Show me the money

Proving the commercial impact of 'fluffy' value

To justify your premium price, you need your clients to see the value you bring. You can use all the words in the world to try and persuade them, but at the end of the day the most powerful tool is to put a £ sign on the impact you can make.

My go-to example for this is a top sales candidate who might bill an extra £250k a year, above and beyond an average sales candidate. It’s a no-brainer for your client to pay you £10k more than another agency if they believe you can land them that superstar candidate.

But so much of what recruiters offer is not directly commercial. It’s not easy to quantify the value of candidate experience, for example, in pounds and pence (or dollars and cents).

Except it has been done. And the value is quantifiably huge.

Virgin Media looked at how job applicants who were also customers reacted if they were rejected for the role - and discovered they were losing £4.4m every year from applicants cancelling their Virgin accounts.

You can understand it. You apply for a job with a company you look up to, but then you don’t hear back from them for ages. You’ve jumped through all their hoops but don’t know how you did. You get more and more frustrated, and lose hope that this company will ever get back to you. It feels like they don’t care about you. Why should you keep paying them when they’re rejected you?

Now imagine candidate experience is something you are great at improving for your clients. You’d only need to persuade Virgin Media that you can make a 10% difference for them to see that your service would be worth £440k a year to them. That number is likely to make them sit up and take notice.

There are so many valuable things that recruiters offer. You may have called them ‘nice to haves’ or ‘fluffy’ add-ons, but this example shows you can turn many of these things into commercial strengths that get your clients’ attention.

Want to put a number on the value you create for your clients? Send me one thing you provide that you find hard to put a £/$ sign on and I’ll send you an example of how it can be done.

Jon

P.S. Making your offer a ‘no-brainer’ is your best chance of winning new business and getting the fee you want. The more you can justify why your clients should use you, the easier the sell becomes.

Many recruiters I speak with already put a pounds-and-pence value on part of their service. It’s usually the value that a great candidate will add to a business, either through increased revenue or cost savings.

I recommend having more than just one way of proving your commercial impact. After all, your competitors can say the same thing about their candidates. But when you can show how you can add revenue and save costs across a range of areas, you become the obvious choice for your clients.

Want to put a number on the value you create for your clients? Send me one thing you provide that you find hard to put a £/$ sign on and I’ll send you an example of how it can be done.