New BD for Target Accounts

New Business Development is the lifeblood for any recruiter.

Whether it’s penetrating deeper into your anchor accounts, or adding new logos to your current book of biz, we need to always keep bizdev in the forefront of our minds.

I’m sure a lot of us got caught lacking at some point in the last 2 years.

I sure did in 2023.

We rode a wave of a few LOBs in our main accounts - from 2020-2022 - and had record high GPs for pretty much everyone on our team.

Then in 2H 2022 - the fed increased rates - and not only did hiring come to a halt, but layoffs ensued, and contractors were being cut.

So while it was great for those 2 years and while we achieved record revenue and profit, a good portion of it was clawed back in 2023 (but a good amount regained in 2024 ;) ).

It’s also important to know how to do new biz dev bc it’s a skill you can take with you literally anywhere.

Even if you’re an account manager killing the game right now, if your account freezes or you get fired for whatever reason, having new BD skills will carry with you wherever you go.

So for the sake of this newsletter - let’s pretend we want to break into one particular account.

We could already have a good desk running; or we could be starting one from scratch; but our prospecting intel tells us this is a target account we want to win.

MPC

For this exercise, we’re going to utilize the “Most Placeable Candidate” aka “MPC” method, which I wrote about here.

Most people ask me “why don’t you cold call these accounts?” (I do, but I spend just as much time MPCing) or “why would I waste my time recruiting a candidate when I don’t have a job order or service agreement?”

My philosophy on this can be simplified to one sentence:

Why should any company take your call over the 100s of competitors doing the exact same thing?

We all literally have the same value prop. Sure, most recruiters aren’t good and will flop on the intake/prospecting call.

But there are still enough good recruiters out there to warrant the manager to ask “Why you?”.

With MPC - that is your value prop. Here is the exact candidate that matches your spec. You like him? Great, sign a MSA before we set up an interview. It’s as simple as that.

Let’s dive in…

*For the sake of this example, we’re going to use a random company - in this case Verizon since I’m looking at my phone bill right now. I’m not actually targeting them. And for the sake of privacy, I’m going to use a resume generated by chatgpt instead of a live one*

1: Pull up your target account

So let’s start by doing a little bit of intel on linkedin