There are few magic secrets to over achieving on your sales targets, and we all know the people that do best, consistently cover the basics well. In this blog we’ll look at the importance of leveraging your strengths, quality over quantity, focus, and why learning equals earning.
Do What You're Famous For
You will be the most successful when you’re working at your optimum so find your niche and stick to it. Don't get seduced by shiny things that are not your core business. Not only will you be more efficient and effective when you narrow and hone your focus, you’ll also develop a reputation as the go to person within your area of specialisation. Top performers gather significant referrals and splits with other recruiters when they become well known for placing people within a specific industry or profession.
Quality Over Quantity Wins Every Time
We know this well, yet lots of people set unrealistic activity targets, for example, spending a whole day on business development to make 100 calls. Of course this is rarely successful because as a top performer you have lots of other stuff going on that needs your attention. If you lose focus you end up taking on jobs or clients that are outside of your area of expertise draining even more of your time.
Aim to be like a world class sprinter, prepare for short bursts of activity where you do everything to the very best that you possibly can, and you’ll be much more efficient and effective. This does take additional time to research target clients and prepare for each call, e-mail, or meeting with great information about how you can add value to their business.
Try spending the same amount of time researching and planning 3 x 1 hour blocks of focused and targeted activity, and you’ll be surprised at how much better your return is compared to a whole day of hammering through a big list.
Don't Live for the Day/Week/Month/Quarter
If you want to continually overachieve you need to approach your work as a collection of activities that generate an overall outcome. People who under achieve often focus on just getting one job done this week. But if that falls through, then they end up scrambling because they don’t have a back-up plan.
Conversely, over achievers work within a system that generates X number of jobs, Y CVs, Z interviews and lots of placements. Yes, they have good weeks and bad weeks but the impact of the lows is much less because they have a consistent pipeline.
The success that overachievers enjoy doesn’t happen by accident. It’s down to excellent planning and skilful time management so that you cover all of your key result areas in the right quantity. For example, if you’re working a brand new desk, then you might spend the majority of your time on business development, but you shouldn’t neglect high quality interviews and sourcing great candidates
Clean Desk Policy
By this I don’t mean that you should have a tidy table top free of clutter - although that’s never a bad thing. You should periodically check your sales and recruitment process. Are you still getting value from all of the clients that you work with?, Are you working a small number of jobs that are highly place able? If not, you should periodically throw out any old jobs that have not progressed, alongside clients that you don’t see value in or who don’t see value in what you do anymore. It might be painful, but once you make the decision, you’ve cleared a path and freed up time to focus on your priorities.
Keep Learning
In terms of professional learning, there's no shortage of options that you can choose from including classroom training courses, online training courses, seminars, and conferences. Why not turn your commute into study time? If you have an average daily commute of 1 hour, that totals 14 hours of learning per week, which would allow you to complete a part-time MBA or listen to 2 audio-books. Could you be a better recruiter if you got through 100 books a year? Time you didn’t otherwise use productively can be repurposed in order to achieve more. Go turn your car into a university on wheels.
If all the books and university stuff sounds a bit heavy, then consider something more informal. You can check out podcasts and online webinars on platforms like Blab, but don’t blame me if you soon develop a thirst for more knowledge!
If you stay focused on what you're best at, work for the long term, keep learning and advance your skills, you'll be a far more effective recruiter. If you do this consistently then there's no question that you’ll be in the target smashing club in no time.
We have put together an eBook to help you nail the basics and smash your targets! Click on the image below to download:
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