If you're not on that list, how does one earn a spot?

Yeah, the reality is that there's two ways to think about that, right? One is I'm not on the list.

So how do I get added to that list after somebody has started looking to solve a problem? And this research, just to give a little bit more context to the listener, this research was duplication of some research that Google had done.

So Google did this massive body of research around overall B2B buying.

And what they found was that the vast majority of people had this day one list.

and if they had this day one list whether they're hiring a lawyer a consultant a staffing firm they had to say one list and and uh if they had this day one list the vast majority of the time they would actually hire somebody from that day one list so we replicated this for staffing and what we found is you know similar to what you were saying right that we have this day one list uh well over half of the time but what was fascinating is if they had that day one list almost always they actually select a firm that was on that initial consideration list.

And so I think it's the wrong question to think about like, okay, how do we get added if we're not part of that day one list? The right strategic question is how do we end up on people's day one list? uh at the starting point and and the way that you do that is by holistically bringing value to every step of that pre-purchase uh journey as a part of this so your marketing should not be around hey let us tell you about us it should be around hey let us tell you what we know about you what is valuable to you right you talked about how you found us initially by the research that we were doing that was our attempt to do that right was not to talk about clearly graded but instead to actually talk about the industry as a whole and then ultimately when there's a part of that the problem set that we defined through that research that we can help you with then great we're happy to help you with but if we never get that far we've still added value and that's i think a thing that staffing firms miss a lot of times you've got to add value with your marketing You got to add value with your sales.

So looking at your marketing efforts of staffing firms, when buyers vet us online before they call, what do you think that specialized looks like? Does it have a look? like outside of just, you know, a salesman knocking on the door?

How do you get on a list with that kind of approach?

Yeah.

So I defy you to find an accounting firm of any size that somewhere in there about us doesn't talk about how important the client experience is.

And to your point, right, they all kind of look the same.

In fact, we did this study across all professional service firms and we asked leaders of professional service firms, how do you differentiate? And almost 100%, 97% said that they differentiate based on the service that they provide.

And then we asked buyers if they thought that their firms in the industries were all kind of the same.

And 55% said that they thought that all firms were basically the same.

Where would you recommend they start with any kind of external profiler? Yeah.