Making the Right Connections

Generating new leads, making contacts and building your network are all important parts of the sales process, but could you be wasting your time? The key to successful sales is to get through to the right person — the decision maker. It is true that you might have to meet a lot of people along the way before reaching the people with purchasing power, but that is only really worthwhile if you are making the right connections to get you nearer your goal. Expending too much energy with individuals who are never going to make the purchase and who cannot help you make the next connection can be a huge waste of time. What might be difficult at first is learning who will or won’t be able to help you make connections. It is always a good idea to befriend receptionists or PAs. While they won’t necessarily be in positions to introduce you to the right people, you may get the next best thing, which is access to direct contact. They may either be persuaded to put your call through to your identified contact, or they may be helpful in advising you on who the most appropriate contact would be in their organisation, whether or not they deign to direct your enquiry straight to them. Building your contacts is about quality rather than quantity. You will need to be able to research the market and the organisations of target prospects within it. In order to make the right connections, you will need to be knowledgeable about staffing structures and lines of responsibility within an organisation. Learn who has the power to make decisions or who is controlling the purse strings before you start making your advances. Time can be wasted if you choose to start off blindly just to see where it might lead. A one-off gamble might be worth it, but it is not sustainable when you have targets to achieve. Imagine you are looking for a new job and you know that one of the many sales recruitment agencies in Birmingham is dealing with the employer you would most like to work for. It makes sense that you would introduce yourself to that particular agency. Look at your sales approach in this way and you will stop pursuing hopeless leads and start researching your prospects more effectively. If you were actually looking for a new job, being knowledgeable about sales recruitment agencies in Birmingham will put you in a good position and mark you out as someone capable of doing their homework.

What’s Cooking in Shropshire’s Economy?

The current return to form for the housing market is having great effects on the Shropshire economy. Aga Rangemaster, which has a finishing factory in Telford, has reported an increase of approximately 25% in the sales of electric ovens. The sales are the result of both the build of new houses and the increase in the number of existing home owners making improvements to their own properties. It is an interesting reminder of how interlinked different industries can be and how the performance of one sector can so directly affect the fortunes of another. Further good news for the Shropshire economy came with the announcements from Stadco and Heinz. Stadco, which is a firm that makes car parts, announced a number of new jobs as part of the company’s expansion in Shrewsbury and Telford. The famous food brand Heinz is also planning to expand its local factory, creating around 80 new jobs for the area. Taking on additional staff is a clear indication that a company’s performance is strong enough to cope with the additional staffing costs, and also that there is sufficient optimism about the market and future orders that the additional output from the increased workforce will be taken up. All this is good news for sales and marketing teams. During the recession, it was often the case that the first jobs to go when companies needed to cut back were from the marketing and training departments. Rightly or wrongly, many companies saw marketing as an expense rather than an investment during the recession so would have cut costs in this area. Hopefully, the re-emergence of the economy from the recession will mean a return to more permanent in-house roles for marketing professionals where companies once had to manage with ad hoc support from outsourced services. The recent boosts to the economy might have positive knock-on effects for marketing recruitment agencies in Shropshire as businesses look to build on the growing sales opportunities. If you are looking for a change in your career, this could be a good time to send your CV to local marketing recruitment agencies in Shropshire. You can also always take the initiative and apply directly with speculative applications presenting what you can bring to the company should they be looking to hire. If you are to choose this approach, then keep a close eye on what’s happening in the local economy to see which firms are most likely to be hiring.

Would You Hire You Based on Your CV Alone?

If you were running one of the top marketing recruitment agencies in Staffordshire and you were looking for the best talent for an important client, would you consider your own CV to be amongst those good enough to impress? It can be difficult to know what part of your CV is going to stand out to potential employers, so it is a good idea to step away from the situation and ask yourself a question. Based on your current CV alone, would you hire you? It can be very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you will get to really sell yourself at the interview and forget that your CV has to sell you first before you get that far. So imagine that there are no interviews and no chances to give fuller explanations about your skills, experience and qualifications. Your CV has to do it all. In taking this approach, one skill you will certainly have to demonstrate is the ability to present detailed information in a concise and compelling manner. Most professionals looking for their next career move will have much more information to share about their career history than will fit on to two sides of A4. So how do you go about selecting and presenting the highlights which will grab the reader’s attention? For any job you apply for, there will be selection criteria that each candidate will need to meet. There may be lists of skills and experience which are essential or desirable, so it is your task to clearly illustrate how you meet all of the requirements. No two jobs will be the same, so be prepared to have more than one version of your CV. You may find that you can repeat some of the sections on skills, experience and qualifications from one application to the next, but make sure that your opening personal statement or summary is clearly tied to the requirements for each specific role. Another danger with CVs and trying to impress is that individuals can exaggerate the extent of their skills and experience. Another test for anything you claim on your CV is to prepare real examples and evidence of where and how you have deployed specific skills. You would be asked to do as much in your interview, so make sure you are prepared. Don’t be afraid to illustrate how your skills might be transferable and therefore relevant, even if they were gained within a different work environment or profession to the one you are applying for. The key is to focus on the competencies required to fulfil tasks and job roles and not just to mirror exact experiences. It is normal for marketing recruitment agencies in Staffordshire to request CVs, and also normal for them to interview you to assess your suitability for different roles and various clients. Again, don’t wait for the interview to show your best. The difference with your CV requirements when registering with marketing recruitment agencies in Staffordshire is that you will need a general overall CV to present the breadth of your capabilities and career history. It should be enough that they can gauge the range of roles they could put you forward for at a glance.

Branding

Building a successful brand requires you to grow a company that lives and breathes your brand values. Everyone from the front-line customer advisor through to the senior management team and CEO should all be practising behaviours which support and promote your brand values. The last in line to experience the brand is the customer, but it is by starting your brand engagement programme with them in mind that will help you map out the perfect brand journey. Once you have your internal brand engagement programme working effectively across all areas of your business, the output will be an excellent brand experience for the end customer. Building a strong brand has never been about simply getting your logo seen everywhere. It is about the entire customer experience: the interaction with sales or advisory staff; the effectiveness of administration; the performance of the product or service; the quality of after-sales service and much more. In order for every step in the journey to be successful, all behind-the-scenes operations and delivery elements need to be as fully immersed in your brand as the customer-facing elements. You can’t expect your staff to intuitively know what your brand is and how to live it, so it must be clearly communicated and training may be required. However, all aspects of the business should be delivering to the brand values. This means that how the staff are treated, how they feel valued within the business and how well they understand the contribution they make to the bigger picture are all part of the brand experience. It is easy to see that generating a truly successful brand will take more than just an effective marketing department. It requires a strong CEO and senior management team to lead from the top, an effective HR department and training team to roll out the brand across the workforce and well-equipped line managers to reinforce the brand values on a daily basis through performance management. The brand engagement strategy will be the corner stone for making it all happen, so you‘ll need a strong marketing professional to develop this for your company. Good marketing recruitment agencies in Worcestershire can find whatever marketing talent you need to take your business forward. If you don’t know how to start looking for a brand engagement specialist, then let marketing recruitment agencies in Worcestershire steer you through the process. They will have seen hundreds if not thousands of skilled and experienced candidates over the years so will know where to find your perfect fit.

Local Figures or World-Class Names?

Celebrity endorsements or public appearances to support promotions can be a sure-fire way to get the press interested in your news. But how do you select the right person for your product? The reality may be that you have to make do with whoever is willing and available at the right price. For endorsement opportunities, you should aim for influential figures whose reason for fame is relevant to your product. For example, if you produce sports training kit or energy drinks and foods, you would want sports people to help promote them. In Warwickshire you have a host of famous sports names on your doorstep with the Warwickshire cricket team. The added bonus would be that these people have a local connection too, so it might be a little easier to persuade them to support your cause. When looking to attract the attention of the media or hard-to-reach service users, then the relevance might need to be more closely linked to names that the media or the target audience will know but may have no link whatsoever to the product or service itself. For example, think of schemes such as literacy campaigns to get boys reading. Footballers and sport stars are called upon to act as role models — not because they are intrinsically linked to literacy, but because they are likely to be of interest to the target audience. If in doubt, the target market needs to be convinced that if it is all right for the stars then it is all right for them. Over the years your PR team or agency will have built up relationships with lots of contacts. This can bring you that step closer to securing a celebrity figurehead. Sometimes it will be enough to have a local legend to support your cause, but bigger stunts might require household names to grab the attention you are after. Whatever your approach, you will need to weigh up the costs of the appearance fee against the predicted sales to ensure a good ROI. Above all, you need to be able to measure the impact. PR support can be an integral part of your marketing team. It is worth weighing up the cost of agency services if you outsource your PR against the cost of hiring in-house resource. If you can attract professionals with strong career histories and even stronger contacts lists, then they can be worth their weight in gold. Specialist marketing recruitment agencies in Warwickshire can help find the perfect recruit. Calling marketing recruitment agencies in Warwickshire could be your first step to PR success.

Get to Know Your Customers

When you are getting to know new friends or work colleagues, you don’t just try to find out where they shop or what they buy. It should be the same with your customers when you are getting to know them. Of course, you will want to learn about their buying habits and what products will catch their attention, but you can develop much more effective modes of advertising if you get to know their interests, where they spend their time or what they spend their spare time doing. Whether your target customers spend a lot of time on the internet, like to travel on public transport or spend their leisure time attending live sports, it is good to know where they are spending their time. It is particularly good to know where they are spending their time when they are relaxing or where they are likely to spend time again and again. Frequency in advertising has long been linked to the success of campaigns, so finding out places where you can achieve regular repeated visibility with your customers is a great way to succeed. By finding a concentration of your target audience, you can advertise for longer or more frequently because you aren’t having to spend large amounts on lots of locations with a scatter-gun approach. Advertising hoardings at sports venues can be great regular spots for advertising placements directly to your customers. Not only will you reach them week after week, but you will get them for prolonged periods of time and hopefully in a relaxed frame of mind — as long as their team isn’t losing. Adverts on popular websites can also reach many of your target markets with regular repeat viewings at a smaller outlay than you might think. Creative thinking when it comes to advertising isn’t just about dreaming up novelty themes, designs and content for the adverts themselves. It can also be just as important to decide how, when and where to advertise. If you are a creative thinker and thrive on solving problems or working out effective campaigns, you might enjoy a career in marketing. Visit marketing recruitment agencies in Birmingham to see what current vacancies are available in your area. If you want to show marketing recruitment agencies in Birmingham what creative skills you have when it comes to planning campaigns, then maybe you could suggest great places that they could be advertising.