You aren’t just competing on vacancies, candidates and relationships. You’re competing on commercial clarity.

Hello, and wherever you are in the world. Now, every time we run these sessions, we get people dialing in from all over the world, from the US, UK, Australia. Today, we might have some people in the boardroom sharing this with their directors. Others of you might even be on the beach. But wherever you are in the world, I hope you're having a lovely afternoon. And I'm really grateful to have you with me.

Now, I want to share something really important with you on commercial strategy. I've been talking to a lot of recruitment business leaders about this over the last couple of months.

And it's something that we've recognised that you might have noticed too. Recruitment firms aren't just competing on vacancies, candidates and relationships today. You're competing on commercial clarity: who you serve, the value you create, how you sell, and how you get paid. That's the argument I want to unpack today. Things have moved from it being simply enough or simply possible for us to compete against each other. But we're now competing against AI.

We're competing against internal recruiters. We're still competing against each other. And the competition is not simply on access to candidates or relationships. It's on something much greater. It's on a much bigger question, this idea of what is your value and how do you display, capture and create that value? And that is ultimately what commercial strategy is all about.

That's the argument we're going to be looking at today. Because most recruitment firms are doing lots of activity. There's lots going on. They're spinning the wheel faster. More is happening. They're calling prospects, posting on LinkedIn, filling roles, testing tools, and going on training programmes. But activity is not the same as strategy, and that's being seen in the outcomes and the results. Activity is up.

Businesses are no doubt busier. But are they stronger? Are they sustainable? Are they scaling? Are they building the kind of assets and growth that feels like it's going to last? What I see all the time when I'm talking to recruiting businesses is that a vacancy lands and everybody reacts. People get very busy very quickly. Or you go through a quiet month and then there's a burst of BD. Everyone's kind of chomping at the bit on BD. It's patchy. It's up and down.

A good placement gets celebrated, but then the board gets wiped clean as you roll into the next month. When the firm needs momentum, founders and directors are the ones carrying the load, either to lead from the front and do the business development yourselves or generate the revenue through networks, relationships, all the rest of it. The rest of the team might be doing busy work, might be very busy, but they're not necessarily growing the strength of the organisation.

So the question I want to ask you today is: what is the health of your commercial strategy? Does your commercial strategy create revenue by design, where sales, marketing and delivery all work together to put you in a stronger position? Or are you still relying on either bursts of effort, relationships, or good timing? And are you one of those people who feels that, you know what, we run an expert business in a niche. We are a high value consultancy.

Our commercial strategy should perhaps no longer rest on activity, good timing or relationships. Maybe we should be trying to build something stronger when there's so much scrutiny on this question of value. Now, when I talk to business leaders, sometimes they will admit to me that the strategy is missing. Others are a little bit embarrassed and sheepish to say that actually there's no strategy at all, or what they do have feels kind of very thin, feels very unsupported.

Others say we do have a strategy. It's in place. It's got gaps and we need it bringing together. So you might be in any one of those scenarios. I'm going to be speaking to all three of those today. Most firms do really good work across every route to revenue, right? So most of you right now will run a team who do good outbound. It might be reactive, it might be based on live opportunities, speccing, whatever, but there's outbound activity happening.

You post on LinkedIn, you might run some events, you might do some marketing. You create probably some inbound, either via referrals or directly from your marketing activity. You've also probably got some repeat customers. So you probably do already get more revenue from existing clients. And you might also have something in place that is structured in a strategy that supports that referral process, those networking events or whatever it is that really helps you generate more referral-based inbound as well.

But what we found in our State of BD report is that 76% of recruiting businesses have no clear plan for BD — no clear strategy or sales plan for how to contact a target client, how often and what to say. And so what we then have to think about is: where is the commercial strategy and what can we do to tighten it up? Because a commercial strategy turns "whatever it takes, we'll win business" into something that the whole business can run consistently, then measure and improve.

The commercial strategy is measurable, improvable, and helps you build a stronger business consistently. Now, commercial strategy is all about seven key decisions. And I'm going to talk them through. I'm going to take the next 10 minutes or so to talk through these key decisions with you. This is the meat of this session. This is the bit that you tuned in for. This is the bit that you can use in your business today.

I'm going to go through each one. The first one is value. It is amazing to say, right? But so many recruitment businesses, when I ask them, what is the real value of the work that you do? Where do you create greatest impact? What of the things that you do has most value? The answer changes as we go through the conversation. They go from feeling it's hard-to-fill niche vacancies, typically, to something that's more related to moments of impact, difficult conversations,

helping a client see a little bit more clearly the challenges they face and how to overcome them. There's something in that expertise and insight that has more value, more depth, and is more in demand by your client base than simply the ability to fill the vacancies. So that's something that we think about when we talk about value. And it's your decision, of course. Some of the best businesses I work with come out of this saying, no, we are designed to be transactional.

What we do, the best of our value, is delivered in filling hard-to-fill vacancies. But for others, it's not. For expert lean boutiques, the expertise is the value. Secondly, once you've worked out where that value sits, you might want to then think about who is the audience for that. I want to give you a real life, tangible example. Let's imagine that the businesses that you speak to are clean tech SaaS companies, right?

They are organisations who produce or develop software for the clean tech space. And they are based in the US. That might feel like a really tight niche. That might feel like a really serviceable niche when it comes to sourcing talent. But it isn't a tight enough niche. It isn't a focused enough group of people around which to build your commercial strategy, because there are too many businesses that sit within there, too many different types of people, and too many different types of stakeholder all over the map.

When I work with businesses, a smart decision on this is to start with: how many clients does each consultant in your business need to win in order to hit their target? For many of you, that'll be five to 10. Why five to 10? Well, if each of those businesses hires three or four times a year, or five times a year, or if you're on a contract desk, if each of those businesses might take five to 10 runners, then you don't need too many of those in order to hit your revenue target. Let's say you set every one of your consultants a revenue target of £250,000. Five clients worth £50,000 a year will get you there. Ten clients worth £50,000 a year, you've absolutely smashed it.

You're doing great. So your audience can always be smaller than we're taught to think. 150 target clients, 150 target individuals who really closely fit your value offering and the way that you want to work, is going to be a much smarter way of approaching the market than listing the 2,500 that you could potentially sell to and waiting until they've got a vacancy — for reasons I will go on to explain.

You then want to think about your offer. If you take those two decisions around the value you create and the audience that you want to work for, what does that offer need to look like? Let's go back to our example of a recruitment firm who specialises in filling vacancies in the clean tech SaaS space in the US. Their offer could be: we can fill your vacancies.

Their offer could be: we can fill your vacancies faster or cheaper than anybody else. Their offer could be: we will find you hard-to-find talent. But right now, the leaders of those businesses aren't really worried about recruitment. In fact, to be honest, they probably think that recruiting is easy, or easier than it actually proves to be. The leaders of those businesses are worried about things like their funding runway.

And their sales pipeline. So how important, in getting their funding runway, managing their funding runway or increasing their sales pipeline, are the people that they hire? I would say — and in fact, I think you'll find — that the quality of the people they hire into that business is incredibly important. Those hires, arguably, and I think most leaders would agree on this, will make or break the ability for that company to succeed, to hit its exit valuation or achieve whatever it wants to achieve.

Commercial success depends on the strength of the people that you hire. So your hiring methodology and your ability to hire for them enables them to achieve that goal. Think about that. You've got a client you're trying to work with, and they've got a burning pressure or a burning goal they want to achieve in the next 12 months. And they don't see it yet: hiring is crucially important to achieving that goal.

It's not the only thing that's going to help them achieve that goal, but it's an essential cog in achieving that goal. I would rather that, for most of the businesses that we talk to, their vision is not to be the best recruiter in their niche. They've already done that, and that gets them so far. But where value comes from is not being the best recruiter in their niche. It is being a small but essential cog in their client's ability to achieve their $10 million, $1 billion goals.

What would you rather be seen as? The best recruiter, or an essential cog in your client achieving their $10 billion goals? So your offer might then fall more in that framework. The fourth decision on our list, if we're thinking about commercial strategy — we've talked about where is your real value, we've talked about who is your real audience, we've talked a little bit about what do you offer and how are you communicating that, what's the message — the fourth thing is then the route to market.

In a highly efficient recruitment business, there are five routes to market, and I wonder how well you're doing across these. Proactive outbound is my favourite and, in lots of cases, the most valuable. Proactive outbound is often seen as the most valuable because you can control the business you win. You set out the message, you set out the type of client you want to win, you take the offer to market, you are in control.

That makes it strong. You've got slightly less control with reactive outbound: live vacancies, live hiring managers, speccing candidates, treating your candidates as your product. That is slightly less in your control, so therefore the results that you get are slightly less efficient. You'll probably win that business a little bit easier, but the value of that business isn't necessarily as high as what it can be when you go out and do proactive.

The third thing is inbound. Inbound can be great. I've spoken to recruitment leaders recently who say, look, we're 100% inbound. And I think that is a brilliant position to be in, absolutely no doubt. Except when the inbound that they're getting isn't from ideal clients.

It's stretching them left and right. It's pulling their offer. It's making it more difficult for them to know what to sell, having to negotiate down on rates. They're struggling to deliver all of their value. The work is coming, sure, but it's not the shape or size of the business they really want. It's not actually a really good growth engine. It's all inbound, but it's not clean, and it's not the right business in a lot of cases. And that sounds crazy — I'm not anti-inbound by any stretch. But you've got to get inbound right. And again, that's about controlling it.

The fourth thing is then your account expansion. Do you have in your business today a methodology for generating more revenue out of the clients you won before? Do you have a recipe for client growth? Do you have a timeline and a measure for how long it should take a consultant to work that first vacancy through to having achieved a higher level of commitment with that business?

Do you have any way of tracking or recording that, or is it gut feel and relationship based? For most businesses, it's gut feel and relationship based. But Peter Drucker, the famous management consultant, said: what gets measured gets done. Your consultants are likely, if they've got any responsibility for account management, not growing that account unless you've got some measurement you can track them against.

Not only revenue, but referrals, introductions, account growth to other people within the industry. There's a whole host of things that sit within that account expansion piece that just don't get measured, don't get tracked, don't really get focused on. If I built a commercial strategy for your business today, we'd probably start there, if it was a gap worth filling.

So what are we talking about? Proactive outbound, reactive outbound, inbound, account expansion. And then there's this idea of a reactivation track. How are you reactivating lapsed clients? What are you doing around events, networking, community, that kind of stuff? How are you building a world, a universe in which you can be the centre? How are you backing up the first part of the claim, which is: we are the best recruiter in our niche?

That's the first part of the claim. The second part of the claim then is: how do you prove you're a small but essential cog in helping your clients achieve their biggest goals? The first part is how do you prove you're the best recruiter? That can come through events, networking, referrals, that sort of thing.

The final channel is a thing called commercial allies. I don't know whether you are going to be one of the very few recruitment business leaders I've ever spoken to who's got this, but here's what I mean by commercial allies. Can you operate in a universe of suppliers who sell to your target clients? What relationships have you got with the other people who sell to your target clients?

Recruitment events are always hosted by law firms, right? They want to help you with your MBO or your exit strategy. People like me do webinars with people like Jordan Schlossberg at Atlas or Chris Holland at Quito. You see these commercial partnerships everywhere in the world, apart from recruitment.

Now, one of the biggest challenges for recruiters, of course, is trust. Typically, most recruiters go to market with the same promise that every other recruiter does and really focus on building rapport and trust. But your client has already got people they trust: suppliers of other services, not recruitment, be it legal advice or consulting services or anything else. Maybe they're an accountant.

And if you built a relationship with that lawyer, that consultant, that accountant, and got them to trust you, got them to see how valuable you were, that lawyer, accountant or consultant could sell you into 10 businesses, 15 businesses — could probably help you win all of the business you need for the next 12 months. So we've got five strategies there: proactive outbound, reactive outbound, inbound, account expansion, and commercial allies. And that may not be your order.

That may not be the right priority order for you. As I say, commercial allies could potentially double your revenue. I am absolutely certain that for almost every business I work with, you could bill twice as much from your existing clients as you currently do without winning another single piece of business. It's a difficult thing to prove, but I'm prepared to stick my neck out and say we could build a strategy that, even if we didn't achieve it, if we got close, would that be worth pursuing?

So the routes to market need deciding, need clarifying, need baking. And the fifth thing is your sales methodology.

Because if I said to you today that the next client you want had to be on a partnership basis, or at least you had to get to a position where you were proposing a six-month partnership to the next client you sold to — does your current sales methodology, your current sales process of meetings and conversations and the assets that you use to support all of that, would that enable you to create this kind of proposal?

Would it support you building a partnership with that client? For most businesses I talk to right now, the answer is no. Discovery in recruitment typically means taking a job brief. A sales methodology might include a discovery step. A demo step. It might include multi-threading, where you proactively go and find out who can ruin this deal and have a chat with them before they get a chance to ruin it.

It needs some kind of demo step, whatever that looks like for you. It needs some kind of multi-threading step where we get everybody aligned and on the same page to agree that we're the right person to buy from. Remember, I'm in no massive hurry to get this deal done. I'd rather have a £50,000 deal this year, next year, and the year after. It takes a little bit more time to land than pull a role, fill it, and see where we go from there.

"You guys have improved the way we hired in the last 12 months and we want to keep working with you on an exclusive basis for the next 12." Why would we work with anybody else? I can't believe we ever did anything differently. So partnership is where you want to get to. Now, this ties to your sales methodology, bear with me.

But how many times have your consultants come away from negotiating fees with a client where they've been able to increase the value of the service you provide and the revenue you capture from that relationship? When I think about good sales methodology, it's about increasing the revenue as you go through the deal, not just getting your price negotiated down. All right. So maybe some of this makes sense. Maybe you've already made some of these decisions.

Delivery. Why is delivery a key part of commercial strategy? Without all of this delivery skill, you don't have the value to offer, right?

So it makes sense that we think about not only, when we win this business, how do we hand off to delivery? How do we run delivery in a way that drives more value and keeps the value of that relationship increasing? But also: what are the bits of work that we deliver — be it data, insight, reporting and transformation, the DIRT, D-I-R-T — that happen outside of a hire, but we could sell?

By the end of May, one firm had sold £18,000 worth of consulting to clients who weren't yet ready to hire. They sold three £6,000 pieces of work called hiring readiness programmes to clients who they wanted to work with, who were thinking about hiring, but weren't yet ready. Because they made the case that actually what you do in that three-month window before you hire is more important than the hire itself.

They knew that these hires were going to be incredibly important. Typically, the fees for those businesses are something like £20,000 to £40,000, so the six didn't seem like that much. But they made £18,000 worth of revenue from consulting fees from clients they wanted to hire with who weren't ready yet to hire. That's one example. And I wonder what that kind of model would look like in your business.

And you're delivering your value not just in a hire, but across a hiring relationship. So some businesses would call that an RPO, wouldn't they? Some businesses would say, yeah, we've got an RPO product. Now, if you worked with Alexander Mann 10 years ago and had the worst possible experience, you don't want to buy that RPO, because it sounds like something you bought before and it didn't work. So whatever you do, if you've got a product, don't call it retained. Don't call it RPO. Don't call it statement of work.

Give it your name and put your branding on it, because that's the way that you work. And the way you work is unique to you. Your RPO is not the same as Dave's RPO. It's not the same as Alexander Mann's RPO. Your version of executive search is not the same as Korn Ferry's. So give it your own name and own brand. And if your client can't work out what it means, then your sales methodology isn't doing the heavy lifting.

However, I believe in recurring revenue. I believe in recurring partnerships. Maybe that gives you a bit of shape for understanding what we mean by a commercial roadmap.

There are five times when this is most likely to land. When people reach out to me, when people book calls with me, when people come on our workshop — which I'll talk about in a moment, we've got a free workshop which we run which helps explore all of this — they usually do so for one of five reasons. They're about to make a commercial investment, be it a new hire, a CRM, a rebrand, something like that.

They want to know that their commercial strategy is sound before they invest in tools. They don't want to be in a situation of buying a catalytic converter and strapping it onto their bike, which doesn't make the bike go faster. In fact, it makes it heavier and slows them down.

You might find yourself in a position where you're busier, really busy, incredibly busy. Lots of recruiters are very, very busy at the moment, but the business isn't getting stronger. I don't feel like they're going to end the year with a business that's in better shape despite all the effort and activity that's going on.

You might also be really tempted to slip out and have a beer about now. You might actually want to get away from the business this summer. But as a founder or a leading director, you feel that you can't, because who would carry the relationships? Who would generate revenue in your stead?

Maybe you're selling beyond recruitment. Maybe you don't want to be defined by the agency tag anymore. You don't just want to be a supersized agency. You don't just want to be a really transactional business. There's a place for that model, absolutely. But maybe that's not where you want to be. You don't want to be a super agency. You want to be a lean boutique. And lots of businesses are going in that direction right now. They see the value of their expertise. They recognise they're undervalued. That's where they want to play.

Or maybe you're looking at exiting the firm. Maybe the step away for you is not just for the summer, it's for the end of your career. It's selling the business. It's cashing in your chips. An exit, an MBO, or a handover is on the horizon. And as a result, you recognise that getting the commercial strategy in place is going to be one thing that boosts enterprise value for your organisation.

And that's why we run these workshop sessions. If you want to join one, you need to grab the link that's on the screen, and I'll send the link over separately as well. BeResonant.co.uk — that's our homepage. You can head there now. And then you want to head over to the Commercial Strategy Workshop.

The Commercial Strategy Workshop is where we get hands-on. It's an interactive conversation, not a webinar. So you get to talk to me: bring your numbers, bring your situation, bring your context. Tell me which one of those five buckets, if any, you sit in. You're a founder who wants to get away from the business. You're busy but not stronger. You're about to make a commercial investment — whatever it is, we'll talk it over.

We'll work through the seven decisions at a slightly slower pace. We'll talk about your world in a small group setting. You don't need to disclose anything that's private — obviously, and I'd recommend that you don't. It's Chatham House rules, but still, I don't want you to discuss anything that can't be discussed. But I will be there to answer your questions and support you with these decisions as you think about your commercial strategy.