Today we’re looking at how to get more HR Tech customers and I have kindly been joined by GetMoreHRclients reader, David Odier, who leads international growth for the exciting French & English-language talent portal based in Paris, Crème de la Crème.
David Odier, Head of International Growth, Crème de la Crème
Paris, France
Crème de la Crème connects professionals with freelancers from the best universities.
(Ben’s Note: Like me, David has a strong belief in understanding your target audience – see my quick article on how to make your HR-related business stand out).
How To Get More HR Tech Customers – Q&A With David Odier
Here’s what I asked David:
- What does your business do?
- Do you focus on a niche within the market or do you serve all businesses?
- What are some effective ways you have acquired new clients/customers? What makes them effective?
- Any ineffective ways to find new clients? Why didn’t they work so well?
- Can you share some tips on interesting people, websites, tools, podcasts, or books to check out to help grow a business faster?
First though . . .
Next: Join my private mailing list now and I’ll send you my four-step strategy to get more clients in the Human Resources industry.
Discover How To Grow Faster & Easier – Get Your HR Industry Business Growth Newsletter & Resources
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If you work as a Human Resources consultant in recruitment, training & development, employee engagement, HR consulting, employment law, employee outplacement – my HR marketing update will help.
Let’s get into it . . .
1. What does your business do?
Creme de la Creme is a platform that connects the professional world with a curated community of freelancers in France and in the UK. Today, we rely on a community of 30,000 freelancers that possess every technical skills (business, tech, design, marketing…) and we’ve already worked with more than 5,000 clients including famous international corporations (e.g. LinkedIn, Google, Airbnb).
By outsourcing innovative projects via Crème de la Crème (lead generation, brand content, web-design, web-development…) on a regular basis, it allows these companies to focus on the essential: work on their core activities to foster their growth.
2. Do you focus on a niche within the market or do you serve all businesses (if so, how do you try to stand-out from competitors)?
Although there are other players on the market, we believe we’re unique in our value proposition for three specific reasons:
- the quality of our service is highly correlated to the fact that we’re working with an amazing community
- a community that is the heart of our business and we work with them every day to help them in their success
- the fact that we emphasise the human aspect of our service: a dedicated account manager is here for our customers and freelancers have a dedicated talent specialist.
3. Any ineffective ways to find new customers? Why didn’t they work so well?
I’d say even if something is not effective in the short term it can be in the long-run. For instance, I remember starting this emailing campaign back in September. Well, in the end, one of the leads came back to me early in January and we’re about to conduct a transaction.
There are channels that you SHOULDN’T exploit but it entirely depends on your business. For Creme de la Creme, since we’re targeting decision makers at established SMBs or Large Corporations Instagram is an ineffective channel (which we didn’t even try). I’m sure other B2B companies and professionals will understand.
My personal failure to find customers has been that I started an emailing campaign targeting HR. My initial subject thread was “HR Innovation <> Creme de la Creme” and I’ve never had such a low open rate…
4. Can you share some tips on interesting people, websites, tools, podcasts, or books to check out to help grow a business faster?
To truly grow your business and leverage your CRM, develop your customer personas with existing data and ask key questions to optimise and enhance the customer journey.
Start by considering key points such as:
- How do people find me online?
- What do my customers like?
- What is the age group and demographics of my clients?
- What peak times do I gain traffic?
- How many conversations do I get from social?
- What are my customers wants/needs?
- Then analyse your current data to identify behaviours, patterns, and trends of your users.
For example:
- If you have low CTR (click-through rate) and high unsubscribe email marketing metrics, adjust the timeframe, subject and content.
- If you gain a lot of attention on product listings but fail to capitalise any sales, tweak the UI/UX and incentive buyers to use your platform.
- If your bounce rate skyrockets with mobile viewers, upgrading your layout to a responsive format.
- Use this to improve, evolve, optimise and streamline your process to near perfection. The results will speak for themselves.
5. Any ineffective ways to find new customers? Why didn’t they work so well?
Completely avoid bombarding your audience on social media. Period
I believe that as a brand, your corporate identity and values and ethos are mirrored on social media. By only pushing out your own ads, and only engaging with your own content, you’re bound to fail.
A few months ago, we learned this the hard way, when one of the staff members set up an automated job poster; throwing out plain “new job posted” ads on Twitter every single day.
Not only did people not engage with our content but we started to be blocked and unfollowed!
7. Can you share some tips on interesting people, websites, tools, podcasts, or books to check out to help grow a business faster?
Any marketer or business developer should read (or watch the TED talk) ‘Start With Why‘ by Simon Sinek. If you can apply that reasoning with your leads/customers, you’ll definitely succeed in enhancing the word of mouth effect that we were talking about before.
If you’re interested in growth marketing you should read Brian Balfour’s newsletter on Growth & Acquisition. I also happen to watch many episodes on Growth Hacker TV. The people interviewed are very interesting because they’ve already managed to scale their companies and have great tips to share.
And I think any manager should read Tim Ferris’ The 4-Hour Workweek!
Next Steps
David and the team have done a great job growing this HR Tech business. As a tiny side note, I really like the small mention on their home page of their partnership with AXA – it adds credibility and gravitas. Small touches like this indicate a depth of thought throughout the business.
To get more of a flavour for Crème de la Crème and its HR Tech platform, I recommend looking at their customer stories.
To go straight to the business, visit Crème de la Crème.
Next: Join my private mailing list now and I’ll send you my four-step strategy to get more clients in the Human Resources industry.
Discover How To Grow Faster & Easier – Get Your HR Industry Business Growth Newsletter & Resources
Make sure you’re receiving my free resources and business growth briefings on growth strategies & tactics, revenue & profitability ideas, templates, guides, and much more.
If you work as a Human Resources consultant in recruitment, training & development, employee engagement, HR consulting, employment law, employee outplacement – my HR marketing update will help.
