Magnus Marketing Blog

In the recruiting industry, there is a function that does for recruiters (the sales guys) what we in sales intelligence/biz dev do for salesguys called sourcing. The parallels are amazing. This is what a master researcher AmyBeth Hale mentioned on her AmyBeth Hale- Research Goddess blog:

"How does the sourcer role fit into recruiting and/or HR? For example purposes I'm going to assume for the rest of this reply that sourcer = researcher. How a researcher fits into a recruiting office or an HR team is that the researcher can take the pressure off the recruiters to put in hours of research on their own. I truly believe that the research that goes into uncovering leads is the most time consuming part of the recruiting process. A search that takes me 5 hours to generate a list of 30 contacts can be knocked out in less than an hour by a recruiter. Recruiters who are doing all of this background information gathering themselves are either spending too much of the working day on this task to the detriment of their phone time, or they are sacrificing their evenings and weekends (and families!) to do so. Researchers are part of the behind-the-scenes backbone of the office that keep those who generate revenue 'closest to money'." (ERE Discussion, Defining Sourcing 5/1/2007)

Change "Recruiting Office" to "Marketing/Sales Department", change "Recruiter" to "Sales Guy/Girl". The contacts are qualified candidates - change that to qualified sales opportunities. Look at the time and cost savings. When you get QUALIFIED Sales Intelligence Analysts - people who are experienced in identifying opportunities, the right contact names, and business issues, the sales and even telemarketing team is focused on further qualification and closing or as AmyBeth well articulated "staying closest to the money".

Another point was made about the role on the same post:

"What should the duties of a true sourcer be? Research. Pure and simple. Company research, lead generation, networking on professional networking sites and associations, etc. The more directions you pull the researcher in that are away from research, the less research they will be able to do (duh!). When you have them posting jobs, managing the intranet, and other miscellaneous tasks, they will not be doing research. Same reasons why recruiters ought not be disturbed during phone time. Let them do what they were hired to do - recruit. In the same breath, let researchers do what THEY were hired to do - RESEARCH"

Lead generation, company research, networking - all apply to Sales Intelligence as well. I take SI further into prospecting which is form of qualification research.

Sourcing in recruiting is used to identify passive candidates, people who aren't looking for a job (not advertising themselves), but may be thinking of a change or are prompted to change. Plus, they find these "Hard to find" people using a variety of targeted tactics and prequalify them. Passive candidates are usually a 98% fit with a job - meaning if they join, the longevity and performance of the candidate is greater than active candidates. Recruiters like passive candidates (who, according to AmyBeth, "tend to make the best employees") because they are stickier.

Think about this principle in a marketing perspective - any response to a public marketing tactic will yield an active sales opportunity - meaning the initiator is actively looking at a number of vendors which can translate to price margin pressures, competitive issues, and puts the initiator in a power position. If I identify potentially qualified sales opportunities proactively through research, I intelligently am ahead of the competition. Plus, I likely identified a great fit for the company's competencies and the needs of the "passive company opportunity".

If you get this principle - then you understand what Sales Intelligence is all about. Add prospecting in and your sales team is ONLY receiving the best leads with the highest probability of closing or at least a qualified account entry path. Not every passive candidate joins a company, but a relationship is built - a memorable one - that can lead to a future consideration. It doesn't get any better than that.

Further to ROI, with a great team of researchers/biz dev people - theoretically, you can dump most Marketing Communications, all Advertising, and all PR which are costly and focus efforts to find only the best opportunities. A great model for B-to-B where high volume isn't an issue.

Email me to learn more about this! I'd love to hear from you.