to the Staffing industry uh by my business partner Francis Freeman I didn't even know anything about the Staffing industry I was literally the I could not have been more opposite for Staffing sales than I was at that moment and I had no clue I literally went out and I asked 25 prospects what they wanted from a staffing agency that was it I literally called out all these companies I'm like hey would you come in would you invite me in and let me ask you one question and they were like morbid curiosity they're like well what is that question like you got to invite me in so again they would invite me in and be like hey what is it that you really want out of a staffing agency and I would take all these notes and at the end of it like there was 25 different answers and I was like how do I be everything to everyone and then when I laid it out the picture was clear about how we needed to build a company that allowed us to scale tremendously in the top 2% of staffing agencies in the country especially being independently owned you know when you do that we realized I was just listening to the customer and a lot of times we actually forget to do that we forget to go back and just ask our customers or our prospects what do they need us to do for them right because after a while you get a level of expertise you feel good you you're an expert in your industry and you know how to provide the service but sometimes we just forget to keep going back and asking the customer it's called voice of the customer or customer Discovery depending on what school of thought you're from either way uh Rob from simple VMS is actually going to teach us what the customers are saying today that they find valuable and what they're willing to pay for from Staffing Partners and what they're not and this is going to help you not only craft your messaging and your marketing but your sales pitch and your value proposition to differentiate yourself so you can sell based on value can you imagine what it would be like what your sales pitch would sound like and how your customers would receive it if you actually walked into the meeting and you had intimate knowledge about what their challenges were and the value that they actually get out of Staffing Services can you see how that would sound and feel different and how that would differentiate you and you would come off as an expert and that is what we're trying to do we're trying to teach you how to do those things with that session obviously I'm on the agenda with my value selling it's just basically it's exactly that it's showing you how to sell based on value versus selling on price and if you feel like you've struggled with uh competing on price or maybe you're not quite sure how to differentiate your agency so you stand out and you're not quite sure how you can actually get a little bit better of a markup or Bill rate like that's the session for you I'm going to teach you like how to do those things right and a lot of it is just coming down to understanding you know what is the real value that you provide to the agents or to your clients not necessarily the service you're providing what I mean by it is what do your people do for your client and what value does that work product give to your client so if you're in light Industrial Staffing right and you're sending material handlers like what is the value of 20 material handlers getting widgets out of the the warehouse like what is the actual value of that to the client and what is the value in comparison to that actually not happening if they didn't have those 20 people like what would that look like right and that's the value the gain that they get out of the service that they pay from is the value and we talk all about that and how to differentiate yourself then we talk about Sales Management topics from Mark witer talking about how do you actually hire and onboard sales people the right way how do you build a strategic sales plan so you can deploy those sales people to be effective right uh Butler Street was on on uh stage of siia exec Forum last year and they talked about how less than 25% of sales people hit their sales goals well I think that we can see from some of the recent playoff failures that a lot of times it's not the actual producers fault it's the coach's fault and if sales managers don't know how to put together the right game plan for their salese to be successful in the environment that they're going into it makes sense as to why 75% or more of salespeople actually fail to hit their goals right so if you want to see how to change that like look at your Sales Management and your plan we're also going to be talking about and these are some of my two favorite sessions they're actually the afternoon of day two uh we actually have Robert Reed from Butler Street who I was just talking about talking about how to negotiate your way through the toughest objections right so if you're looking at this sales Summit and you're like man I this is it's expensive and you're right this is a premium event this is a there's a lot of know there's a lot of talent that's going to be taking the stage teaching people how to do this but if you could just take one nugget just from Robert Reed's session from Butler Street about it negotiating your way through the toughest objections and get just one more client that you wouldn't have gotten you're likely to have massive Roi from it or if you just learn how to negotiate rate increases and you can actually just increase your overall you know markup by 1% I mean that's a $10,000 Revenue gain for every million dollars of payroll you do right so massive Roi just learning these one or two little nuggets from this event that you can actually get so if you're looking it as an expense you're naturally going to be reluctant to not want to spend the money but if you see it as an investment then you'll understand how you actually can get the value out of it right uh and then the last one again if you're if you're going to grow there's only two ways to do it you got to get more clients or you got to get you know more business from the client you have Tom herb is going to be closing us out with his you know renowned workshop on maximizing existing clients how do you actually grow your existing clients vertically and expand horizontally throughout these clients and strengthen these relationships to grow your business you know so just kind of to to sum up is we're heading into a massive headwind and we're going to face significant resistance when it comes to selling Staffing services and it is not because there is not a need for our service there's not because there is not a a demand for it there is demand there is low Supply our pricing over the last year has not reflected that we've been out of balance by commoditizing our pricing because we failed to differentiate ourselves we failed to truly understand the value that uh we provide to our clients and we've not priced it ingly so now these companies are actually heading into economically uncertain times so they're being a little bit more wise in their spending and they need to justify it based on value they have to say hey what is the value we get out of partnering with these staffing agencies and if your salese don't know how to sell based on value you're going to really struggle to to get your you know new business or to grow your existing clients or to not compete on price so uh again I would encourage you to go to the the Staffing sales Summit it is going to be an amazing amazing event um however I understand it's not for everybody I I do understand that you know it is a premium event if you're looking at this and you can figure out how to send one person this is how I would tell you to maximize it this is a great strategy just to provide a little bit of value in this this video here a great strategy to do is to send that that person have them take notes and then literally set them up to do a lunch and learn you know tell them to say hey you need to pick the most three most powerful nuggets that we can Implement in our business immediately and then set up a lunch and learn each week when they get back to the office off to teach the rest of the team right and then teach the others how to do this and that's how you can get this information into your entire organization so um with that uh I hope that you recognize these Trends and I hope that you're now aware and this information can help you make better decisions about how to tackle the more difficult selling environment that we're heading into uh so you can be successful in 2024 and if you'd like to take that next step I would love to see you at the Staffing sales Summit in February on