New BD for Target Accounts

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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 biz dev 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

2: Jobs Section

We’re going to go to the jobs section to see what jobs they have posted.

If they’re posting jobs on linkedin, chances are it’s:

• High priority because they need the visibility

• Still open & need more candidates

• An evergreen type of position

So we see right here 2 AI/ML jobs and a Data Engineer job right on the first page.

This is music to my ears.

2 AI jobs tells me these are going to be evergreen roles. This means I can find a good candidate, and even if 1-2 managers don’t get back to me, they’ll keep posting new roles and other managers will have those needs where I can submit that same candidate.

A data engineer has a similar tech stack/background to an AI engineer so I can potentially kill 3 birds with 1 stone here.

3: Candidate

Ok so now it’s time to find a candidate who will fit these roles.

Again - some of you may ask - “Why would I waste my time recruiting for roles that I dont even have a service agreement for, or spoke to the manager?!”

• As we mentioned earlier, you’ll be able to MPC this candidate to 3 openings in one shot

• 3 similar openings tells me they will have evergreen opportunities for ai/data engineers where I can keep MPC’ing a good candidate

• Assuming you are niching down, you can use this candidate for other current clients or MPC prospects

So use your favorite job board or linkedin and get a candidate.

Again for the sake of privacy, let’s just say I found this fella on linkedin.

The difference here is that we will redact the candidate’s name and contact info from the resume as we MPC them, so the candidate can’t steal them from us.

4: Outreach

Ok, now to do some digging. Let’s go back to the first ML role they posted.

Unfortunately, no job poster for this role. That would be too easy, right?!

Let’s head to the “people” tab on linkedin and click on “information technology”.

From there, we’ll also type “AI” into that search bar right above and look at the results.

In the first 6 results, we see an AI director, AI Product Lead, and AI Recruiter.

Let’s click on the director first.

We are going to use a free tool called “Apollo.ai” to scrape his email. I’m not going to click the button here for his privacy, but once you do it pops up.

You can do this with other people in director titles that pop up as well if you scroll down from the image earlier.

5: Rinse & repeat

After a few times hopefully you’ll get some traction with these prospects. At some point, one of them will be interested in your candidate.

Then you book a meeting with them, give them your value prop, and go to book an interview. Just make sure you tell them they can’t actually interview the candidate until they sign your service agreement.

Once signed, you’re all set and it’s time to make some money!

Final Remarks:

I personally prefer using MPC to break into target accounts because it shows them why they should use you over the 100 other recruiters calling on them.

With the rise of social media in recruiting, we all honestly have the same type of pitch. Doesn’t matter what industry, where you’re selling.

The MPC shows them exactly what you’re capable of if they were to sign a service agreement. The candidate is the trojan horse for you to finally break into this account.

You should also be making sure you’re using a skillset in that niche that is as evergreen as possible, this way you avoid wasting your time recruiting a candidate for nothing.

So even in this example if none of those people got back to me, I know Verizon as a whole will continuously hire AI Engineers and at some point someone will eventually get back to me to take a meeting.