Pint with Paiger

Join Darren as he chats with Sara Kavanagh, Head of SEO at Venn Digital about:

1. Producing content based on the data you have
2. The impact of badly written job adverts for SEO
3. Gated vs. Ungated content for SEO benefits
4. How AI is and will affect SEO

Join Darren as he chats with Ashley Jones, Director of marketingSHOWCASE about:

1. What makes a good event
2. Why you should use your personal brand to promote your events
3. Whether the best events are on Thursdays
4. The future of events being hybrid or technology influenced

Join Darren as he chats with Derry Holt, CEO of OneUp Sales about:

1. The ultimate sales motivation techniques

2. What makes a good company culture - hint, it depends on your people

3. Replicating the office sales competition in a work-from-home business

4. How to get everyone posting content on social - gamification of course!

Join Darren as he chats with Will Pearce, Founder and Director at Orange Appointments about:

1. Building your niche

2. Proactive BD to make your own luck

3. The perfect BD recipe

4. Taking the jump to start your own business

Join Darren as he chats with Cinzia Ricciardone, Product Director at SmartRecruiters about:

1. How to be a successful product manager
2. Involving both marketing and sales in the product... early
3. What the recruitment market is missing
4. Women in tech

Join Darren as he speaks to Ramli John, Managing Director at ProductLed. The pair dig deeper into what ProductLed really means and the do's and don'ts that go with it. Ramli started his career in marketing before becoming a consultant and finally landing at ProductLed back in 2020. You can also follow along on Ramli's journey with ProductLed in the highly informative slack community and newsletter here.

Join Darren as he speaks to Ricky Wheeler, the Global Marketing Director at cube19.

Ricky has been doing marketing for 20 years, beginning his career at a web design company and running events as a DJ on the side. Both aligned into event management and marketing which turned into a marketing role at Broadbean for 8 years, where Ricky crossed paths with Darren. He is now the Global Marketing Director at cube19. 

Ricky talks through his process for getting buy-in company-wide, his opinion on the term marketing girl and how the relationship between sales and marketing will affect marketing activities. 

Kristie has 16 years of experience in recruitment marketing. She worked her way up and now owns her own business called Thrive which specialises in sales and marketing automation. Having worked at a large company, she was given a large budget to work with and try different things out. However, being in a large company you are also restricted by the speed things can progress. Since the pandemic, we have seen the impact automation and AI can have to speed up processes and the technology has caught up with the slower businesses.

As recruitment and sales will continue to be 'people buy from people' but automation should not be feared it should be encouraged to start off the process of selling. Some of the best recruitment companies operate and try both B2B and B2C strategies from other industries than just recruitment. That's where the automation element comes in. Covid has forced us to look outside of our comfort zone of calling and past the vanity metrics we typically used.

Why should consultants spend so much time on the phone if they can add an automated element to get warmer conversations and close deals?

What is automation and how do you use it?

Having the ability to post content, share content and scaling that. Recruiters are busy and being pulled in many directions so having it automated to save them time. Thrive automates emails with the real benefit of reactivating your database to contact dormant leads you may have available. A lot of older databases are unlikely to be used because data can be outdated and intent can be questioned. So Thrive assesses the customer sales journey which can be sales or marketing emails alternated. It also lets you extract your contacts from LinkedIn to search for their work email address to then feed those prospects into an automated journey. Adding scoring to accumulate intent is helpful in finding the warm leads.

Companies spend a lot of money seeking new leads that often exist already within your database, to begin with. It's just getting over the issue of sales and recruiters hatred for CRM's.

How do you use lead scoring for recruitment?

Looking at the different actions on the journey and scoring them accordingly. They start with a minimum of 7 interactions and over the course of those emails, they get scored for different actions such as opening, clicks, case studies etc. You look overtime at the score build-up and the journey they follow. If you know the customer and their pain points, ensuring your messaging fits their values, regardless of whether it's automated or not, if they are delivering value, they will be opened.

The most successful email campaigns?

They tend to be the ones going to clients as to candidates tend to get a worse open rate for newsletters.

Things a marketing team can help with:

1. Adding an element of retargeting to your site can bring even more touchpoints and recognition of the brand.
2. Working out the cost of acquisition to invest the resources there.
3. The right content past just a salary guide once a year - so stretching the key piece of content out more than a once a year email - this can be a rule of 5 using the content in 5 different ways.

In this episode of Beer with Darren, I spoke to Robert Woodford from The Marketing Junction about marketing in-house vs. outsourcing and how to do effective marketing in recruitment businesses.

The Marketing Junction offers outsourced marketing for recruitment businesses before this he worked at a variety of different recruitment companies over 20 years. He fell into recruitment, as many do but also fell into marketing after completing a degree in economics. He prefers the start-up life as a marketer as he terms marketing for larger businesses 'a glorified administrator' - this being exec or manager level. You often get told how things are done.

Robert wears many different marketing hats and is continually doing different things through outsourcing for a variety of types of companies. As a business owner, you have no choice to become sales to some degree. For Robert, he grew from consulting on companies to have to sell to get business.

What advice do you have for new freelancers?

If you are doing it because you've always wanted to great. If it's out of necessity and it's not actually what you want to do or passionate about, then be careful because it's hard work. Surround yourself with your 'competitors' as you will get good advice and people are more than happy to help.

What does the phrase recruitment marketing mean to you?

Robert loves recruitment marketing as you have an element of both B2B and B2C. Marketing within recruitment is so unique, you have 3 autonomous parts - the clients that are people, the candidates and the recruitment consultants who are the brand. So marketing within recruitment you are balancing all of those parts.

How do you define the ROI of marketing?

Robert often asks the question back 'how do you define the ROI of your telephone system or CRM? Because actually, you don't define the ROI because you just know it works. Within marketing, we all do Google Analytics but ultimately some things are just impossible to track. A lot of marketing is to do with solidifying relationships so can you actually put a figure on that?

Marketers add so much more to recruitment businesses than they are given credit for. They are often responsible for the culture because internal marketing is great. Again how do you measure that? Often in his reporting, he adds an anecdotal note - that could be internal views that show your importance but they aren't measurable. The challenge for anyone within recruitment marketing is that most CEO's in the companies are recruiters so they have never had to work with marketers before.

In this episode of Beer with Darren, I spoke to Kristina Finseth from Interseller as we discussed sales and marketing alignment for common growth goals and how to get 80%+ open rates on outreach email campaigns.

Kristina started out in recruitment for the first 5 years of her career before she entered the B2B SaaS space. She landed at Interseller in January which is a platform for prospecting and outreach for most recruiters. She sits on the fence between sales and marketing in what has become her role 'growth marketing' which will include both sales and demand generation for the sales team.

The misalignment of top-level goals is often the reason for the conflict between sales and marketing. So having the same goal of revenue means looking at every activity from a marketing point of view and through that lens will it get us any further towards our goals. It goes back to the old question of should marketing be measured purely on MQL's and no it shouldn't if those MQL's are only successful 2% of the time.

If you are working with a leadership team who haven't previously been heavily involved in the marketing strategy, it's part of your job to get the buy-in for why you want to do something step-by-step to share that vision.

It helps a marketer to have worked with the sales team. Kristina has worked on the team understands their goals, understands their pain points so it's really a people relation problem when sales and marketing don't align. Getting to know each other on a personal level massively helps close the gap.

Everyone thinks they are a marketer, so often sales will come to the marketing team with 100 ideas but making sure the sale team are heard without saying directly no and offending them is important to establish early on.

Every business has influencers they can engage with. And these are their customers and employees. It seems to Neal crazy not to engage with your advocates in a B2B space as they are your salespeople on LinkedIn by offering influence. Termed employee advocacy or employee influencers, salespeople are connecting with their prospects all day long. So tapping into these connections is highly important.

Looking at an employee as an advocate can often lead to questions of why aren't they sharing my content. If you look at employees as influencers you actually ask them how can we help you with our resources. Then the influencers become amplifiers of your content and involved in the content. For example, asking them to get your podcast guests. Developing the relationship will have much more impact on your marketing long-term. It's treating them as influencers - appealing to their ego.

Some companies now are offering nano-influencer training. Giving the person what they want to get the content they need, in their personal brand strategy. This is something you can bring to the table as once you offer them value, they are likely to share your content through the collaborative mindset.

In this episode of Beer with Darren, I spoke to Coralie Fernando from Tiger Recruitment to discuss getting your sales team bought into marketing efforts and how crucial marketing is to business survival post-pandemic.

Coralie started her career in Australia as a recruiter in Sydney before moving to Melbourne and joining a brand agency as an account manager. Both herself and the owner of the agency could see the links between recruitment account managers and account management in alternative sectors. Since she has moved back to the UK.

Recruitment in Australia for her company was extremely KPI focused and it was really sales-driven, whereas her agency now in the UK is much more about relationship formation.

This can also show the transition of time from working 15 years ago in recruitment to now has pivoted much more towards relationships.

The most important selling technique for Coralie is to think who is reading it and produce copy from this. Are your audience drawn to that heading, is that going to make your audience want to read more or click through? If it doesn't change it.

At both events and in writing we have to be cautious to use simple terms and the correct wording for our market. Using client and candidate outside of the recruitment industry can cause confusion.

Previously freelancing and working with Tiger on an outsourcing basis led to a full-time position with them. Tiger has seen great growth over the year and the success has led to an expansion of the marketing team and a content editor position. Which within recruitment seems luxurious and lucky.

SEO is a massive part of what they do and the main driver of new clients as well as promotional activity producing leads. So her measurement of ROI is based on both.

As a recruitment marketer, you are both B2B and B2C across different sectors and locations. For strategy, it is about prioritising based on the objectives for the year and making sure each of the audiences is targeted and addressed.

Prioritisation in any business is extremely important, especially in light of the new working from home or living at work where there is a choice between being done for the evening and letting the to-do-list run onto the next day. Sometimes it can feel there is no escape from work.

For the marketing team being able to physically see consultants and management makes such a difference to how well we do our jobs. As managing a team whilst at home has its challenges. Not just for team morale but to keep human reaction to minimise loneliness.

Ryan is from Philadelphia on the east coast of the US. He is the CEO, founder of two firms, one is Pereus Marketing and that led onto his other firm Superhuman Prospecting. The second is where he spends most of his time giving outsourced business development to companies. A lot of it is adding more to sales development reps. It ranges from marketing to insurance to finance, really any industry.

He has always been in the direct marketing role in some type of person-to-person format, so he has always considered marketing with sales functions.

Ryan sees good call pick up rates, dependent on the industry and market you are calling into. This can be the size of the company, position they are in, geographic location and each places specific needs.

Companies use Pereus Marketing for 3 primary reasons. The most popular is that they just don't want to do it in house. Ryan originally started the company for this exact reason - to advance sales as a whole as the telemarketing role has a stigma to it. The negative perception started after roles in things like 'The Wolf Of Wall Street' or 'Boiler room'. There's a natural resistance to cold-callers but then added in the scams that were produced from those sales techniques only worsens the perceptions of cold-callers. It changed from someone giving information to be helpful to automatically a nuisance.

Ryan looks to change this perception by generating leads by building trust with the prospects, rather than being aggressive or squeeze them into signing the deal. The way they deliver cold-calls will hopefully in time change the way people perceive them.

The second is they don't know-how. There's a serious lack of sales education. If you want to be a lawyer you have to pass the bar. If you want to be a doctor you have to pass the boards. Why isn't there anything like that for salespeople? Some standard to meet in order for you to enter the profession at some level. So it's interesting that many people don't know the best practices. A lot of the time, salespeople use techniques which are bad for both parties.

This is where we have identified processes and methodologies that work if you follow the steps.

Another major hump for cold-calling and prospecting is rejection. It is understandable why it is terrifying. So Ryan's advise here is to express emotion (sales EQ) but you need to approach the call as if you are coding or solving a math problem. If you can start to adjust your brain to do that, looking at each call as if it's a single puzzle, the emotion or rejection just becomes part of the puzzle. Look at it like that piece of the puzzle not fitting, so compartmentalise and take the emotion out of it, you can start to see why people might not go forward with you has to do with the way you responded or worked through their problems. It becomes each call is a micro improvement.

Ryan's tips to get around the 'gatekeeper' is to think about them differently or realise that they are a stakeholder in the decision. The way he goes about it is first 'pass through and engage' strategy. The strategy that you act confident and get through quickly. If they ask you questions of why or are they expecting your call, you still know that they know enough about the business.

In this episode of Beer With Darren, I hosted James Warrack from SaveTrees, as we discuss his marketing strategy, cold-calling technique and lessons learnt from owning a business.

SaveTrees does online timesheets specifically for recruitment agencies with the long-term idea of taking any paper-based products online.

James history did not show an obvious link to recruitment or online timesheets but essentially along the line, he met with his business partner Jeremy who similarly was a contractor like James and wanted to build something. The seed idea was timesheets from his partner and after a not long meeting, they decided to go into business.

Since then the business has come along massively, even after a slow to market strategy and what he terms a not great first product. But now it is something he and James are very proud of. It's a simple product but people love it.

He started his career out of university as an aircraft engineer, ended up in Toulouse working at Airbus. After this, he thought about going into website design but didn't see himself becoming an expert in this. He went on to start a cleaning company but hated it. His logic was to get a client, put a cleaner into the company and that was the end of the chain. Over time this should accrue. He thought this couldn't be so hard but you are competing with multi-million-pound companies and they'll charge any price but not really deliver.

This sounds a lot like recruitment for me?

His staff ended up being paid more than him so at that stage he lost the energy to keep training his staff who would leave after being trained so he sold the business.

When it comes to selling James took the same approach as me. The do you want a pen debate James like me took a no as a no. Even if he knows they need it, he tries to be pushier but he doesn't like the style of twisting someone's arm. He'd rather someone came to him who was interested as at that stage you aren't selling, you are presenting. That's why he was interested in partnering with us.

For James, LinkedIn plays a significant role in how they do business because the recruitment business is so heavily focused on LinkedIn. It wasn't a natural platform for him and it has taken time to fully understand how people correspond because it's kind of a halfway house between professional and social. Some people are using emoji's all over the place, some people keep it strictly professional and it's finding that balance between both. With time James did a combination of what worked for him, just being natural.

Moving from aircraft from timesheets seemed a little unsexy to me! But none the less James has a passion for timesheets. They smooth out the process for everyone, if you are a contractor it cuts out the paper reporting in the physical sense and the stress-related. We still see that people are printing out digital copies making it just as laborious and slow.

It's a similar situation to Henry Ford saying do you want to upgrade to this car and the person replying with a bigger and better horse. It just isn't really an upgrade at all.

But people are starting to get it. For us, COVID has highlighted the need for changes into tech and marketing and how to speed up their processes. James similarly has had conversations with clients who are looking to adjust their processes and waste less time - the forward-thinking people. After working to adjust their SEO James has seen a positive turn in business during and now moving out of the pandemic.

He has tried to avoid cold-calling similar to me who finds it difficult. We both don't handle the rejection well!

James is the Marketing Director at CloudCall after working in marketing for 20 years. After graduating with a business degree, James found himself in the marketing industry as the 'no wrong answer' sector.

Daniel is the Channel Marketing Director at CloudCall after entering the industry around 20 years ago in consumer goods giving him a good background in product and brand management.

Talking the difference between B2B and B2C, marketers have a decision to make and for James, B2B is more of a challenge due to tighter resources, lack of feedback, and the many buyer personas involved in the purchasing decision.

With B2B marketing you have a greater audience to convince to part with cash and the challenge is even tougher in the current climate.

You can't see people shopping for your product which makes B2B even more challenging as the essence of marketing is understanding your customer.

You must then build relationships, visit companies, talk to the different personas, and talk to your sales team to fully understand your prospects.

James and Daniel advise me on how to measure my new marketing efforts with debates on LinkedIn questioning whether revenue is really a fair evaluation.

If a marketer gets 100 leads that turn into no sales why should their bonus be affected by a lacking sales team?

The marketing team should surely be evaluated on their ability to get good MQL not how the sales team then converts them - assuming they are good MQL's.

Ewan is the Associate Marketing Director at Eden Scott after previously working in leisure marketing. His passion for leisure stemmed from his degree in sports marketing as he suggests your degree selection should be based on something you are passionate about.

After a recent discussion on social platforms, in particular on LinkedIn regarding the degree or no degree subject. Having not gone to University myself, there are times when you can be left behind in discussions with certain terminology. But, is this enough to encourage people to go to university?

Ewan's advice is to go to university - if there is a subject you are passionate about.

A key to becoming an expert in your field is continually learning areas in your field that are not your specialty.

For Ewan, he has recently been learning more on SEO - especially with Google updating their algorithm frequently. This will not only improve his RIO in his own company but increase his understanding of areas he is passionate about.

Within recruitment marketing, you need to wear both a B2B and a B2C hat which makes branding challenges.

You need to have different strategies for both segments and as a marketer, you need to recognise the right channels by developing your brand around your service. For candidates or for clients, having a superior service in how you approach both customers will essentially ensure your brand covers both.

Kris is Head of Marketing at Charlton Morris after working his way from an executive level. Having previously worked in sales, Kris understands the pain points his sales team has and can give better solutions to solve these having been there himself.

We discuss the use of the term 'marketing girl or girls', which Kris concludes as a lack of respect for many marketing teams in the industry.

So his advice is to gain respect early on is not completing the minor jobs or touch-ups which the sales team can do themselves, with the results showing a better relationship between marketing and sales.

Kris goes against the typical idea that if your CEO isn't on board with marketing changes to get a new job. Instead, he suggests you should be up for the challenge as the reward of convincing the colleagues who are skeptical can be extremely rewarding.