Cheapest Price vs Adding Value First

A series of articles revealing all the secrets for Successful Recruitment written for HR professionals and amateurs having the drive to become outstanding.

Written by Gerard Koolen (please react to [email protected], thank you!).

Cheapest Price vs Adding Value First

Being help driven instead of commission driven is one of the biggest secrets for long-term everlasting success in recruitment, HR (and any other business). And it’s a guarantee for having an exciting and wonderful career. And a lovely personal life. And an ever-growing bank account. 

Let me share with you what I have experienced, what customers told me:

Customers love to buy. Customers love to spend money…

And they love to spend it to providers whom they trust, like, believe, have confidence in, who are a valuable source, who help, who understand, who gives them answers, who fightor their interests, doing extra work, who are reliable, honest, smile, friendly, knowledgeable, friendly, caring, funny, personal, understanding, friendly, generous, funny, warm,  honest,  friendly,  emphatic.  Am  I repeating myself? Oh, read it again if you can’t dream this! Read it again to get it into your system. And read it once more.  

30% to 40% of customers are price customers. They go for the cheapest deal possible. With these customers you can never make a healthy profit margin, you can never make a sound business deal. And they’re a pain in the ass when working with them. This is the bad news. And my advice is that you leave these companies to your competition. 

The  good news is that 60% to 70% of all companies want the best deal possible. They are prepared to pay a fair price for outstanding service. And the more outstanding your service is, the less price is playing a role in their decision making process. The more delighted your customer is with your service, the more pleasure they have in paying your bills. 

How to make your customer delighted? How to make him or her delighted paying your bills (we have customers who pay us before they received our invoice –wow! -): 

1. Be help driven, and start with giving value. Before even having presented your fees or your sales pitch (give salary benchmarking reports, show CV’s, give a report about the labor market, give them information about their competition, …),

 2. Talk with the decision maker, like the CEO, the GM or the HRM. Decision makers don’t care about costs; they care about return on investments. Their managers are budget spenders and all they are interested in is spending their budget and cheap prices (not all of course),  

3. Go for the extra mile. By exceeding any expectation they might have, 

4. Know their expectations. How they want it, when they want it, and than exceed these expectations by far. So you take their breath away, 

5. Be friendly, be funny, be sincere, be honest, be knowledgeable, be pro-active, 

6. Not your perspective. Look at things from the customer’s perspective. Forget about yours, as this will cause you big problems. Always.

7. Customers prefer to buy from friends. Know that customers prefer to buy from friends, even when friends are not as good as you are. So be friendly with your customers.

8. Study friendship. And buy all the books from Dale Carnegie, Wayne Dyer, Jeffrey Gitomer, Anthony Robbins, Ken Blanchard, Dalai Lama, Robert Kiyosaki, Norman Peale, Neale Donald Walsch. Study every month a book, 

9. Why do they buy from you? Ask your customers why they buy from you. Ask your customers for feedback. Fear not, be courageous, 

10. Take risks. Be prepared to make mistakes. Be prepared to learn from them. Be prepared to apologize sincerely, and be prepared to repair, no matter the cost, 

11. Analyze the challenges. Some would say: problems, communicate answers and solutions, and act on these, 

12. Get rid of a nagging boss. Get rid of your boss when he or she complains to you (is nagging to you) that you’re spending too much time on your customers doing an outstanding job,  

13. Use the best recruitment software available on the market: TalentBase! 

The funny thing is. We all know this. As we all love suppliers being outstanding to us. The funny thing is only few amongst us really do it. Why? I don’t know. Maybe because it takes a lot of work?

Putting 1-13 into practice means for you lifetime earnings, big commissions, more sales, more fun, and customers telling you that you can charge them more than agreed upon (happens to us all the time). And customers agreeing with you if you have to increase prices. And customers referring you to their business friends.  

The only thing you don’t like about this is that it requires from you (incomplete list): 

1. Real, tough thinking, and analyzing (quote from Henry Ford: “thinking is probably the most difficult thing, that’s probably why so few people engage in it”). 

2. Total and continuous creativity, (buy & study Thinkertoys). 

3. Being critical to your own actions, thoughts, ideas etc. Use your brain with full awareness.

4. Asking for feedback, and learning from it. I know, this is scary, frighting, fearful, and wonderful, nice! 

5. Many nights of hard studying.  

6. Taking big risks, making mistakes, and learning from them, 

7. Swallowing your pride and ego, 

8. Preparing yourself for every business meeting (you think you already know it all, but you don‘t), (you think you can do without but you can’t), 

9. Nagging your boss to buy the best recruitment software available (TalentBase). 

When you decide to love yourself, when you decide to love what you are doing 1-9 are easy. They go automatically. So better decide you love what you’re doing. And this is one of the biggest secrets of those who are extremely successful in recruitment. I am happy that I’ve around me a bunch of recruiters who are dedicated to add value first. Will you do the same? 

I am curious what you will decide. Will you let me know? Thank you! 

For more secrets read next time’s issue or write an e-mail to [email protected] (thanks again) and you will receive regularly all other secrets (also if you work at the competition, I’ll be more than happy to help you). Gerard Koolen is Managing Partner at Lugera - The People Republic operating in AM, BU, CZ, NL, PL, RO, RU, SK, UA with 450+ smart HR fanatics in 50 offices, with15,000+ temps doing Permanent Staffing, Temporary Staffing and Payroll Outsourcing doing one thing really very cool: outperforming the expectations of our clients and making sure they profit from our services. This means that they always pay less than the value we deliver. That is awesome. We are the homeland of talent:-)