Are staffing agencies asking the right questions to uncover client needs? What challenges are shaping today’s market, and how can agencies ensure they stand out? We explore these ideas on today’s episode of The Staffing Show. David is joined again by Dan Mori, the Founder of both Staffing Mastery and the Staffing Sales Summit. For those who may not be familiar with Dan, he is a renowned thought leader in the staffing industry, known for his expertise in leadership, sales strategies, and systems thinking. Today, Dan shares insights on today’s staffing market challenges, the debate between job boards and agency databases, and why clients feel let down. He offers strategies for aligning expectations, thoughts on improving performance in 2025, and looks at the objectives related to rates, speeds, and quality in the market. Dan also shares the driving motivation behind founding the Staffing Sales Summit, and what attendees can expect.
[0:01:13] DF: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for another episode of The Staffing Show. Today, I am joined by Dan Mori, who is the founder of Staffing Mastery, as well as the Staffing Sales Summit. Dan, really great to have you on. I believe it’s your third time on, one of my favorite podcast guests. So excited to talk with you today.
[0:01:30] DM: David, I appreciate you having me back, man. This is one of my favorite podcasts. I love listening to The Staffing Show. The thought leaders you get on this show, and the nuggets they drop are- it’s a gem. I appreciate what you do.
[0:01:39] DF: Absolutely. Let’s go ahead and jump in. Today, we’re going to jump into a couple of different categories. For those of you that don’t know, Dan is a thought leader, and one of the best people in the industry when it comes to leadership, as well as sales strategy and systems thinking. Today, we’re going to be talking about some of the market trends, as well as the Staffing Sales Summit and some tips and tactics that you can take home and use on the sales front. To kick things off, a lot of people in the industry already know who you are, but for those who don’t, maybe you can just give a quick background and then we’ll hop in.
[0:02:10] DM: Yeah, absolutely. Like most people, man, I got into staffing on accident. You know the opportunity presented itself and I jumped in. I didn’t know anything about it, but we and my couple partners, we scaled pretty strongly to the middle market, top 1% of independently owned staffing agencies. It’s a blessed industry to be in. I know people will be like, it’s a double sword, because you got to be a different kind of crazy to be in staffing this long, but I truly love it.
On my journey, I was blessed to basically meet mentors that encouraged me to do lessons learned and track lessons learned. And pay attention to all the setbacks. That really led me into coaching others. It was where I started Staffing Mastery, is there were some other owners that they reached the very typical plateaus that staffing owners reach. They weren’t quite sure how to get past it where they would face these roadblocks and Staffing Mastery was born through that, just teaching systems and ways to get around things so you can actually scale.
Through that, led some other things that came out, notably the Staffing Sales Summit. You know, it’s something that was a void in the industry where there really wasn’t a dedicated conference purely towards business development. So, we created that last year to really focus on teaching sales leaders, sales producers the techniques that work the foundational ones, as well as the stuff that’s working today that we didn’t even know about two years ago. That’s really my journey is to help educate the industry and give back as much as I can, because this industry has been just tremendous for me and my family.
[0:03:40] DF: Awesome. Well, jumping in, I know you’re talking about staffing agency owners all the time. You’ve got the Staffing Sales Summit coming up. What are some of the challenges that you’re seeing in the market today?
[0:03:50] DM: Yeah. That’s a long list. Sales obviously, and I know we’re going to talk about that as we get into this further, but sales, it’s still ranked as higher, seen as a higher challenge or a stronger challenge than even recruiting, but recruiting is still a challenge, because you’re actually, you’re seeing this, I don’t know, degradation of quality from our candidate sources as I feel like agencies have gotten, for lack of a better word, lazy in the way that they recruit, maybe complacent as a maybe a softer word to say, maybe not as creative is another way to say.
I think that people change, buying behaviors change. The way that we interact with companies, businesses, people, it changes over time. I feel like recruiting habits have not really followed the behaviors of the job seekers out there as much. I think we’ve become over reliant on a lot of the pay-per-click job boards that are out there. Not to say they’re not an important piece of your recruitment marketing playbook, but a lot of the owners, a lot of the companies I talk to that are struggling with recruiting, and attrition, and retention, all those issues, like they’re struggling there and they don’t know why they can’t scale.
Once you actually peel back the layers, they realize that 80 to 90% of their placements are coming off job boards within the last 30 days of candidates being found. They’re struggling to realize like that’s the most active candidate base out there. So, I think the challenge comes down to, because we’ve been facing that challenge for a couple of years, but I think the challenge is really like how do you move away from that? Then how do you really tap into that passive talent that’s still coveted by staffing clients and what they view as valuable and that will partner with staffing agencies for. Those are two of the big ones out there. There’s always the technology. That’s always a moving target too for a lot of companies. So, those are the big three, right?
[0:05:40] DF: The job board part, I mean, I talk about it quite a bit and I also think it’s – most recently I’ve heard the job boards being described as a drug. I was like, it’s the easiest, fastest path in many instances. The hard part and one of the things I’ve heard you talk about this, I’d like to know more of what you think about it is like, if a company can go to Indeed, how are you doing something different than what they are? I’ve recently gone through some hiring internally and I went out and I actually tested both fronts. I did a job board and then I also worked with a staffing agency. It was an interesting experience and I think we’re going to dig into this more, but understanding how and where you create value is something that I think is supercritical and what’s your take on the job boards versus using your database?
[0:06:29] DM: Yeah. I honestly think about job boards. Again, no disrespect. They are a very, very important part of recruitment. I’m not saying to move away from them. I’m not saying they’re bad, that’s not what I’m getting at here, but I will say in recent years, they’ve really become more of the fast food of the recruitment industry. It’s convenient. You know, if you’re hungry and you’re in a pinch and you need something, job boards are great for that, right? But really the database would be like high-quality ingredients that are at home in your kitchen.
It takes a little bit more effort to get it there. It takes a little bit more effort to actually create a good meal, but you know at the end of the day, it’s going to be a better-tasting meal, probably in the long run, less expensive, right? Probably healthier. So, if you’re focused on, like long-term thinking and looking further out than just solving the hunger problem right now, you would go that way.
I think that right now what happens, especially coming to the pandemic, a lot of leaders were just very short-sighted, you know? It’s like, “I got to fill this order.” You just feel like you’re running on quicksand or running on sand, so you just over-rely on job boards and which means you under-rely and under-develop those other recruiting sources. You’re right, I’ve said this for years. Companies – our clients are catching on. They’re like, “Listen, I don’t need a staffing agency that can post on job boards. We can do that ourselves.” Right?
Back in the day that used to be a thing, if you had access to all the job boards, and all of the licenses, and all of the featured employers, and all that stuff. That’s something that clients would pay for, but now, it’s like, “Okay, yeah. We can just do that ourselves and get the same level of quality.” So, if you’re going to stay relevant, you have to give them something that they can’t easily do themselves. The reality is, and this has not changed, that’s a healthy, nurtured, passive, talent pool that only you can provide access to. That creates a level of exclusivity and creates value, that clients will still covet it.
[0:08:21] DF: With that, I’ve also heard you discuss the idea that clients today are feeling let down. Could you dig into that a little bit more and like why do you think? What do you think goes behind that?
[0:08:31] DM: I think they do feel let down. You know. I’ve talked to a number of staffing clients and asked this specific question. I think there’s two primary reasons why they feel let down and maybe the second one is like two in one. The first is, I feel like there’s a disconnect between what salespeople sell and what recruiters deliver, right? If you’re running a solo function operation where you’re like dedicated salespeople, dedicated recruiter. Full desk, I think you clean this up a little bit, but a lot of agencies, they have a sales team and others and they hand off their recruitment teams.
When there’s a disconnect within the organization between sales and fulfillment, like you run the risk of salespeople over promising, because they’re given credit to get the sale, like that’s how their success is measured. Did you get clients, right? Yeah, on the back end, they’re going to be measured on their book of business, the GM, all that kind of stuff. At the end of the day like shortsighted, did you get the client?
A lot of times they tend to sell too early, oversell, over-promise, and sometimes actually start competing on price, which I’ll save that, because I think that gets into the second piece here. Then when they hand it to the recruiter, there’s a mismatch, right? It’s not like, the recruiter can’t exactly deliver what the salesperson sold. Now, you have the client with a certain expectation that they were sold in the process, getting a different result and literally the cause of all stress in life is when expectations don’t match reality, right?
It creates a frustrated client, creates frustrated salespeople because a lot of times orders aren’t getting filled right or the clients not happy. Creates frustrated recruiters, because they’re kind of given this thing that doesn’t really match what they do. That’s the number one reason that I think that clients are left unsatisfied. But going into it, I actually think that because people are just trying to get clients so much, they just start commoditizing themselves. They don’t really focus on the value that they provide.
They don’t think, okay, what do I need to actually do to properly solve this client’s problem? This is a perfect example. I’m going to go on a sidebar here for a second, but perfect example. I was talking to a client, and a sales rep, and it was in the middle of this, kind of, I guess, post-sales audit. The client expressed turnover as a problem, right? As soon as the salesperson heard this, they started to prematurely sell and they tried to sell against turnover. They’re like, “Oh, we can solve that problem for you. We’ve got this database of people. We’ll give you better quality and all those things.” Those platitudes that you hear and the client was like, “I’ve heard this all before.” Right? Like, “This doesn’t sound any different to me.”
As it turns out, once we actually got a little bit further in talking to the client, we recognized the client saw turnover as a problem, but it wasn’t what they were trying to solve for. They actually had a level of turnover built into their model to keep their costs down. They knew that they paid slightly under market. They knew that they were going to turn through people and the cost to create a job that would attract better talent and actually retain better talent. That cost was too cost-prohibitive for them to deliver the value that they gave to their clients, that their clients bought from them.
Turnover was part of the model. So, really what they wanted was quick replacement. They just wanted the funnel to be going through and they were actually getting from their current their income at vendor. They were getting people too slow to keep up with the turnover machine that they needed to keep going in order to serve their clients. The salesperson missed — they were like, “Oh, I was trying to solve for turnover, but really, you just needed to solve for speed and keep the price point low.”
I feel like salespeople really aren’t asking the best questions to uncover what the need really is. They just prematurely present. I think that just leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths because frankly, it all sounds the same. Yeah, I think those are the issues the clients are facing.
[0:12:19] DF: How are they, I’m going to start with the missed expectations. I love that concept of – I think about that a lot. It’s like all of the times that you’re frustrated. It’s almost always because you had expectations and you’re not sitting in this where you thought you’d expected you’d be or just something on that front. What are some of the steps that you think agencies should be looking to put in place to make sure that they are matching the expectations they’re salespeople are putting out there?
[0:12:44] DM: Yeah. I love that question. The number one thing to do. Define good for your agency, like literally, success leaves clues. Go look at all of the orders that you’ve had the best fill performance on. All of the roles that you have that have the best retention rates. All of the areas where your clients are giving you positive NPS scores or positive feedback, however you measure it, right? Just look at those orders and say, “Hey, this is what we do really, really well.” You know. If you’re really good with your database, you can actually cross reference that against the strength of your database for those types of roles, right?
If you define what a good order is and what a good client is, and then you actually teach your fulfillment team, your sales team, your marketing people, whether it’s in-house or outsourced. It doesn’t matter. If you teach them all of that, now you create this sales enablement process where your messaging starts priming the pump to the clients. Then your salespeople are saying like, “Hey, this is what we’re really, really good at.” They can triage in the sales process. If a client says, “Hey we had this really low-paying job, but it’s okay. We’re just trying to solve for speed, not turn over.”
The salesperson might say, “You know what? We’re really not the best agency for you, like that’s really not how we’re built or maybe it is.” Right? But like they’ll know that. They’ll be able to filter good clients in and bad clients out. Then they’re going to be handing better clients and better orders to the recruiters, which means now their work tickets are stacked in their favor, like what they’re working on their job orders are more likely good.
If they really just define what they’re really good at and what value they’re providing, and then go talk to the customers to validate that to say, “What problems do we really solve for you?” Right? Like really get a picture of the value you provide and what you’re good at and just do that. Don’t try to overreach. Don’t spread yourself too thin. Don’t try to be great at something that you’re average at, like you’ll just waste resources and you’ll get a disproportionate return. That’s the first thing I would say, just to find what good is for you and make sure everybody knows it and only take good business, because if it’s not good, it’s bad.
[0:14:42] DF: Yeah. It reminds me a little bit of the – and I know you’re talking about what you’re good at beyond just the niche, but I always love to – whenever I have a chance to talk about the riches and the niches.
One of my favorite, my favorite saying, but I think you’re even going beyond that and talking about the differentiation of how do you – where do you excel? Is it high quality? Is it speed? Is it with a specific role? I know you and I have had conversations about teams where they were trying to fill all of the positions and posting every job order that they got on Indeed versus saying what looking at simply just being strategic about it and stuff.
[0:15:18] DM: Yeah. I’ve seen it, man. Like they will spend all of this money. They will post all of the jobs. The thing is, Indeed loves that, right? Because you’re going to pay for every application you get, but the issue is, is if you’re posting a job that you’re not really that equipped to fill. All of that spend has to get applied to the orders you fill. That’s all of your spend has to go build orders, because that’s where margin is created, which creates this almost hidden margin compression.
You don’t realize it because you’re like, “Oh, this is what it costs me to get a candidate.” But yeah, but you know what, you’re getting a lot of candidates that you’re not actually deploying and you’re puffing up your database in a way that’s not really, I don’t know, I hate to be using a lot of analogies, but when it comes to overgrow is weeds, right? Sometimes you got to prune it a little bit. So, yeah, you’re spending a lot of money if you’re trying to pursue bad business. Honestly, you’re spending your people thin. They can tell. Your recruiters know. Your salespeople know.
[0:16:09] DF: Yeah. With that, and kind of like some of the challenges we’ve talked about, whether it’s not selling correctly, not studying expectations correctly, getting in the transactional sale, or just being over relying on job boards. What are some of the things that if you’re an agency owner or sales leader, what should you be thinking about today? It’s the start of the year. We’re walking into 2025. What are the things that you would recommend putting in place to make sure that 2025 is a better year than 2024?
[0:16:38] DM: Yeah. All right. I’m going to give you two. They’re two comprehensive thoughts. Hopefully people are listening. They can – they got a notepad and a pen that can take some notes on this one. First, I’ll start on the sales side. I’m going to go back to the exercise I just said, like define good.
[0:16:50] DF: Yup.
[0:16:50] DM: This is what I would recommend sales leaders do. Okay? Create what I call three by three or using multiplication and nine by. Take the top three industries that you serve, right? Just the top three industries or clients whatever they’re in, like if this is like, “Hey, these are the top three industries that we serve.” Then go look at the top three roles in each one of those industries that you are the best at filling, right? Simple as that. It’s like, hey, if I’m in health care and mine is like RN, LPN, and x-ray tech, right? Like if that’s one industry and those are my top three best for fills. Okay, that column is done.
You know, whatever you move on to the next one and the next one. Now, you have nine roles, right, that you’re really, really good at filling. The odds are stacked in your favor, right? This creates the niche focus. This is – you know, focus should be a keyword for everybody, you know, this year. So, with this, once you’re doing this, now you teach your salespeople how to sell and qualify those specific roles. What do those roles help out your clients? What problems do they solve for your clients? What issues do they create when those positions are vacant within the prospect that you’re going for, right?
Now that you know this, you can actually have a very custom-tailored sales process, create the questions that are really going to uncover this and then teach your salespeople how to qualify someone so they can go back and they can debrief to their leader and they can say, “Hey, here’s the prospect I just met with. Here are the negative business impacts that are facing as it relates to staffing challenges. Here are the solutions that I think we would be a fit for. This is where I think that we should present our price.” You can debrief in a very effective way. That way, when you actually present the proposal and the pricing piece of it, it’s going to be aligned to what they need, right?
That’s the first strategy. Just do that right there and you’re going to have really probably better than 90% of sales forces out there, because they’re going to be focused and they’re going to sound different. That perception is going to be like, wow, this is a different type of agency. You’re going to start to differentiate yourself through the sales process intriguing more clients to go with you, right? That’s the first one that would recommend the sales side.
On the recruiting side or on the operations side. Here is one and it might sound a little bit contrarian, but you have to take a more strategic approach to your recruitment map, right? You have to actually say, “Hey, we want to have a database.” Look at your talent as a portfolio, right? Set some upper limits and say, “Hey, we only want this much of our talent to come from job boards, you know. Make sure that you start getting it in balance and be flagging people as active candidates and passive candidates, like designate that piece of it.
The reason why is because active candidates are just that. They’re more likely to turn over quicker, right? Because they’re actively looking for jobs just because you put them on an assignment doesn’t mean that their account or resume or portfolio comes off of the job boards. It doesn’t, right? They’re still getting bombarded with people and other agencies recruiting that same candidate. They’re the most active ones.
Flag them. Active and passive and say, “Hey, we need to have this percentage of passive candidates coming into our database on any given month.” Right? So, you set some metrics. Then you start to look at what are the tools that I can create? What are the streams of passive candidates? There’s two that I’ll share. I know that I’m going to sound like a homer being here on your podcast, but referrals, I mean, the data is conclusive at this point.
Referrals, they perform better. You get better NPS scores. You make more money on them. In the long run, they’re less expensive, right? When you consider the sunk cost of all the job board candidates that you pay for that you never actually placed, right? Referrals, they’re inherently better, but they’re harder. It’s like that home cooked meal, right, you know. But don’t just save it for a special occasion, like create that referral system, whether you want to do it manually, or automated. Figure that piece out. But what I’m saying is like you have to have a pipeline getting referrals and it starts with your process, like you have to have people asking for referrals all the time.
You and I have talked about this, man. This is the, would you like fries with that moment. When McDonald’s the first time they really exploded their sales? It’s because they asked that question, would you like fries with that? With every single meal. Then they became such a staple that they just turned it into a combo meal or a value meal or whatever they call it, you know? That’s why I was like be asking for referrals all the time, but treat that as a recruiting pipeline and say, “Hey, these are the minimum amount of referrals that we need coming into our database every single month” and work to that.
Then the other piece that I would highly recommend, I’m not going to get too deep in the recruitment map. We can talk about that another time, but you have to do database management. You have to create an engaged audience, you know. If you get someone into your database, that’s not the finish line. That’s the starting line, right? Like if you do all of the work to get these people in there, and then you just stop building relationship with them, or you stop communicating with them, or stop engaging. No wonder that they don’t apply to your jobs or they don’t respond to you, right?
Build a relationship. This is the last thing I’ll say on this is, I think this year you’re going to start to see agencies take a page out of influencer marketer playbooks. They’re going to say, “How are these influencers so popular? How are they managing their audience across multiple platforms? What are they doing?” They’ve got social media. They’ve got email. They’ve got all sorts of stuff. They got the different channels that match their audience, because they’re staying engaged and they’re building emotional currency.
Once you do that and you have a strong database with these inflows and highly engaged passive talent, then that’s when you go talk to your clients and say, “Hey, this is what you’re getting. This is what you’re getting from passive talent.” Those are just two that I would suggest that agencies and leaders be looking at this year.
[0:22:36] DF: Obviously, I second a lot of that. I think that aligns with what we’re seeing in the market, but also, I think of talking to an agency and saying, “Yeah, I get all of my talent from a job board. I just do it faster than you or I just am more efficient at the job board. I filter it out.” I mean, there’s value in that. But I think the – when I think about agencies, I think that the number one thing that differentiates them and the number one thing is their database and how are you leveraging your unique database to deliver unique value and give them access to candidates that they don’t have access to. I think those are great tips. What are some of the objections that you’re hearing when it comes to rates, speed, quality? What are some of the common objections in today’s market?
[0:23:19] DM: I’m going to come back to that question, but there is one thing that you just said that I think the industry needs to be aware of. We talked about technology briefly, and it’s like most people know that it’s a very segmented market or fragmented market when it comes to ATSs. There’s a lot of them in our industry. You don’t have to look too far to find two or three that you’ve never heard of, right? I mean, you probably know a lot more. You could probably name off. I’m willing about a couple dozen you could name off, right? There are the big ones that we all hear about Bullhorn and Aviante and Crelate.
[0:23:47] DF: Yeah.
[0:23:47] DM: There’s a lot of small ones, but there’s a big push right now. Your typical HRIS is the ones that have been serving non-staffing clients, the ones that we go after. They’re starting to get into the staffing industry and they’re starting to actually build staffing databases. Now, there’s a two-prong approach for this. I actually was chatting with – I can’t say too much about this, but I was chatting with a private equity group that was representing an HRS system that was wanting to get into staffing.
When I just asked the question like, “What’s the appeal?” Two main drivers. One, it does open up a new vertical where they see as being a very purple ocean because there’s not a main, sure, bullhorn has the mass of the market, but there’s so many, like there’s a lot of market share that they could scoop up, so they see that as an opportunity. But they also see the fact of taking the ability of an ATS and bringing it to the private sector client is valuable. Helping those clients build their in-house staffing agencies, because they recognize we’re a very commoditized industry. That’s a threat.
If you’re not really good at database management and you’re not really good at bringing that passive talent pool to your client, your value is literally diminishing by the day, just with this threat that’s going on right now.
[0:25:02] DF: That’s super interesting. I hadn’t heard that. I’m intrigued to see what that looks like over the next few years.
[0:25:08] DM: It’s going to be interesting. So, objections. What are we hearing? Big one right now is still back to price. There’s this, I think right now coming off of the last two and a half years have been pretty much like a downward slide, a little bit from the pandemic hangover that we all enjoyed and had the boon of business with. I think what happened is a lot of companies they overbuilt and they were short-sighted. I guess that’s probably a theme. They overbuilt. Then once the revenue started dropping back, like a lot of agencies, most of the market saw that.
I think they started to scramble and they were like, “How do we get business? What do we got to do?” Then at the same time, it collided with clients being a trust recession and like, “This isn’t worth it to me. The same other agencies tell me the same thing. Why are you better?” Well, they couldn’t differentiate, so they would cut price. I think this is happening on a mass scale. So, right now, we’re seeing absolutely ridiculously low prices out there.
I’m seeing stuff that is literally in the 20%. It’s like how are you doing high 20s, low 30s for like light industrial, right? This doesn’t make sense, like you’re giving your service away. You’re not even leaving enough margin to properly service the client, right? But we’re seeing that. That’s really tough to sell against. I don’t have a silver bullet for this, but I will tell you, I’ve seen firsthand clients not choose the low bidder if they feel like paying a little bit more will get the result that they’re going for, right?
The only way to get to that is through effective questioning. You have to ask question, after question, after question until you really have a full comprehensive understanding of what it is they’re facing and what their desired outcome looks like, right? Then you have to know, can I solve this? You got to be really confident, because when you say, “Hey, I can help you.” It’s going to – you have to be so convicted that they believe that you can help them, that you understand what they’re facing and where they want to go, and that you’re the right partner, and that what you’re pricing is going to make it worth it. But that’s really the only way that you can hit that one right now. Then they’re like hold on, man, like, “Why are you different?”
[0:27:15] DF: Yeah.
[0:27:16] DM: Have I already told you the story that I learned the lesson, the hard way on this one?
[0:27:20] DF: I don’t know. But if you have, I want to hear it again.
[0:27:22] DM: Oh, man. Long time ago, this goes back to what I’ve always called my big break client. I told you, I stumbled into this industry. I didn’t know what it meant to be a staffing person. I had some sales background, but I didn’t really know much about selling B2B services, right? I treated it just like, kind of B2C, kind of commodity sales. I had a pitch. It was very filled with platitudes. I sat in front of this guy. Old HR dude named Tim Sullivan. I go in there, and David, man, I got like my green polo with the logo. I got the fresh haircut. I’ve got the legal pad and the branded pants, and I’ve got the Choskey giveaway. The coffee cup that I’m giving this dude. I’m going there and I’m sitting there. He just sit, he’s like, “Okay, talking about you. What can you do for me?” I lay it on him, and I had practiced this pitch. I don’t know how many times, but it was, it was smooth.
I was like, I’m in my head, I’m like, man, I crushed it. Like I’m like, I was like – he doesn’t even know, like I’m about to just get this contract. I am feeling so good. He looks right me, and he goes, “But like why are you different?” I was like, “He wants to hear this again.” I’m like, “Oh, man, it was so good. He wants to hear a second time.” I just spit it all right back out and repeated it.
Then he followed that one up with the thing that made me learn the lesson that that’s not what he was asking when he said, “Why are you different?” It’s because I didn’t sound any different, because he goes, he goes, “You know what? That sounds just like the other agency that was just in here an hour ago.” He goes, “I can’t tell what you’re going to do for me that they’re not, like what are you really doing that’s different?” He said, “Don’t you all have access to the same people? Don’t you have the same tools?” I’m like, “Well, yeah.”
Then that I put me right into a corner. I was like, “Well, we got, our recruiters are really good. They get the best service. That’s a really big company and we’re locally owned. We’re nimble and you mean something to us.” You know what, man? I hate to say it. That stuff means very, very little to clients, very little. You know? Oh, it was an eye-opener for me that like he wasn’t asking me what I can really do that’s different because he wanted to hear it again. He just couldn’t tell, because I didn’t give him anything to differentiate.
Then in that moment, I started to reflect and I realized it was because I did 80% of the talking. I was telling him all about us and not trying to learn about what he actually needed. I remember this because I came back and I didn’t have the contract yet. He helped me. This guy was amazing. He was actually pretty transformative in my career. He goes, he’s like, “Let me just show you the floor.” He goes – he’s like, “I heard you talk.” He’s like, “I don’t think you really understand what we do here.” He said, “Let me show you this.” I was like, “Okay.”
We went out there and it started to click for me. I’m like, oh, I was like, I can see why this is a problem. I was like, okay. If you have people in this inspection, this is light industrial client. They made automotive parts for the auto industry. I was like, “If you don’t have the inspectors doing the right thing or measuring to a very precise tolerance, like you’re going to actually have to kick back these parts and do rework.” At the time I had never heard of rework. I didn’t realize how costly rework was, right? I’m like, “Oh, that’s a problem.” I was like, “But what you’re doing is you’re asking for these people. Then when you’re getting them, they don’t know how to read, you know, micrometers and calipers.” He’s like, “Yeah. Now you’re starting to get it, Dan.”
I was like, “Okay.” I was like, “How do I solve this problem?” You know what we did, man? I kid you not. That came not so Iong ago. This is so funny to go down memory lane here. We went out and we bought sets of micrometers and calipers. We had all sorts of crazy stuff that we would have these people measure in the office. It’s like, “Hey, give me the outside diameter or the inside diameter of the different ends of the paperclip.” Tell what the thickness of a dime is versus a quarter. Tell me what the spec tolerance is, right?
It’s like, and you would know right away if someone could have done it before or had not, but we didn’t treat it as a pass-fail always. Sometimes if people had an aptitude, it’s like, okay, they, they might have never done it, but they could get it. We would actually just teach them on these little tools in the office. So, then I went back to Tim and I was like, “Hey, can I tell you why we’re different now?” He goes, “Okay, what do you got, kid?” Again, this was an old HR pro that was short on time. He was about to retire. I was a young buck at this point. I was like, “I listened to you. We went out and we got calipers and we have a measure of the OD and the ID and we have it all tracked and we scored people.”
I was like, “So, I actually have a list of people and I can tell you who they are, their work experience, and what their score is on this standardized measurement test for QC inspectors. That’s what I can give to you.” He goes, “That’s different.” He goes, “There’s no other agency in the area that has that.”
[0:31:59] DF: That’s amazing.
[0:32:01] DM: Okay. That goes back to like being different, right? That was a niche. I created a nurtured talent pool, you know? Oh, God. That’s a fun story.
[0:32:10] DF: Love that story. I also, I mean, it’s – when you say it and you think about it, it’s like it always sounds simple. Understand the problem, and prove that you can solve the problem in a way that nobody else is solving the problem. Yet most staffing agencies go out there and pretend to be everything to everybody and say, “Oh, yeah, you want that? We do it all.” Because they’re afraid to not get the job work.
[0:32:32] DM: It’s so true, man. If you speak the language, it’s like one of my best salespeople I ever had had never sold really anything. He was an operations manager at a manufacturing facility, but he would walk in and he would talk to HR and then he would start asking questions and they’d be like, “That’s a really good question. Let me get the warehouse manager in here. Let me get the production manager in.” They’d bring him into the meeting and these guys are like, “What are you bringing me into a meeting for this for?”
Then he’d start speaking their language and these guys start geeking out. They’d be like, “Oh, come on in the floor. Let me show you this. Yeah, this is how our PPE works. This is our safety program.” He’s like, “Well, do you have lockout tag out? Where’s your safety logs?” Like he’d be asking all these really in-depth questions that most staffing salespeople do. There are some good people out there who really know this stuff and they’re good salespeople, but most staffing salespeople, they don’t go to that level of expertise. This guy had never sold anything, but he had that level. He would just literally close manufacturing client after manufacturing client because they felt like they were working with an expert. He very rarely had to contend on price.
[0:33:27] DF: That’s amazing. That’s great.
[0:33:29] DM: I got to get poached away from –
[0:33:31] DF: I know that people want to know that you know their business.
[0:33:34] DM: Oh, 100%. Yeah.
[0:33:35] DF: The last part I have for this, for today, and the most exciting part. I want to jump into the Staffing Sales Summit. I want to talk about the conference that you have coming up. I was lucky enough to attend it last year. One of the best conferences I’ve been to. I think I love learning about sales, leveling up my sales game, bringing that back to my team. I had a lot of great takeaways from it. It was good. I think everybody there was raving about what the takeaways were, the educational content, and it felt like it was really impactful. I think especially in the market we’re in right now. I think that at a time where differentiating your services is so critical seems like a valuable thing for everybody to think about. But let’s jump into it. What I want to know is why did you decide to create the Staffing Sales Summit?
[0:34:23] DM: Yeah. It was a need. I was actually, I was chatting with Brenda and Chris from Avionte.
[0:34:30] DF: Yup.
[0:34:31] DM: I had shared the idea. You and I had talked about it and I talked about it with David Searns and was like, I wish there was a conference just for sales. I finally set it and Chris Ryan just piped up and he was just like, “Let’s just do it. Just create it.” I was like, “Okay.” You know me, like I don’t really want things to do. I’m a busy guy. But I mean, you know what? Yeah, why not? Like I can’t, you know, if not me, who? If not now, when? This was literally a little over a year ago. He’s like, “But you got to do it. it’s got to come out before Exec Forum, because it’s got to be early in the year, because if it’s sales, it leads the way.”
We had, I don’t know, maybe 70- or 80-days runway on it. We just created it, because there is no conference out there that focuses deep dive workshop, actual, kind of actionable items that salespeople and sales leaders can take away to improve their business. There’s always sales topics on the major conference agendas for sure, but never to this depth. That was the main feedback that I got. Like I don’t know how many people would say about the Kim Henderson session or Mark Winter session that just one of their sessions was worth the price of admission. They’re like, I took so much out of that, it transformed my business. I think that was really the main reason we did is because it just wasn’t out there. It’s needed, because sales is hard right now, especially hard.
[0:35:47] DF: Yeah. I think it is challenging time. I think that a lot of agencies are still running the old playbooks. It’s time to level up if you want to hang in this game right now. What do you think when it comes to the Sales Summit, what are some of the things that people could expect to walk away with?
[0:36:04] DM: A lot, actually. When we started creating this agenda, and as you know, because you know you’re a founding partner with this. We didn’t know there was going to be a second one, right? We left it to the audience. At the last summit, we’re like, “Hey, if you say we should do this again, we’re going to do it again. But if you think this is good one and done, then we’re good.” Everyone’s like, “No, you have to bring it back.” Right? So, like, okay. What we did is we did our NPS survey at the end. We brought back the four highest rated speakers, because I don’t ever want a conference to get stale, or we just keep bringing the same people back over and over and over again. But obviously, if people rated the highest, that the most value transfer was there.
We brought back our four highest speakers to be talking about topics, which I’ll run through super quick, but obviously, it was Tom Erb, Kim Henderson, Mark Winter and, oh, God. Robert Reid from Butler Street. There’s so many speakers this year. They were amazing. They all had these actionable takeaways. That was like the premise that like who are the top four that we want to bring back? Then let’s get some new speakers in that are doing some cool things and the industry to keep things fresh and relevant.
The next thing we did that a lot of people don’t realize happened going into the planning of this, is we talked to countless number of staffing leaders, sales leaders, sales producers. We said, “What are the challenges that you’re facing?” Right? What do you need to be solved for, right? What we recognized, there was a common theme and it goes back to that segmented silo approach that’s happened right now where sales just is outselling and then there’s recruitment.
Sales enablement was the main theme. It’s like we need more marketing cover. We need better messaging. We need better use of LinkedIn, better branding. We need to differentiate ourselves at every single step of the way, because in reality, when the salesperson is sitting there in front of the buyer and they’re saying, “Hey, are you ready to buy?” A lot of times they’ve already had this massive buildup of research and trying to figure out who that salesperson really is in the company they work for, right?
I think the latest data said that 80% of C-suite buyers and B2B services actually leverage digital marketing. In the staffing industry, particularly LinkedIn before they make a decision, right? This is an area that we needed to really solve for. We also recognize that there’s more price pressure, so you need better questioning. How do you manage meetings to a more successful outcome? We have people that are coming and talking about that. Those were the main themes that we saw as like, how do we keep our prices strong? How do we build a better case for ourselves ahead of time in the marketing funnel?
We actually have a lot more sales enablement, marketing experts coming in to talk about how do you leverage LinkedIn to be generating more leads, booking more meetings, selling through LinkedIn, social selling, to really build out that custom process. I will say in a nutshell, what someone can take away, they’re going to know how to have probably the most comprehensive and potentially automated sales prospecting plan that will increase capacity of prospecting and actually input or increase the yield throughput of your clients, because you’re actually going to have tools and methods that you’re going to know on what’s working and what’s not so you can continually improve. That’s kind of in a nutshell, but like honestly, go to the Staffing Sales Summit website and see all the speakers that we have and all the workshops are going to be delivering, like it’s a lot. It’s a lot of –
[0:39:21] DF: Last year, there were people that were sending their whole team too. They have people who had four or five people from their team, all together have the shared resources. I’m very excited about that. The next question I was going to ask you to be already brought up. Where do people go if they want to sign up? What are any deadlines in terms of registering for it?
[0:39:40] DM: Yeah. If you go to staffingmastery.com, right in the top menu, you can see Staffing Sales Summit, just click there and you can see all the information, the speakers, the video, you can get tickets right there. The entire agenda is online. I will say that we are cutting off sales February 14th. That is the last day to get a ticket. However, where sales are at right now with ticket registration, I don’t know if we’ll get there. It is a limited event. That was the one of the big pieces of feedback last year was people didn’t want it to get too big. They liked the fact that it was workshop style and it’s a little bit more intimate and they felt they could actually produce more.
They said we don’t want more than 100 people this year. With speakers, partners, all that kind of stuff, that gives us about 80 tickets. So, there will only be 80 people, staffing professionals in the room. It’s a very small, exclusive event. If you want to be one of those 80, I wouldn’t wait until February 14th. I would go do it sooner than later.
[0:40:36] DF: Awesome. Well, Dan, this is a great conversation and can’t wait to see you in Orlando, February 26th. So, excited for the conference.
[0:40:43] DM: Of course. I’ll see you there, man.
