Thursday, September 2, 2010

Best Practices in Lead Generation for Staffing Companies

September 2, 2010

The best marketing people wake up every day thinking, how can I generate more business for my company.  That obviously is true of staffing, yet most staffing companies haven’t begun to tap into modern lead generation tools.

Instead, they confuse marketing with sales or even go at it with an attitude that you only need marketing if you aren’t good at sales.  Nothing can be further from the truth, and the best sales people know it.  They know their time is too valuable to spend interrupting their prospects all day long to say “just checking in”.    Time is money, and they want that time spent in thoughtful conversation with clients about efficient solutions.

In this clip I introduce the notion of enterprise lead generation for staffing companies.  By leveraging your website as a listening tool, you as the marketer can become your sales team’s best friend.

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Why I Hate Mission Statements

September 2, 2010

I’ve never liked mission statements.  In fact, I used to be #1 or #2 on Google for “Why I hate mission statements”, a ranking I was quite proud of.  There’s something about them, a syrupy lack of substance that sits in my stomach like a half-cooked pancake.

Any doubts I had about that got dispelled about twenty years ago I was on my high horse about some issue, and a priest that I was discussing it with said something that stopped me in my tracks.  He said, “Don’t tell me what you believe.  Let me watch you for six months.  I’ll tell you what you believe.”

That nails it pretty well.  While it is crucial to have values and to live by them, it’s also important to be very careful about how you talk about them. 

Steve Jobs of Apple does a very good job in communicating his company’s values.  I’m not convinced Apple lives by them all that well but he does communicate them well as you can see in this video of his “Think Different” campaign (hat tip Ben Casnocha):

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Prosecutors Hone in on Temp Fraud in Denver

September 2, 2010

The race card.  Religion.  Fraud.  All that’s missing from this case is sex.   Still, it’s an interesting read.  According to the Denver Post, a trial is set for January stemming from a 2009 grand jury indictment charging David Banks and other defendants related to the Denver firm IRP of defrauding a series of staffing firms [...]

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Software Developer Axes His I-Phone, Yeah Baby!

September 2, 2010

He’s no threat to Paul Bunyan, but software developer Niels Hartvig has got style.  Fed up with Apple’s abuse of its early adopters, Niels hacked away his frustration. And I like the way he runs his company, Umbraco, too.  He gets transparency and posts the occasional nastygrams from clients right on his company blog.  He [...]

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How to Manage a Couple Dozen ERP Implementations

September 1, 2010

With more than two dozen ERP implementations going on at once, TempWorks can be a hectic place.  How to manage it all? At TempWorks we make project management a core component of our enterprise software. Our implementations manager, Jathan Moline, also happens to be a scrappy coder as well, and he’s been busy building out [...]

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Kenexa, Salary.Com: Let’s Not Call Them Mergers

September 1, 2010

Bill Kutik, co-chair of the upcoming HR Technology conference, posted this morning about Kenexa’s “merger” announcement with Salary.com.   Kenexa’s Chief Executive Officer, Rudy Karsan, says that the acquisition will round out his compensation management offering.   I suppose that means his sales people will be able to sell the Salary.com offering to its client base.  But [...]

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A Good Programmer Is a Lazy Programmer

August 31, 2010

I don’t get to code a lot any more but I really like to, so it’s been fun this last week to be working on an update to the TempWorks lead generation system.   Also, I’ve been fortunate enough to have great coders (and genuine night owls) like Eric Anderson, Matt Sonnenberg and Andy Cohen of [...]

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The Disturbing Lack of Preprocessor Macros in C#

August 31, 2010

Every language has its negatives.  English its awkward spelling;  French its impossible-to-acquire “chanson”; and Japanese its multiple alphabets.  And C#?   What about it? It has no preprocessor macros!  And unlike the natural languages, C# lacks the excuse of having acquired this flaw by accident.  Designed with guidance from ancestor languages – C, Java, FORTRAN, C# [...]

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FUD, Salesforce and the HR Technology Crowd

August 25, 2010

I’m not sure how Salesforce has done it, but it has managed within the HR technology space to have turned highly intelligent consultants into mindless lemmings that drink the Salesforce kool-aid straight up when it comes to discussing modern software distribution platforms and in particular SaaS. By “highly intelligent HR technology consultants” I’m talking about [...]

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An HR Technology Discussion Worth the Listen

August 19, 2010

The usual conversation among HR technology consultants invariably centers around the problems with integrating legacy HR systems with new best-of-breed apps.   Such was the case today on the Bill Kutik radio show in which he interviewed Jason Averbrook of Minneapolis-based Knowledge Infusion. I’ve written about Bill’s show before, in fact it was after his previous [...]

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