Episode Overview:

In this episode of the Staffing Buzz Network, host Bob Pettke sits down with sales performance expert Mark Winter ahead of his appearance at the 2025 Midwest Staffing Conference. With over 20 years of experience in every level of staffing sales, Mark shares practical insights on what it takes to drive new business in today’s competitive market.

The conversation covers the evolving concept of sales enablement, bringing the right message, materials, and approach together to create a smarter, simpler sales process. Mark and Bob dig into the real challenges staffing salespeople face right now, from clients who are increasingly trying to manage hiring on their own, to the growing influence of CFOs in staffing decisions, to the pressure of competing on price rather than value.

Mark offers candid advice on prospecting strategy, the importance of active listening, proper documentation, and why “retellability” or equipping your buyer to champion your story internally may be the single most important skill a staffing salesperson can develop in 2025. The two also tackle the thorny subject of pricing, with Mark sharing a practical framework for anchoring value early in the sales conversation and why he’d rather walk away from a deal than discount his way into a bad relationship.

Whether you’re a seasoned staffing professional or newer to the industry, this episode is packed with actionable takeaways to sharpen your sales approach and stand out in a crowded marketplace.

Mark Winter will be presenting “The Power of Sales Enablement” as a breakout session and appearing on the sales panel at the Midwest Staffing Conference, April 23–24, at the Drury Lane Conference Center in Oakbrook, IL.

Listen to the Episode:

Episode Transcript:

Bob Pettke: [00:00:00] Coming to you from the Ultra-Staff Studios in Chicago. Welcome to the Staffing Buzz Network with your host Bob Pettke.

Hello everybody, and welcome back to another edition with the Staffing Buzz Network. I am Bob Pettke. I am your host, and I am so glad that you’re here. We continue to have a special, how would I call it? Series featuring some of the speakers that are going to be presenting and appearing at the Midwest Staffing Conference.

So this is the fourth segment and episode on that. And just as a recollection, the Midwest Staffing Conference is gonna be held April 23rd and 24th, it’s gonna be at the Drury Lane Conference Center in Oakbrook, and it is a highly anticipated two-day event. That’s right, two day event, it’s designed for staffing professionals from all [00:01:00] over the Midwest.

And what they’re doing is we’re all coming together, and we’re gonna have some of these experts, some of these people that we’re having, and others share their expertise when it comes to staffing. It’s gonna be a very collaborative effort. And we’re going to be learning from some industry leaders.

So we’re excited about that. I believe, don’t quote me on this, a hundred percent, but I’m pretty darn sure you can still register. For the Early Bird member discount. If you’re an ISSA member, you can go ahead and email your corresponding person at your organization, and they might even have a discount code for you so that you can put that in there. But make sure that you’re getting enrolled. People in the Midwest are coming. We’ve got people that come from all over as well. And if you just want more information on it, you could just search Midwest Staffing Conference 2025.

Just put that in your Google, and you’ll find that there. You can also email info@issaworks.com. [00:02:00] So very cool event. There’s gonna be all kinds of vendor partners there. We’re gonna have some of the industry’s very best talented speakers to collaborate and share some very pertinent information that’s relevant in today’s day and age. So yeah, make sure you mark your calendars and plan to be there. So we’re excited to promote that. And like I said, this is gonna be our fourth installment with somebody from there.

But before we get into that, just a little reminder that if you’re not doing so already, or if this is your first time you’re watching us, make sure that you’re subscribing to the Staffing Buzz network, and also, as far as who we are as an organization, and we partner. Hand in hand with the ISSA, the Illinois Search and Staffing Association. But our company is Automated Business Designs, and we have Ultra-Staff EDGE, our ATS platform. So you can do front office and back office stuff, and it’s got one database for everything.

And so a lot of folks are listening in, calling in, and we’re doing demos on that. So if you wanna know more about that, [00:03:00] let me know, and we could talk about that. My information will be available here. But again, more importantly, we really wanna kind of segment into our guest today. And so I’m excited today to bring Mark Winter into the segment here, and a little bit about Mark. And I’ve known Mark now, we’ve been on the circuit a little bit, so we’ve got a chance to meet each other a little bit. Mark, how are you doing today?

Mark Winter: I’m doing fantastic. Thanks for having me, Bob.

Bob Pettke: Hey, we’re glad to have you here.

And just to give you some information on Mark, Mark is expert at driving sales performance, and what he does is keeping focus on customers and keeping things simple. For over 20 years, Mark has held every sales role out there, from branch manager to vice president of sales enablement for a $2.5 billion publicly traded staffing company. Also, during this time, he has spent countless hours figuring out what works and, of course, what doesn’t. With Mark, his ability to do this [00:04:00] just by getting to this place in space and time.

Mark’s been able to figure out how to sniff things out and see what are some things that are blocking performance. He’s looking at being able to remove barriers to get people to act in the best way possible to maximize their skillsets. If it’s strategic planning or if it’s sales process development or sales training, anything to do with customer acquisitions and engagement, Mark is a proven leader in the industry, and he’s your guy to keep you on track with that. So we’re glad to bring you here. And Mark, I know you’re gonna be on a sales panel with us.

Mark Winter: Yep.

Bob Pettke: 23rd, and then you’re gonna have a breakout session. The power of sales enablement. Welcome, welcome here.

Mark Winter: Thanks.

Thanks for the kind intro. I always wish my kids could hear how cool I sound to other people, so thanks for that.

Bob Pettke: Absolutely. Hey, we’ll dive right into it, right? Because what we really wanna do is we want this message is specific, this episode is about introducing the folks [00:05:00] that are gonna be at the Midwest conference and really why they should come and listen to your message. And so your segment, your sales breakout, is called the Power of Sales Enablement. And I’ll just go a little bit from the description that I see, but it basically, it’s driving sales performance with a smart and simple approach. And you’re talking about being competitive in the marketplace. Tell us a little bit about what people should expect from your breakout session.

Mark Winter: Yeah. So, a couple things from the breakout session. The first thing to know is we gotta keep things simple. We can’t overcomplicate.

There’s a, there are a lot of moving parts that are happening out there, and I know salespeople and sales organizations are getting fed all kinds of great advice from some really great companies saying, Hey, you gotta do this and you gotta do that. You gotta bring this part in. I started thinking about all of that great advice and thought, if I were a salesperson, how would I pull all of that stuff together?

How would I take all of that information and put it into one system that I could actually use and see some results? And that’s how I built this [00:06:00] presentation that we’re gonna go through. So the term sales enablement I, it’s been around a while, but it’s relatively new to staffing.

It’s the coming together of the right message to the right prospect at the exact right time, using the right materials and saying and doing the right things so that you can see some sort of quick result, not immediate result, because there is a sales process that has to be gone through. And we’ll talk about that.

And that sales process is changing. Our customers and prospects are, we’ll talk a little bit about how they’re getting more and more involved in staffing, how they’re trying to do things themselves, how the buying roles are changing. We’ll talk about all that, but more importantly, it’s bringing all of these tools and resources together in one place and making sure that they’re working for you and that you are not just a slave to them.

Bob Pettke: Okay. One of the things I know from my prior life in the industry, and similar to you, working with sales folks along the way in staffing, is we spend almost as much time trying to [00:07:00] find our prospect as we do to the actual selling process. Talk to us a little about that.

Mark Winter: Yeah. So not only do we spend a ton of time trying to find these prospects, which sometimes feels like a needle in a haystack, but we are often using the exact same search criteria as every other competitor out there. So once we get our list, we start knocking doors, and we realize we’re 10th in line.

There were nine other staffing companies that showed up here before us because we’re all pulling out of the same systems, right? So that means that messaging becomes important. Memorability becomes important. Retell ability becomes important. And so we’ve gotta go beyond just the list. We have to have a list, but we have to go beyond the list and start helping salespeople with what to say, how to say it, when to say it, who to say it to, so that they can feel some effectiveness.

Otherwise, it just feels like we’re beating our head against the wall. Now, to your point about time, smart business says, go ahead and spend some time building your list. But then the question [00:08:00] becomes, how do I do that initial outreach? Do I stop by there? Do I make a phone call? Do I network?

What do I do? What’s the most effective? So we’re gonna talk through all of that stuff too, because all of it works in some capacity, and there is a smart order to how you do that activity.

And we’ll save some of that for them.

Bob Pettke: Absolutely. I will ask you your thought process on utilizing some of these other tools that are out there, and maybe the vitality of it, like the zoom infos or those types of tools that are available.

Obviously, subscription involved. Sometimes, we have to justify price. What’s been your take on some of that stuff?

Mark Winter: We live in a world where there’s so many great tools for salespeople. I hate to sound as old as I am, but back in my day, the best tool we had was a good pair of shoes.

That was the joke. A good pair of shoes and a laptop were the tools of the trade. Now we have everything, man. So if you’ve got access to tools, great. But I think I would caution just saying keep those tools in perspective, [00:09:00] right? So the flashier the tool, the more likely all of your competitors are using it.

So just know that some of the big tools that you mentioned, you called out ZoomInfo specifically, or Apollo, or Rocket Reach, or those tools that help us get people’s contact information, they’re fallible because people move around a lot. So I go into those tools knowing that they’re only going to give me, at best, 70 or 80% good, accurate data. There’s still gonna be some fallibility to it. Is it beneficial to have? Heck yeah, it is. If my company’s willing to pay for that and I get a subscription to it, that’s great. Build myself a list. But it’s not the only way. There’s other things that I can do to accentuate that list, go into networking events.

There is no substitute for shaking someone’s hand and inviting them into your contact network. Referrals are still hot. We have texting apps now that are great that will shorten the sales cycle. We’ve got calendar, my calendar can talk to your calendar. If you can sign up for something like that, great.

I recommend you get that kind of [00:10:00] tool. So get the tools you can, but vet them and just, I guess as a reminder, keep ’em in their place. Remember that it’s not gonna do the job for you. It’s just helping you do the job better.

Bob Pettke: And how about having a plan, right? Having a sales plan and maybe even something that’s repeatable.

There is a certain stereotypes exist for a reason. Now, not everybody falls in any stereotype that they’re pigeonholed in. But that being said, sometimes a salesperson can be pigeonholed in somebody who maybe doesn’t document very well, or somebody that flies by the seat of their pants or somebody that is a ready fire.

Oh, maybe I should have aimed, one of the stories that I often tell, and I’ll make it 30 seconds or less. I figure that salespeople struggle with at least two things. It’s listening. And documentation. And Mark, since you’re a salesperson, I’m gonna say it again. It’s listening and documentation.

Talk to me about your thoughts on all of that.

Mark Winter: Yeah. So talking about tools, one of the [00:11:00] tools that I use when I meet with people on Zoom or Teams is a tool called fireflies.ai. They’re an automated note taker. I bring it up because one of the things it does for me is it provides some coaching on the back end of the call.

It’ll say how many questions I asked or how many questions were asked in the meeting. It’ll tell me the outcomes, like what were the committed actions coming out of the meeting. But it also shows who did the majority of the talking. Like it gives me a talk-to-listen ratio for every call. Which is really great, and I have a personal goal.

I want it to be 70 30. So my personal goal is to only do 30% of the talking. By the way, I have a prospect who I won’t name, but they did 96% of the talking, and that was my record. 96 and four was the best record. But I bring that up, Bob, because you’re right, salespeople have a tendency to wanna tell you everything they know and share everything they know and tell you everything about their company, when really the best thing they can do is listen. And it’s amazing to me when a [00:12:00] salesperson exercises good listening skills, how often a prospect will respond with things like man, you’re really good at this. Or, I feel like this was therapeutic. So exercising that listening muscle is critically important.

As far as the documentation, I’ll leave it at this. I think as a salesperson. Every lead that I come across, every prospect that I engage with, that’s a company asset. And I owe it to my company to make sure that I’m properly managing those assets. Now, some companies have everyday requirements for documentation or every week, but I feel like as long as you’re managing those assets properly, I have a company credit card.

At the end of the month, I gotta process my expenses. I am out there dealing with company leads, and so at the end of the day, it’s the right thing to do to make sure that I’m documenting those company assets properly. So do the right thing, spend the time, do the right thing. And who knows if you get a system down, it might even help you with some time savings or time management, because I talk to salespeople and one of the first things they’ll tell me is, man, I need some help with time management. [00:13:00] But use the tools you have.

Bob Pettke: Yeah.

No. If there’s one thing that you can’t put a price on, it’s time. But, you talked about listening, and my experience is there’s two ways that people listen. They either listen to respond. Or they listen to understand. And one of the things that worked, when I was doing this, and again, this is your segment, not mine, but we would take notes down, and towards the end of the conversation, basically recap and repeat.

And to your point, this is why I brought it up, it’s why it’s stuck in my head, is then they’re like, you get me? You understand the therapeutic part of it.

Mark Winter: Yeah. Yep. And that also translates to faster sales. And here’s how. So I do coaching of salespeople from time to time.

And so I’ll ask a salesperson, Hey, what’s the next step in this particular sale? And they’ll say, you know what? I’m not really sure. I’m just kinda waiting for the prospect. And so when we start digging into that salesperson’s notes, if we’re lucky enough to found that salesperson has taken notes, what I’ll find is a lot [00:14:00] of what the salesperson said or what the salesperson intended, and not as many notes on what the person actually said.

The beauty of the notes that I take when I’m on a sales call personally is, I don’t have to make anything up. I don’t have to embellish anything. I don’t have to think about my point of view because the notes that I take are exactly what the prospect or customer is telling me. And so when we get to a certain point in the conversation, it simply becomes, Hey, what do you see as next steps?

Or how do you see us moving forward? Or what would you like to do from here? And they’re telling me, I rarely have to push them. Sometimes you gotta give ’em a little nudge. But it’s coming directly outta their mouth. And so you’ve gotta give them space to share it, and you could ask the right questions to get them to share it, and then be taking that down.

That’s what your notes should reflect: the voice of your customer or prospect. If they don’t, you’re missing out.

Bob Pettke: One of the things, even with my sales team here, no longer in the staffing door-to-door, cold call grind, it’s a different kind of grind. If [00:15:00] someone’s got traction and there’s something that’s coming up next, I’ll ask my team, and I always expect the answer, you said it, what are you gonna do next?

And more importantly, I’ll ask them, when are you gonna do it? And then I’ll ask them one more question. Now you know what you’re gonna do next, and you know when you’re gonna do it, but does your prospect expect for you to do something next? And do they have an expectation of a date and time when it’ll happen?

Mark Winter: That’s right. Yeah, that crap about, Hey, I’ll follow up with you sometime next week. That’s no good, right? There’s a book that ties to some of the training that we do. It’s called Win-Win Selling, and it’s based on a counselor selling course. One of my favorite lines outta that book is salespeople without good discovery skills often find out too late that they’ve been shadowboxing prospects rather than truly engaging.

And I love that because the idea of standing in someone’s office just like shucking and jiving all by yourself, is embarrassing. And salespeople should be embarrassed if they’re not actually engaging buyers, getting commitments on times and getting the buyer’s voice out, then they [00:16:00] run the risk of being a shadow boxer.

And how humiliating would that be? Don’t be in that situation.

Bob Pettke: For sure. And we’ve been circling around something here, and I wanna get into a specific direction as we continue our conversation. But as somebody who’s coached and mentored people in this industry specifically, what are you seeing present day is the current challenge or struggle that you’re finding with people that are driving to drive new business in our staffing community?

Mark Winter: Yeah. So there’s a few different challenges that are popping up. One is staffing customers are trying to reduce; they’re actively trying to reduce their dependency on us.

Let’s face it, they have access to all of the tools that we have access to now. And in fact, here’s the thing. Companies like Indeed, ZipRecruiter; they’re selling those tools to our customers cheaper than they sell them to us. So not only do they have access to the same tools, they have them with the more affordable, right?

In the customer’s mind, there’s no reason they can’t do this themselves. [00:17:00] So we’re up against that. That’s a big uphill slug. We know. There’s a lot more to it, right? There’s a whole bunch more to it. And so we’ve gotta be really Johnny on the spot with, Hey, here are the things that we’re doing on your behalf.

This is the stuff that you don’t see that happens behind the curtain. That’s issue number one. I think that’s one of the biggest issues. Issue number two is competitive pressure. There’s more staffing people out there knocking doors now than ever before, and some of those staffing companies that are out there are to be the low price leader, or they’ve kinda lost their identity so they’re selling anything to anybody that will listen. So that means that people are jumping outta their swim lane. That can be really challenging. And then the last thing that I would say that I see as a big challenge is there’s more buyers involved.

I’m dubbing 2025 and 2026 the year of the CFO. There are more CFOs getting involved in staffing decisions now than I’ve ever seen in my history. HR is still there, purchasing’s still there. Operation’s still there. At some point in the last couple years, the [00:18:00] CFOs picked up in our invoices and said, we’re spending how much on staffing?

Hang on, just a minute. And so that changes the selling game a little bit. That changes who’s making approvals, that changes how we have to retell our story internally. And the last thing that I’ll say on that challenges piece is a term that I’m gonna talk about in our presentation at ISSA is retellability.

And retell ability is simply knowing that when I go to an organization to sell them staffing services, whoever I’m talking to is going to spin their chair around and they’re gonna retell my story to someone else internally, a buying team or the CFO or whoever and it’s part of my job as a salesperson to arm them with the tools they need to tell that story the way I would tell that story, or better yet, let me tell it to those other people.

Because if not, here’s what’s gonna happen. I’m gonna do the best sales job possible, and that HR person is gonna spin around to the CFO, and he or she is gonna say, met with a great staffing [00:19:00] company today, they’re very personable. And the CFO’s gonna say, cool, what’s our markup? And they’re gonna say it’s 52%. Your whole presentation will get boiled down to that if you are not prepared for retail ability. And I feel like that’s a new thing for salespeople. So, there’s the challenges.

None of them are insurmountable. We can hit all of them, but we’ve got some challenges. We’ve got some headwinds.

Bob Pettke: So you talk about price, right now we’re at CFO. I’m gonna go another step deeper again. Yep. You’re just taking me there, brother. You’re taking me to the promised Land.

Winning business on value versus price, being value you bring in, or simply being the lowest priced in the marketplace. What are you seeing when it comes to that, and how can you overcome whichever one is more sinister than the other?

Mark Winter: First off, we have got to get out of the mindset that we’re selling people.

Staffing provides people, but we provide people as a mechanism to get a job done. And so we’ve gotta [00:20:00] shift the conversation to getting the job done part of that scenario. Because the market sets the rate for people, we don’t. So if we go in and we say, Hey, we have people, or if we even go in and say, we have good people, or we have highly vetted people, none of that matters.

The market sets the rate for that. There’s a standard markup for that already in play, and you’re gonna be subject to that if you don’t have something else in your back pocket. The something else in the back pocket is, what services do you provide in addition to providing people that can be shortening time to productivity?

It can be faster ramp to get candidates on site. It can be helping your customer refine and improve their interview process. It can be taking weight off of your customer’s shoulders. It might be vetting, it might be, it could be all kinds of things, right? For industrial people, it might be driving candidates to work.

It might be, you name your thing, but there’s. My point is there’s a whole list of services that have to be talked about in the sales process because, at the end of the day, that’s what [00:21:00] customers are buying most of the time if they’re paying anything more than market rates for staffing.

So if you hope to get any more dollars than what you know, the 35% markup that ABC staffing is currently providing them, then you better have some services lined up, and you better be prepared to tell them about that service.

Bob Pettke: You staffing people all just fish from the same pond anyway.

You have to have, if you’re gonna go there. What makes you different? The differentiators, right? We know people buy from people they like and people they trust. It’s that trust factor where your X factors come in. And as an organization, what I’ve seen is that you have to have certain things that you can go to market with that are not just on a flyer or on a drop off, but there are real specific things about, and this is beyond sales, it’s your organization, things that are gonna be differentiators between you and the other person? We all do fish from the same pond. Maybe we’re using different bait. Maybe we’re catching the bigger fish. Maybe we’re putting the small ones back where other people are just throwing that stuff out there.

Mark Winter: And [00:22:00] here’s the thing, Bob, if I had to put one little bullet on the ISSA presentation that I’m doing about sales enablement, it’s creating differentiation in the sales process. So today, one of the challenges staffing has is we don’t get to prove our differentiation till we have a body on site till we have a person there.

I say that lovingly till we have a human that shows up to do the work, right? We can say and promise a ton of things that we’re gonna do for a client, but they don’t ever get to see those things until they say yes, and we send them a person. Unless we have a differentiated sales experience, unless we have someone who goes out there that acts as an industry expert, unless we go out there and we say, Hey, we have some services that could potentially be a benefit to you and your team before you actually get a person from us.

Unless we’re good listeners, unless we’re providing them and arming them with a way to buy staffing services that’s different and easier. Those are all things that we can do to differentiate the sales process, and if we have salespeople out there that are doing that, customers are [00:23:00] going to believe, they’re going to feel like there’s something different about the company that we’re working for rather than just commoditized people who are efficient from the same pond.

Bob Pettke: Okay. Lemme give you a little bit of a hypothetical mark. Say that you’re going head-to-head with somebody in another staffing company. And your prospect is ready to make their decision. They’re like, Mark, you’ve really demonstrated that you can do things different, right?

I like these things. I like the fact that you guys recruit off hours because you’re getting more people. Maybe you’re even gonna find us people that are currently employed during the day, and they’ll take your call at night. But here’s the thing, Mark. I need you at 33%. How do you do that, and are you willing to walk away from that business?

Mark Winter: Yeah. So couple things. This is gonna sound a little haughty if I’ve found myself at a head-to-head competition like that in that space, there’s a couple of things that I’m thinking through. First off, I missed something in the sales process. [00:24:00] Part of the job of the sales process is to have created that differentiation and thereby minimize the potential impact of the competitor, right?

So it shouldn’t be head-to-head. The other thing now, that’s not gonna work in every single case. And here’s why. The other thing that I’m thinking is I may not have the actual buyer here. I probably have someone who’s on a scouting mission for somebody else, and I miss that, shame on me. And that’s not to say that the person that I’m talking to doesn’t have buying authority.

They likely do. They probably have what I call borrowed authority. So someone above them, maybe a CFO, has said, Hey, I need you to vet a couple of staffing companies, come back, gimme some proposals, make sure that they fall somewhere between the 33 to 35% range, ’cause that’s what we’ve typically paid.

So weed out anybody that’s not in that range. And so that person has the ability to sign off on something within that range. But I probably missed something in the sales process that put me in that situation where we’re being compared like that. You asked, would I be prepared to [00:25:00] walk away? Heck yes, I would.

Now, the things that would make me scared to walk away is if I don’t have other prospects in my funnel. If I’ve got a weak funnel, I’m gonna be scared to walk away. So shame on me. If this is a gigantic prospect, or this is a logo that I really wanna do business with, then maybe I’ll reconsider, maybe I could do something with pricing.

But I’ll tell you what, even at that stage of the game, even when it comes down to the wire and they’ve given me an ultimatum, I’ll often try one last ditch effort of something like, listen, I can’t meet you there, but what I can do is if you can hit certain thresholds, like if you say you’re gonna take 50 people from me, if you actually hit that, we’ll give you a rebate. You gotta take our 40% markup. But we’ll catch a 5% back if you actually hit those thresholds. We could run 90 days that I would rather give a rebate than give a discount, because the discount sets the ceiling for what I can charge, and it’s really hard to go up from there.

I’ve seen staffing companies that have said, I’m gonna go in at 33% and then raise them. No, you’re not. You’re gonna sell at [00:26:00] 33% for the life of the relationship because you’re gonna scratch and claw for every dime after this.

Bob Pettke: One of the questions that our team used to ask people early on in the sales process and you could sit across the table from somebody and, pretty darn early if price is a key factor.

So we would ask them point blank. You tell me, I’m gonna give you three topics. Tell me what’s most and least important about this decision and who you’re gonna partner with. Is it gonna be the quantity of attempts? Is it gonna be the quality of attempts? Or is it gonna be the price?

What if somebody tells you right away it’s price?

Mark Winter: Then it depends. I may not have an ideal prospect. It depends on my staffing company. There are some staffing companies out there who are set up to, it’s a volume and price play. And if so, if that’s your strategic choice, then be okay with that.

That’s fine. Then you’ve just gotta make sure your pricing parameters are clear and there’s no shame in that. There are a ton of staffing companies that I know that are in the price game within reason. They have to stay profitable, obviously, but they don’t take orders for less than a hundred people.

If [00:27:00] that’s your thing, that’s fine. But make sure it’s a strategic choice. If it’s outside your strategic choice and the company’s saying, Hey, We’re not gonna do anything better than a 33% markup, then you may have to walk. It’s not an ideal customer. Because what you’re doing by saying yes to that even if you hate walking away, you’re gonna throw that order over the fence, and every worker that gets placed is being placed at a discount.

You could place them somewhere else for more. Why would you do that to yourself? I know the recruiting market’s better, but it’s still not perfect. It’s not like we have a limitless supply of people out there. Why would you sell them at a discount?

Bob Pettke: Yeah, I’ve asked that question and when it became pretty apparent that there wasn’t gonna be any room to budge the organization I work for on time, and again, there are businesses that will take that volume.

They’ll take a thousand nickels as opposed to $30. But there was a time once I had my stuff out and I just started to shuffle my papers and I’m like, listen. I gotta go. And he is, oh whoa. Wait a minute. And I said, listen, we don’t win business on price alone.

We [00:28:00] win it based on, and then to your point and I think coming complete circle, these things that make your organization different, your differentiators going to market different and having that in your toolbox.

Yeah.

And not only having the lip service to do it, but being able to have policies and procedures and maybe even case studies or just examples of how that’s worked for your organization to get you there.

Mark Winter: Yeah. Yep. And I’ll tell you, Bob, one of the things I love the idea of case studies. I think that’s super powerful. By the way, I think every salesperson should be armed with solid case studies.

But not to get too geeky on the pricing theory, but here’s how pricing works. When a person’s evaluating pricing, there’s a constant and a variable, always a constant and a variable. And so sometimes salespeople will say to me what do I do when I walk in?

And one of the first questions they ask is, how much do you charge? I love that question. Bring it. Because here’s what I do is when I get that question, I set both the constant and the variable. I [00:29:00] give ’em a range. I say listen, we’ve got competitive pricing, but we tend to run anywhere from a 45% markup to a 65 markup.

We have a pretty wide swath. And during our time together, my job is to figure out where you guys fit based on the services that we’re gonna provide and what you’re gonna offer. And so what I’ve done psychologically is I’ve created the constant and the variable, the constant being the 45% variable, being everything above that, right?

So I only want to give, my low-end range needs to be somewhere in the average range for my company. And so if I don’t do that, if they don’t ask me that question, we haven’t done this, and we get to the point of pricing, then the constant becomes my competition. So if we have this conversation early, if we say, and I’m not telling you to introduce pricing upfront.

If you’re a salesperson listening to this, let the customer bring it to you. But when they don’t shy away from it, give them the range. And if it doesn’t happen to come up, you can deal with it later and still give ’em a range because if pricing isn’t discussed, you don’t have opportunity to weed out those people that are price shopping, [00:30:00] then the only constant they have in the pricing game is what your competitor’s charging. So let’s just kill that right out of the gate. I don’t care what my competitor’s charging. That has no impact in how I price.

Bob Pettke: Yeah. Mark, I think we’ve given the listeners and the viewers a lot of information. It gets started probably what their whistle on, making sure that they come out, register, and come out see Mark Winter. Before you go. And I’ve been asking some folks this in previous episodes, if you had a crystal ball and there was some kind of a nugget of information related to staffing sales that maybe somebody is not aware of or not practicing. It could be something to do with the economy, technology, trends.

If there was something that someone could put in place today that they might not be doing that a year from now, they’re gonna be like. Man, I’m glad Mark Winter shared that with us on the staffing Buzz Network. What would it be?

Mark Winter: It’s gotta be that retell ability thing. So [00:31:00] making sure that you have some kind of tool or mechanism to help your buyer retell the story internally, because buying is a team sport.

Every person you talk to is gonna swivel their chair around and talk to somebody else. You have to assume that no one is making buying decisions in a vacuum anymore. They’re doing it as a team. And so it is the salesperson’s responsibility, it’s part of the selling process now, to arm that person with a way to retell your story and get other people in the organization as excited about this moment as they are.

And that’s the best thing you can do to help yourself as a salesperson. That will shorten the sales cycle. It’ll get other people involved. It’ll help you find out who else is making decisions. It’s the single biggest thing happening out there.

Bob Pettke: Mark, thanks for being on the Staffing Buzz Network, and I think a lot of folks are gonna be excited to hear more.

We’ve just scratched the tip of the iceberg, so we are looking forward to seeing you at the Midwest Staffing Conference. April 23rd, 24th. And also, I’ll be leading the [00:32:00] sales panel. So we’ll have some time together on that, I can’t wait, Bob. We’ll see you then, my friend.

Mark Winter: Hey Bob. One quick thing. John Devore, our keynote speaker. I gotta put a plug in for him. He is amazing. This guy has been in every movie that’s ever had a skydiver or squirrel suit. He’s got an amazing story to tell. The very first time I went skydiving, I was lucky enough to skydive with this guy.

It’s amazing. If you show up to see John, he’s got an amazing story.

Bob Pettke: We might have a surprise for people coming up that want to hear more about him, too. So just stay tuned to the Staffing Buzz Network, and we’ll see if we can pull some strings and get a little teaser for him before he comes on stage there in April.

Mark Winter: Cool, man. Thanks, Bob.

Bob Pettke: Mark, thanks for being here. We’ll see you then. I look forward to seeing you personally and connecting.

So there you have it. Mark Winter, tremendous talent. Good guy. He does things right. He makes sure that he leaves you better than he found you. You’re gonna be equipped to do some things, and again, a lot of this is not necessarily reinventing the wheel, but it’s really [00:33:00] just picture yourself in a dark room, and you’ve got a flashlight that has a beam, and it only casts in the spots that you look at.

Sometimes people don’t move their flashlight. It takes a guy like Mark, that’s gonna be able to come in and show you some different areas, and maybe some different focuses that you can have to drive your business. Excited to see him there. So make sure again, the dates are April 23rd and 24th.

My best recommendation is two things to find out more information. Number one is to just go ahead and search on that Midwest Staffing Conference 2025, or you can send that email to info@issaworks.com. You will be able to get connected in and get linked into that. So just remember also about us.

My name’s Bob Pettke. I’m here at Automated Business Designs. We have Ultra-Staff EDGE, our staffing software. And if you want more information on that, or if you’d like to see a demo, because we’ve got a lot of listeners out there who are calling in, or checking in, or using us already, we’d love to be able to showcase what we can do for you.

We’re gonna be at the Midwest [00:34:00] Conference, so you can stop by and say hi and, yeah, good times ahead, everybody. So with that said, signing off. Bob Pettke here from the Staffing Buzz Network. Make sure you subscribe, make sure you listen, make sure you share it with your friends. And until next time, we’ll see you then.