How to differentiate yourself from the competition

Andy Preston

Recruiters are always looking to stand out from rival agencies. Andy Preston describes the ways agencies can differentiate themselves from the competition and win more business

“We’re happy with our current agency”, is heard all too often by recruiters, along with: “We get dozens of these calls every day,” and “We don’t use agencies”.

Here are some of the things you can do right now to be perceived as different from the competition, listened to by prospects and given some “airtime” by decision makers.

If you want to be seen as different, you need to sound different
Think about the opening lines from your calls and ask yourself, “is that really the best thing to say to get the decision maker interested and involved in my call?” Could there be something else you could use instead to get better results?

Be genuinely interested in the potential clients that you’re calling
Show an interest in the person you’re calling, and it needs to be a genuine interest in their business strategy and how you may be able to add value to that.

Make sure you are reliable
Merely doing what you said you were going to do would differentiate you from most of your competition for a start. I’ve lost count of the calls I’ve listened to where the consultant has agreed to do something, but then never actually does anything about it.

If you don’t like the “next action” that results from your call, that’s probably because the prospect defined it, not you. The thing is, by not doing it you look even worse than you did before. So do it (because you agreed to) and learn the lesson for next time.

Progress your calls
You should be looking at getting towards an outcome from each call, and with each call be moving the prospect closer to becoming a client. If 12 months or 24 months later they’re no closer to being that, what have you actually achieved?

Look after your clients (and your candidates) Whenever I’m talking to successful recruiters and top billers they all seem to agree that good consultants become more successful by looking after their existing clients and their candidates.

One of the biggest mistakes we can make is to think: “I’ve got that client on-board now, I’ll hand over the resourcing of it and most of the client contact and I’ll focus on getting more business in.”

As the market gets tougher and becomes more “candidate short” over the next year or so, existing candidates should be a great source of repeat or referral business. How many of you have even spoken to your old candidates since you last placed them? Remember, looking after your existing clients and candidates should be the easy part of your role, leading to enough repeat and referral business to hit your targets. Add to that an element of new business and you’re laughing.

Andy Preston is a UK sales trainer with clients including BMW, HSBC and Nissan