Sales prospecting guide for selling recruitment

Introduction

Selling services through outbound prospecting always involves some challenges. Recruitment services, however, can be more challenging to sell for several reasons:
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- You can't convince a company to hire more people if they didn't have the intention to do so (you can only capture demand, not create it)
- There is a lot of competition (i.e: your competitors are prospecting the same accounts you are).
- Services are expensive. Thus, it is required to find companies with a consequent budget.

For the above reasons, it is essential that you stand out in your outreach. This means that a "spray-and-pray" approach in which you contact every company on earth with jobs openings won't do it.

The best ways to stand out are to:
- have a niche specialized offering (i.e: specialize in recruitment for an industry or for specific departments)
- reach out to companies that showcase public signals of needs for roles (i.e: engineering team is growing fast, new product offering, many open positions for a long period...)

This is where you come in by [1] identifying companies in need of "niche" profiles and [2] showcasing you have the expertise to fill their demands.

This begs the question... how do you find out that a company needs your recruitment services?

STEP 1: Identify companies' need for recruitment services

There is no way to find out - for sure - that a company needs recruitment services. But, you can guess. And when it comes to reaching out to cold prospects, having an "excuse" for reaching out is better than nothing.

Instead of contacting every company on earth without any context, you'll open your messages by saying that you were compelled to reach out to them because you noticed that {insert observation}.


What is a good excuse for reaching out?

To find reasons to reach out, we will leverage what we call "signals" and "triggers". These are observable moves from companies, that usually precedes a set of actions.

For example, when a company raises funds, they will likely want to accelerate their growth. This usually means hiring a bunch of profiles across all departments.

Another example can be the appointment of a new C-Level Executive (CXO). When a company appoints a new Chief Sales Officer, it potentially means that a lot of changes will occur within the sales team, this could mean more people!

When it comes to recruitment, here are the "buying triggers" we like to focus on:
- The headcount of the company is growing fast.
- The HR/Talent Acquisition team expands.
- Job openings stay open for a long period.
- There are many new open positions.
- A new CXO is appointed.

If you're looking for more buying signal ideas, check the LinkedIn post below‍

STEP 2: Find companies currently hiring

‍At ColdIQ, we have an *unfair* advantage when it comes to finding companies currently hiring.

We use a tool that is called Clay: https://clay.com/
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The principle is simple: you upload a list of websites within the tool, and ask it to filter for specific positions. In the example below, I was looking for companies currently hiring AI & ML profiles.

As a result, I get:
- the number of open job position for these filtered roles
- title of the role for the job opening
- location of the open role
- date the role was open

And, most importantly, a detailed description of the role.

At this stage: we have a list of companies, currently hiring for roles relevant to us. We know how many positions they are hiring for, and we know the job titles for these roles.

Based on that, we want to identify a decision maker within the company.
Here's the issue: there is no way to know, for sure, who handles that.

From experience, we noticed that it's usually:
- the HR/Talent Acquisition department
- the Head of department for the open role (e.g: Head of Engineering for Engineer profiles).

We also know that HR doesn't like to get bypassed 😆

For these reasons, here is how we like to structure our campaigns:
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[1] A first campaign targeting HR & Talent Acquisition Managers within our target companies.

[2] A second, more personalized campaign, targeting HR & Talent Acquisition Directors within our target companies.

[3] A third campaign targeting the Head of Department for the role that is open.

This begs the question, how do we find them, and more importantly, how do we find their contact information?!
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We use a combination of tools such as:
- Clay
- Apollo
- BetterContact

Apollo & Clay have features that lets us search for specific roles within companies. They also have a built-in email finder that lets up find verified email addresses.

Because Clay aggregates over 50+ data sources within its software, we are able to find a very high percentage of the email adresses we are looking for. Clay also integrates with software that lets you find phone numbers.

If we are not satisfied with the number of email adresses we found, we use BetterContact to find even more data.

STEP 3: Contact prospects at scale

At this point, you should have:
- a list of companies currently hiring for specific positions
- the contact information of the potential hiring manager for these positions

These lists can actually be quite good... and consist of 1000s of contacts. The implications are that:
[1] you won't have the time to manually reach out to them
[2] you have a lot of *potential* new clients

Now, before you get any sales engagement platform and start automating your outreach at a massive scale, there a few things you need to consider:
- your potential new clients receive hundreds of messages every day
- they can sense when your approach is impersonal and automated

If you want to have a decent conversion rate, you need to stand out. We started doing this by targeting companies based on a need, and by going after the right person inside the company (and believe it or not, this is already better than 99% of the outreach out there). But, we can push this a step further. We will leverage ChatGPT inside of Clay to personalize our outreach at scale.

The goal is for each of our outreach message to be unique. You want your recipient to think *there is no way this was for someone else*.

So here is our strategy: we will use the job description for each of the open position as an [Input]. Based on the text inside of the job description, we will prompt ChatGPT to read everything, and summarize the key needs for the hire. We will then ask it to complete a sentence such as: "I saw you were hiring a {job title} that specialize in... {AI-personalization}"

Sounds complicated? With Clay it is child play. I described in the post below how the process works:

Following the above steps we now have:
- a list of companies potentially interested in our solution
- the contact information of the relevant people inside the company
- a personalize snippet that adresses the specific needs of each company

With these, we can now reach out at scale, in a way that will feel personalized to each of our recipient.

At ColdIQ, we use Smartlead to automate our outreach by email and on LinkedIn.

We also like LaGrowthMachine (LGM) as an alternative. The main difference is that LGM lets you reach our to your contacts via email, LinkedIn AND Twitter. Plus, they let you send voice notes at scale.

We recommend Amplemarket for sales teams that:
- need a platform with strong Hubspot or Salesforce integrations or
- an integrated phone dialing option.

You read this far?

Hey - if you read this far… I’m guessing you’re really interested in cracking your outbound sales system.

I left out quite a few details in this guide. I didn’t do that purposefully. It is just *very* complicated to get my point across while being comprehensive without writing a whole book...

In the next sections, I will cover sales copywriting best practices and rules to build an email infrastructure that lands your emails outside of SPAM.
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That being said, if you want to discuss how to implement a prospecting system to sell your recruitment services... I invite you to book a time in my calendar right below 👇

STEP 4: Structure and write your pitching cadence

Now that we covered:
- finding companies demonstrating buying intent
- finding contact information of relevant people within these companies
- personalizing part of our messages using AI
- software for automating our outreach

The question is... how are we going to write convincing messages so that our prospects want to meet with us?
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Here are a few best practices to follow when writing your messages. Both to make sure they’re read by your recipient and they don’t land in the SPAM folder:

- Write messages as short as possible.
- Avoid adding links, images &/or documents.
- Individually personalize them for your recipients.
- Include several touchpoints, and follow-up a few times.
- Reach out across several platforms using various formats
(send videos, reach out on LinkedIn, via Email...)

To help this process - you can use tools such as Lavender that rates your cold emails in real time. 

If you're not sure what to write, worry not... I got your back ;)

I compiled some of my favourite email copywriting frameworks, and you can find them in the below post 👇

STEP 5: Set up the infrastructure to send 500+ emails a day... while keeping open rates above 80%

The last, yet essential steup is to set up an email infrastructure that will allow you to send emails at scale without landing in the SPAM folder.

Half of the battle is to avoid triggering email platforms' spam filters by avoiding links, images & documents in your cold emails. Another is to avoid sending too many emails from the same inbox.

The best practice is to send under 50 emails a day per domain. It is also recommended to avoid using your main domain for outreach. If too many people label you as spam, the consequences can be serious and impact other areas of your business. For example, most of your emails could land in the spam folder, even important communications with existing customers.

I wrote a post here that describes the infrastructure I set up for my own prospecting and for clients.

In summary, you need to:
- Create several domains & email accounts.
- Forward these new domains to your main domain (in case someone tries to look you up).
- Configure your SPF, DKIM & DMARC records for each of these domains.
- Limit your sending volume to 50 emails per domain per day.

And finally, you will want to use email warming software to improve the reputation of these new domains. 

Deliverability is a dense subject in itself. If you want to learn more about it, I recommend that you read this great article by Mailreach on how to prevent your emails from going to SPAM.

If you use several email inboxes - you’ll save a lot of money by using a sending solution that doesn’t charge per email profile. You can use Smartlead, which lets you use an unlimited number of email profiles.

Wrapping this up...

This is all for now. I hope you learn a thing or two by reading this guide.

If you want to connect, don't hesitate to send us an invite on LinkedIn:
-> Michel Lieben (Co-Founder & CEO): linkedin.com/in/michel-lieben/
-> Alex Vacca (Co-Founder & COO): linkedin.com/in/alex-vacca/

And if you're interested in learning more about how we would run your sales prospecting campaigns, feel free to book a meeting below 👇