How I Secured A $500k Retainer In My Recruitment Agency

Hello ladies and gentlemen, James Blackwell here. And in today's video I'm going to be showing you behind the scenes of how I win retained business in my recruitment agency. Now a lot of you talk around how do I win retained business or win exclusivity? So I'm going to walk you through the scientific method to attracting what I call platinum clients and really gaining exclusive and retained business. So one famous quote that I like to use is recruitment entrepreneurs fail not because they cannot win clients or find candidates and make placements. It's because also they do not have solid, predictable systems that can generate long term partnerships with clients. So that's why we implemented what we call a signature sales system. And part of that mechanism is a unique pitch deck. But before you even do that, we need to define your market niche. So for you to win retained or exclusive business, we need to make sure that we've got a niche within a niche. Because it's much easier to be a market leader if you are focused on actual one niche in one location with next to zero competition than it is to focus on what I call like multiple niches and locations simultaneously. So the story of my agency, Ronald James, and now I've got three recruitment agencies all doing seven figures a year is I focus on inch wide, mile deep. So because it's much easier to be a market leader if you are focused on just one niche in one location. And that's really important. So why we actually need platinum clients now one of our biggest clients in my agency was a company called Tesco Bank, a really high profile bank. And we went over half a million year retainer with them and didn't happen overnight. That was probably year five in my agency that we got to that level where we had a track record, we were known, liked and trusted in the market. We, we'd made multiple placements with other big tech companies and we managed to give them confidence of how we would deliver that retainer. So just to sort of put some context in there now, repeat business versus new business. I think personally when you have a dream 100 and you're working with what I call platinum clients or platinum clients that are ones that come back time and time again and you can make multiple placements and make multiple fees from them. So it might not just be making one placement with the company, then you've got to go and find new business again because you're just always starting and that means that you can never scale your agency without you because it's always relying on you to win new clients. Whereas if you have repeat business with exclusive retained business and you can make multiple placements with, it's a lot more predictable and it's a lot more scalable. So that's, ladies and gentlemen, why we have what I call platinum clients. It's very important to have a focus, whether it's like your top three clients might generate 1002-003004-00000 a year with repeat business. Now, building out your Dream 100 strategy is important as well to get platinum clients and for the full signature sales system. So we walk you through exactly how you would have monthly nurture campaigns. We use a tool called StreakCRM for the pipeline manager. We use giftology as a technique to try and win Dream 100 clients. We use different letters, loom videos, video outreach and events. These are just some of them. There's a few more inside the program which we walk you through. But these are really the probably the core six fundamentals of what you need for a Dream 100 strategy to win a platinum client. Now, once you've got that in place, then you're going to need to create your unfair advantage in your market. Now that is what we call your unique signature sales system. So we will sort of boil down like what your USPs are, how you can deliver, and really create a delivery mechanism for you. So we can help you actually build that out as well so that you've got a predictable way that you can go into your niche that is really relevant to them that you can win exclusive retained business. Because with this signature sales system, this is the mechanic behind actually winning the retained exclusive business. So we've got like worksheets and I can walk you through just a little bit around what our, our brochure would be for our recruitment agency, for example, would, would look something like this. Okay. And that's not the pitch check, by the way. That's just a, that's just a PDF that you could send as a brochure after. And you need to like, sort of define what makes you different from the competition. So for example, it might be inbound marketing, it might be digital marketing automation software tools, candid outreach tools, video. All of these things are different to your competition in the recruitment agency world. And then it's like creating your offer. So like, how you actually pitch the offer at the end of the pitch deck is very important. So we talk about packages, platinum package, gold package, silver package, for example, and how you can bolt on what we call like an event maximizer. So how you could actually do webinars or live events for that client in the industry. That's a similar to what we did for the Tesco bank retainer, for example. And then that'll bring you into the signature sales pitch deck. So this is like a real anchor point of how you can win predictable, retain and exclusive business. So first you need to brand it. So we give you that again, plug and play inside the program and we can help build that out for you. But if you're going to create it yourself, you need a pitch deck that's branded for you and testing and iterating. So version one of our pitch deck is very different to version three, version four, for example, you're always improving, so you're starting up basic and then you're going to build and test what works in the market. And the most important thing is you want to make sure that you can customize each sales presentation. So not everything is plug and play with different clients. You might need to take things out and add things in. And that's very important as well, along with presenting with confidence and conviction. So you need to have belief in your product and your service to convince that client to work with you, especially if they're going to commit to exclusive retained. It was very important when I was winning business was I was just so confident in knowing we could deliver because I had a great team and a mechanism of like how we would find candidates that I came across with so much conviction in the presentation. Eight times, nine times out of 10, we would win that client retainer. Now then we've got the client jab, jab, right hook event. So we use things like niche events and webinars. So we built like our own personalized brand. So, so for instance, I'll show you quickly if it loads up. Devop, which was basically we specialize in developers and the Northeast, we would create events like that. You can see my face here. So we would go to these events, we put them on, give pizzas, beers, drinks, et cetera. And we would host these meetups, for example. Now that's something that you can build out and if you don't want to do it in person, you can do them as webinars as well, which is something that we could help you with. And then you can post these on LinkedIn events. So one of the biggest hacks is you can actually invite over a thousand prospects of your connections to these LinkedIn events to get them to sign up, which creates like an omnipresence and free marketing for you in order to get more candidates and clients into that Funnel and then you can host that for example, on a Zoom webinar and then you might provide some sort of training. So whether it's sometimes what we would do to get HR and recruitment teams on side, we where we do some value training around like culture fits, personality profiling and also like how we would hire and attract talent into their companies, we would help with some training for that and that worked really well for us. And then once you've done the pitch and you've got the client sort of on board, next you're going to need a winning proposal to get them over the line. A lot of people get stuck with James, I made an amazing presentation. The client said all looks well and then they get ghosted. So that's why you need a winning proposal to back it up. So this is like a plug and play repeatable template. We use something called better proposals. For example, you can use something different and basically in there you've built out what's in your signature sales pitch deck into a proposal, but in there you've got customized pieces that you've walked through on the exclusivity or the retainer. And most importantly, you need a follow process. So you need to give a client a reason to sign. We use like sometimes you want to create scarcity and urgency. I only take on a handful of clients per month and we're working with XYZ and xyz or you still want to move forward or we've got a really great candidate that could be a great fit for this role. If you can sign the proposal, we can send that candidate over and get them in the process and get the ball moving. So after that, obviously you want to secure your platinum client. So sending them an email onboarding. Thank you. Account management setup. So our team will set everyone up on Slack, WhatsApp and Trello. Very important. We use these three tools because that really builds rapport with the client because they're all used to using these tools and it's a lot better way to build rapport as opposed to traditionally just sending an email through your CRM system. So that's one of the hacks that worked really well for us. We set them up on what we call. We have a full build on Trello board, which is called a Canada Pipeline Manager. And that's how we get our exclusive and retained clients on this process. So it builds what I call like a moat around your agency that where other agencies aren't really doing that and they don't know how to do that. And once you start to get your clients on Trello, for example, it starts to increase that report and the partnership that you're building with your clients. Then obviously you want to build like a platinum client case study. So for instance, like very case studies are very important because especially bigger clients that want to assign retainers, they need to feel confident that you can deliver and you've done it before for someone they know in the market. So once you start delivering your first one, it's can we get a case study walked you through like the candidate nurture pipeline board? So we use Trello with slack and to onboard our clients and and then we've got a full candidate process of like how we walk them through a pipeline with that. So that's pretty much an overview, ladies and gentlemen of how you would win, retained and exclusive business. If you're interested in finding out a little bit more about like how we can build this on custom for you and you can plug that play into your business, then if you just check out the link below, you can put in a call with one of our team, we can walk you through a game plan of exactly how that would work for you. And if not, hopefully if you can give the video a like subscribe and I'll catch you on the next video.