Start A Recruitment Agency

Manage SALES PIPELINE Risks

In setting up your recruitment agency you may well have a view on how your sales roles and how your recruitment roles will work in your business.

There are no “right” ways and sometimes having consultants who are “360” (i.e. have both sales and recruitment responsibilities) suits and sometimes having consultants who are “180” (i.e. either do sales or do recruitment) works. In either case (or some other variant) it is essential to have a process around Leads & Sales Opportunities for your business.

Manage Leads & Opportunity Pipeline

All too often a weakness in a business is that there are no clear processes in place around generating sales and it is left down to individual sales people to use their own individual sales methods. This can make managing and forecasting sales more difficult than it needs to be.

If you get in to the habit of encouraging the generation of leads in your business you will quickly find that there are more opportunities than you ever imagined. Leads can be from just about anywhere and sourced by just about anyone. For example, a lead may come from doing a reference check, attending a networking event or just reading an online article. You should have a simple (but universally understood) leads capturing process that whether it was you as an owner or a junior member of staff there is a process to capture lead information.

Leads are just that – something that may have potential or something that clearly doesn’t. In addition to a leads process you should have a process that allows for a lead to be followed up and (where it is appropriate) that lead converted into an opportunity. Opportunities are qualified leads that have some expectations around potential value, chances of winning, people involved and forecast close date.

Look at your sales process and develop a activity sets that would typically apply in taking an Opportunity from its initial phase through to actually winning it and use a system that allows for the tracking of Opportunity Pipelines and the progress through each of those pipeline stages.