Sales activity needs to create opportunities the agency can convert and deliver profitably. Use your team's conversations and placement results to identify the habits that need improving. Each of the seven below is easy to fall into under pressure, and each can be fixed with coaching and a better routine.
1. Discussing price before understanding the requirement
Clarify the client's problem, urgency and decision process before negotiating commercial terms. Understand what delivering the role will involve.
A rate quoted too early is a rate quoted blind. A request for a locum doctor for one weekend and one for twelve weeks of cover may share a grade, but they differ in urgency, candidate availability and the compliance work involved. Once you understand the requirement, you can price it properly, explain the rate with confidence and decline terms that would leave no margin. Ask, too, what the client has already tried and what it cost them in time or unfilled shifts.
2. Presenting services before asking useful questions
Ask about role requirements, previous hiring difficulties and the criteria for a successful placement. Record the answers where the team can use them.
A list of what the agency offers tells the client nothing about whether you understand their problem. Good questions do, and the answers also tell you whether the agency should take the work at all. For example:
- Which shifts or roles have been hardest to fill, and why?
- What went wrong with previous suppliers or candidates?
- What would make a placement a success from the ward's point of view?
- Who else needs to agree before a booking is confirmed?
3. Only contacting clients when a vacancy appears
Build account knowledge between requirements. Relevant candidate availability and market information can give the client a reason to continue the conversation.
If a client only hears from you when they have sent a requirement, you are one supplier among several, judged on speed alone. Contact between requirements is where the agency learns about what is coming: a new service opening, seasonal pressure on beds, or a permanent post that keeps being covered by locums. Keep that contact purposeful and occasional enough to be welcome. A short note on candidate availability for their hardest shifts is worth more than a newsletter.
4. Depending on one contact
Understand the other people involved in hiring, approvals and supplier decisions. Keep those relationships visible on the client record.
Ward managers move on, staffing leads are promoted and procurement teams review supplier lists. An account held through one person is exposed to every one of those changes. Good looks like several named relationships, each with a recorded role and a recent conversation, so a change of contact becomes an introduction rather than a lost account. For each key account, ask who would brief a new supplier if your contact left tomorrow.
5. Leaving follow-up to memory
End each useful conversation with a dated next action and clear ownership. Review overdue work as part of the desk's routine.
Memory works until the desk gets busy. Follow-ups are the first thing to slip when shift requests surge, and they are often the conversations that would have produced next month's work. A dated action on the record survives a busy week, a holiday or a consultant leaving. A promise held in someone's head does not. The fix is a habit, not a tool: no call ends without the next step written down.
6. Accepting poorly qualified vacancies
Confirm the role, rates, urgency, process and access to the decision-maker. Direct consultant effort towards requirements the agency can credibly fill.
Every vacancy accepted without qualification takes time from one the agency could fill. Warning signs include a requirement sent to many suppliers with no named contact, rates candidates will not accept, or a role with no clear start date. It is reasonable to ask the questions that would make it workable, or to decline, before committing consultant time. Record why a vacancy was declined so patterns become visible. Declines grouped by client can open a useful conversation about how that client briefs its suppliers.
7. Reviewing revenue without margin
Consider placement value alongside delivery cost and operational effort. Use consistent reports to discuss which accounts deserve more attention.
Two accounts with similar revenue can produce very different gross profit. One may book long assignments at stable rates with prompt timesheet approval. The other may need constant short-notice cover, client-specific compliance for every candidate and repeated chasing for approvals. Reviewing margin % and the effort behind it shows which account is really funding the business, and where a rate conversation or a change of approach is due. Look at it by account and by consultant, using the same definitions each month.