Jack Copeland

The Summary

What shift have you seen between sales and marketing in the last 15 years?

There's been a massive migration towards online and digital and that probably peaked 5/6 years ago. And the next switch seems to be towards automation, but also the added element of personal touches and personal branding. Before things were much more short-term compared to now there is a need to build long-term relationships. And Jack believes the UK is ahead of the US in this respect. 

How has Covid affected Staffing Future?

He wouldn't say they are worse off, they have actually reached their targets and then some growing 300%. He's seen more start-ups with people who are starting their business at a slower time to grow once the market stabilises. The companies that have embraced candidate sourcing digitally have excelled, not the traditional door-knockers. A lot of companies have been forced to migrate their data and honestly there's never been a better time to do it. 

What was your relationship like when you were on the sales side, with the marketing team?

When he moved across to the US, sales and marketing were not working as one unit, they worked independently. It felt like marketing just organised some blogs, the website and the Christmas party. But since leaving Broadbean and working at different companies he now sees sales and marketing as one unit - the message is consistent. And this marketing message becomes more directed at the user and their problems. So the gap between the departments then becomes how to attribute a deal when the number of marketing touchpoints in your business keeps going up. Sales are great on the candidate side at nailing where the candidate came from but on the client-side it gets tricky. Someone mentioned you on a podcast, I saw you speak at a conference, I saw your ad or I got your email... it's a combination of these that made the deal. And this is what the staffing industry needs to start understanding.

Podcasts, blogs and other types of content are shown as a source of leads for you. Are you investing in your content at Staffing Future?

They invest a lot in SEO, email marketing and partner marketing has been huge for them. Something he's learnt from Broadbean is the internal brand element being so important. Because if they care about what they do and the reputation of the brand, the clients like them and are happy, they enjoy their job and everyone buys into the brand. Leading to a happy enjoyable workplace and culture. This of course can go the other direction too. So focusing on that internal brand will impact the marketing efforts. 

Can we dig into the bit of your career between Career Builder and Staffing Future? 

He came out of Broadbean and launched a mobile application game with 70k installs but it did fail. You might be thinking why on earth would a VP of Sales create a mobile game that's free to install with no customer contact in the sale?! Jack then went onto consulting amongst Bullhorn partners going into something much more logical: staffing technology. This part of his career allowed him to talk to a variety of business types which was the spring board to Staffing Future, where amongst digital focused markets, all roads lead back to your website. 

 How are you utilising LinkedIn at Staffing Future?

In the early days he used LinkedIn Automation before it was popular and spammy in order to do targeted outreach and book meetings. Now LinkedIn is flooded with message automation. Instead they use it from a social selling aspect to assist with growth being videos, blogging and quality content. A big part of his plans this year is to get back into the social selling side of LinkedIn.