The 3P's of Executive Search: about the Sales Pitch

Product, Price, Place, Promotion are the classic 4P's of the Marketing Mix Model. In academic lingo, they are a tool to help marketeers generate an optimum response in their target market, through the creation of a blend of controllable variables expressing those 4P's.

The 4P's can be applied to Executive Search, but more on that in a later post. Marketing Executive Search focuses on the flow of services to the customer, mainly based on relationship and value. The MM Model applies to the strategic thinking behind a business model, not to actual day-to-day business development.

So, what if you sit in front of a customer? The 4P's mainly helped you bring there in the first place, and provide the framework of what to present and what to say. I suggest a further 3P's that guide what to communicate in client meetings (NOT the ones suggested in the marketing literature by Booms and Bittner, which can be incorporated in the original 4P's because they are mere extensions).

The 4P's frame the customer as someone for whom something is done, my 3P's to whom something is done. Therefore, their main function is to uncover what value your service will bring to the client.

An executive search consultant must explain, and convince his customer what will happen when new, great talent is brought in:

Profit: Improve bottom-line, more revenue per head, lower costs, better cash-flow, higher inventory turns (...).

Power: Higher marketshare, better vendor agreements, more management bandwidth, better processes (...).

Prestige: Stronger brand, better perception, stronger relationships, more influence (...).

Above P's must be discovered by the customers themselves, and this through a series of questions for which examples can be found here. The SPIN technique is an example of a methodology doing exactly that: the goal is to have the customer discover above 3P's for himself.

What a search consultant delivers is not to "find" or "place" someone great. What he or she will do is bring an improvement to the tangible and intangible bottomlines of the client company. A prospect will not necessarily look to hire or recruit someone, but he will always be interested in improving on above 3P's. If they are not, you deal either with an HR gatekeeper only interested in diminishing risk rather than increasing success, or with a dysfunctional organization that does not understand value.

Making a connection between higher ROI and the prospect of a new hire, not on what you actually do (in which hiring managers are only remotely interested), will dramatically increase the chance of landing a new assignment. Which is what we all want, isn't it ?