Growth for any recruitment business can be difficult. It needs strategic direction and hard work. However, you can take some simple steps to protect your clients and your margins while still encouraging growth.
Clients are crucial to any growth strategy, but you don’t need new clients to aid growth. Focusing on existing clients and their tender cycles is the critical first step in your business development strategy.
Bids and tenders are now common parts of the recruitment industry. Public and private sectors may follow different paths, but engagement and winning those bids are similar.
If you put all the effort into a tender the first time around, then you should know exactly when your client will tender again. Running a busy business, it’s easy for timescales to slip or even for basic account management of clients to slip, especially with personnel changes for you and the clients. These simple tips can protect your hard-won bids/tenders and enable future growth.
Unfortunately, we’ve all lost recruitment bids for various reasons.
- Price too high or too low.
- Lack of a tailored response to the specification.
- Missed the deadline. (Has never happened to me and should never happen but does.)
- Bidding for work that you can’t deliver.
- Being too complacent as the incumbent.
- Not enough evidence in responses.
The list is endless. But what can be worse, and we’ve all heard in offices, is when you didn’t know the client had a tender out and you hear a competitor has won. It’s catastrophic if they are an existing client and you weren’t invited to bid
So how do you go about ensuring you don’t miss any new tenders from existing or potential new clients and get the ‘inside track’? This can be achieved by maintaining at least three distinct levels of relationships with all clients.
- Hiring Managers.
Crucial for day to day development of the client. They are the source of job fulfilment, enquiries and relationship management. Hiring Managers are your gateway to more senior managers and those within different departments of the client. You should meet and talk to them regularly. Hiring Managers’ opinions will be sought on your performance will be asked. If you are not doing the basics right, you could be excluded from the next tender exercise.
2. Procurement/HR.
These departments usually manage and handle all bid/tender exercises and know the upcoming bid/tenders’ precise dates. Therefore, it is imperative that you know the people’s names in these departments and includes them in your regular review meetings with Hiring Managers. Lessons can be learnt on how the existing contract is performing to then use in the new procurement. Importantly these meetings provide a free platform to share your recruitment knowledge.
This could be market insights on salary surveys, shortages occupations, new candidate attraction techniques, MI analysis. The list is endless. This can often focus on the shortcomings of the incumbent and the client’s services in the future.
3. Executive.
A lot of bids/tenders have Executive sign off at some stage of the process. This can be a person or Executive department. For any new bid/tender, it is safe to assume. Executive sponsorship will be needed again. Maintain a relationship with the initial sponsor. This does not have to be as involved as the previous two stages. However, it needs to be of a standard where you meet annually for a strategic review/update, and you can call/email and expect a reply and information to be shared. You can use a similar approach as used for Procurement/HR and evidence additional services you can provide as a means of developing the relationship and keeping your business at the forefront of their thinking for the next bid/tender.
General Housekeeping
So, basic tips on how to keep track of bids and tenders you’ve won and maximised their opportunity.
If you maintain regular client contact and conduct meetings, some general points to aid growth from existing clients are worth reiterating.
Know all your contracted clients and map out contract start and end dates to the contract terms you signed. From this, you’ll know exactly where you are in the cycle of re-procurement.
Then match each client to the last meeting you had with them for Hiring Managers, Procurement/HR and Executive. If any of these meetings was over 3-months ago, it is time to organise a new one. Without regular meetings, you can’t be expected to know their requirements, and you increase the risks of missing the next bid/tender.
Match each client to a named Account Manager. Do they have one? If not, assign one and organise a meeting. Also, analyse the client’s current spend to that which was promised or projected on contract award. If the client has underspent, you need to know why. The reasons could be general market conditions or something more long term.
Conversely, their spend may be about to increase. Are you geared up to meet increased demand? Will they come to you first if you haven’t seen them in 6 months?
Likewise, these spend patterns may determine if you bid next time or how you continue to service the account. All affect your costs and growth forecasts.
Growth can be achieved