This video will show you how to upload your email database to your HaleyMail account.

Adams & Garth, one of Virginia’s Leading Independent Staffing and Recruiting firms was looking to strengthen their position in existing markets and introduce a new office in Richmond, VA.  Their new corporate overview provides a strong introduction to their service offers in a unique format. 

Their Workforce Strategies Guide includes 24 pages, highlighting ways that companies can transform their staffing function into a significant source of competitive advantage.  The guide helps position Adams & Garth as a trusted advisor, instead of just another staffing vendor looking for an order.  Both of these brochures can be used as a print piece or an online eBook which can be emailed to prospects.

Tech2Resources was new to the market and wanted to establish a strong presence both online and in print.  Their new website is easy to navigate and provides a strong overview of their service offerings and key value proposition. 

http://tech2resources.com/

In conjunction with the website, Haley Marketing created sales collateral pieces that could be used both online and in print.  Each sell sheet offers a brief overview of services and carries through the same look and feel as the new website.

The Armada Group is a premier Silicon Valley-based professional services firm that helps companies implement their next generation technology strategy. They needed a website that displayed their unique technical competence and highlighted their core areas of specialization.

The new website uses an interactive movie on the homepage to walk through each of their service areas. In addition, video is used in key locations throughout the website to engage the visitor and present key points of differentiation. The website is also built on a Content Management System that allows for easy updates to content in order to keep things up-to-date and fresh.

Found a really cool tool on YouTube. Check us out!

Need help getting your staffing firm to the top of search results? Our SEO services can help get you there. Give us a call today!

Last week I posted a few thoughts on the value of formal market research for a staffing firm. While I expected the research folks to take me to task for my views, I was very pleased by the positive response from a couple of true experts in the field. So now on to part 2:

How to do Free Market Research for Your Staffing Firm

Before I get to the advice, let me preface my remarks by stating that what I am about to recommend is not scientifically valid market research. The sample sizes are too small, the likeliness of bias is significant, and you won’t be able to determine meaningful confidence intervals (see I still remember some of my statistics classes!). However, I do know from experience that the following process works. It will provide useful data, help you understand your real positioning in the market, illustrate where you need to make service improvements, and give you lots of testimonials and other data for future marketing.  Are you ready?

The Five Question Market Research Interview

For this research project, all you need to do is conduct a brief interview with about 20 to 30 people.* Here’s what you are going to ask:

1. When it comes to servicing your staffing needs, what do we do right?
2. Where are our “opportunities for improvement?”
3. With all the staffing firms out there, why did you choose us over the competition?
4. When we make a mistake, what is the impact on your business?
5. As you look forward to the next 12 months, what issues are you most concerned about?

Questions 1 and 2 are designed to help you understand the value your clients see in your services as well as your weaknesses. Most of their responses are going to be based on a combination of their experience with your team, and their comparison of your services to other staffing firms. You may find that people are reluctant to give you honest feedback to question 2 (because they like you!), but you can counter this issue by specifically telling people how much you value their candid input prior to asking the question.

Question 3 directly attacts the issue of differentiation. You really want to probe this one to understand all the aspects of your firm’s service that distinguish you from other staffing firms. If you get the generic “your service is really better” response, ask questions like “what is it about our service that makes us better?” You may also want to probe responses to question 3 by asking, “why is that important to you?” This will help you get a better understanding of the bottom line value of your points of differentiation.

Question 4 is designed to help you understand the impact of your services on your clients’ operations. The better you understand the implications of making a mistake, the deeper you will understand your value. You can also use this data to design new services (and new points of differentiation) that will help deliver a higher level of service and provide a greater value to your clients.

And finally, question 5 will help you to forecast the future and plan new and better services. Your goal in asking this question is to learn about the current challenges your clients are facing–and their fears about the future. The better you understand these things, the better you will be able to offers solutions and position your firm as a problem solver and trusted advisor. 

So what do you do with all this data?

This research project will yield a ton of great information about your company, your competitors, your clients and most importantly your current and potential value proposition. You want to analyze the responses to look for trends. Do people see you the way you want to be seen? Do they see your firm consistently? Are you delivering a clear and distinct value to the market? What aspects of your services are consistently the strongest? Where are your greatest opportunities to improve and develop new services?

When you know the answers to these questions, you can then proactively define your positioning message and craft a distinctive value proposition. This information should serve as the foundation of your marketing and sales efforts–and be fully reinforced by your service processes.

And while the process I have suggested is NOT statistically valid, it’s a great way to get closer to clients and prospects, learn more about your firm, and build the foundation for a solid marketing strategy.

* Why 20 to 30 people?

From a research perspective, there is no magic in this number. However, we have consistently seen that by the time you get 20 to 30 interviews completed, trends start to appear. You will see the same responses over and over, and when you stop seeing new answers (or you only see the occasional new response), there’s little value in asking more people for their opinions.

Ideally, your interviewee list will consist of a mix of:

• Your top current clients
• Current clients  who are occasional users of staffing
• Former clients
• Prospects you are trying to close (you’ll have to adjust the questions for prospects)

And you’ll also include a mix of different levels of decision makers – HR, hiring managers, executives, front line supervisors, etc.

Now if you have lots of branch offices, you might want to conduct this exercise within each office. You may discover that your positioning, points of differentiation and value proposition vary by office based on the way the local teams serve each market. 

You may also discover that different types of decision makers have very different views of your firm. If this is the case, you need to sit down with your leadership team, review the results, determine what parts of the feedback are the best fit with your business strategy, and then focus your sales, marketing and service on strengthening these points of differentiation.

I hope you like the free research idea, and if you try it, please let me know how it goes!

Great service alone won’t do it. With dozens (or even hundreds) of local competitors you need to have a sound strategy to get the attention and interest of prospective clients.

Join us on April 29, 2010 for our next Lunch with Haley Webinar:

Stand out. Stay top-of-mind. Sell more.

This webinar will show you want it takes to differentiate your services, and the specific things you need to do to make your firm stand out from the competition, stay top-of-mind with clients and prospects and integrate sales and marketing to sell more.

I had an interesting conversation today with one of the founders of a very successful LI staffing firm. Despite years of success, the owner feels like his company doesn’t have a very clear or distinct positioning message. He contacted us after attending the Staffing Industry Executive Forum because he heard we knew a thing or two about marketing and staffing.

What made the discussion interesting was the debate we had about the value of formal market research. And you might be surprised by my view, but more on that in a mnute…

First, the debate. The owner of this firm had been in contact with a very well-respected consultant who specialized in differentiation and branding. The consultant had recommended a multi-step research project consisting of in-person interviews with clients to determine possible points of differentiation based on the firm’s service delivery experience. This was to be followed-up by a double-blind study to validate potential sources of differentiation and positioning messages.

Sounds like a pretty good approach, doesn’t it?

Well, here’s the surprise. I did not think this research was worth the time or money. Don’t get me wrong. I am all in favor of conducting research and gathering market data on which to base decisions. But I think this specific investment would have been a giant waste of money (and all you marketing research folks, please rip me to shreds and tell me the error of my ways so I can learn more!).

Here’s my view:

• If you ask buyers of staffing what’s most important to them, they will tell you: candidate quality, responsive service, making the right match, and then about 5th or 6th on the list, price. (And I know, because we have done this research 2 different times with more than 900 staffing buyers each time).
• If you ask a staffing firm’s clients why they use a specific firm, they will most often tell you it’s about the service and/or the consistency of providing quality candidates (they almost never mention the price). They may also say it’s because of the staffing firm’s responsiveness or flexibility in providing solutions. (Again, we’ve seen these exact results with dozens of our clients).
• If you ask prospective clients what they value most in a staffing firm, they may give you a variety of answers, BUT how they will really act depends on their role. If they are in purchasing, it’s all about price. If they are in HR, it’s probably about price and your ability to deliver (unless they are in a small company, and it will be more about the relationship they have with specific people in your firm). And if they are in higher level management, they probably think that they don’t care that much about staffing decisions (and I apologize for the gross generalizations, but this is what we’ve heard over and over again the past 14 years).

Add it all up, you end up spending a lot of money to learn that staffing firms need to provide great candidates, excellent matches, responsive service, flexible solutions, and fair pricing.  And I think most staffing executives know this without spending anything on research.

So am I wrong? Let me know your thoughts.

PS: I’ll share another blog post soon with a way you can do this same kind of market research for free.

Q.  How can I use email to keep my firm top-of-mind–without annoying my clients and prospects?

A.  Did you know that email is the number one way that employers want to be contacted by staffing vendors?

When done correctly, email is an incredibly effective way to nurture relationships with clients and prospects. It can educate, add value, position your firm as an expert, and help you be seen a trusted advisor.

The key to using email to build relationships is to do the following:

1. Get to know the people you’re trying to reach–really understand their challenges, interests and motivations.

2. Show these people you care about what matters to them.

3. Communicate regularly with value not hype; build trust by being honest and direct.

Read the rest of this entry »

There are some cool new tools for designers and web developers on the way.  The biggest is probably the release of Adobe’s Creative Suite 5 — the next versions of everything we use in our creative work. Here’s a link to an article previewing a very cool new Photoshop tool for image editing. It contains a video demonstrating the effect and it really is flat out amazing. The video starts out slow, but the good stuff starts about halfway through:

http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/03/adobes-magical-content-aware-fill-bends-pixels-to-your-will/

Also, here’s a link to a new script-based image gallery. Previously, this sort of thing required Flash development. But javascripting and jquery have made a lot of these things easier to create and faster to load. First, here’s a link describing the gallery, followed by a link to the gallery itself.  Again, amazing stuff, and the creative staff at Haley Marketing can’t wait to start using them.

http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/03/beautiful-websites-former-apple-designers-amazing-photo-gallery/

http://www.mikematas.com/#g9/Hrz/photos/dhobi_ghat_girl