Growing up, I had the chance to meet staffing industry sales professionals from all over the world. I found that the best ones were really good listeners and seemed to have an incredible knack for getting inside my head. I'm convinced that this sort of empathy played a big part in their business success.

These professionals could analyze needs in ways that their clients couldn't even express. And perhaps more importantly, they learned how to work with their clients' complex change processes. They were decades beyond their peers who were stuck in 1970s-style feature/benefit sales, and they knew intuitively how to avoid the presentations that inevitably lead to price discounting and no-decisions.

Most of this, I suspect, isn't a revelation to those of you that have successfully navigated through the staffing depression of the last two years. In fact, if you're still standing, you probably could write a book on the subject. And those agencies that sold staffing as a commodity - they are long gone.

The issue then is no longer whether you should empathize with your customer, but how? How can get not just yourself but your entire organization to empathize with your customers?

How can you and your entire organization empathize with your customers?

This is a big topic - much too big for a techie like me - but I would like to share a process that TempWorks has successfully used to build this empathy. This process anchors our support system, and it has helped our sales and profits surge to record levels during this last year despite a drought in the technology business.

Our technique is to "eat our own dog food." That is, we conduct our business almost exclusively using our own products, so when a customer calls with a trouble report or a business process question, we've likely already experienced that issue and are able to offer solutions that we know will work.

For example, we used to have a mediocre solution for e-mailing documents, which caused us pain and inspired us to innovate.

Have you ever e-mailed a client, 'See attached résumé' and forgotten to attach the document? Have you ever sent the wrong résumé to a client? Or forgotten whether you sent it or not? If you haven't, hats off to you. But if you're like most people, then executing e-mail with finesse can be a challenge.

These issues drove us to build a document management system and an e-mail engine into the core of our enterprise product. Today, a full range of similar CRM features in our core product allows us to better serve our customers.

These solutions will allow you to do the same with some profound implications for the recruiting process. For example, with our 8R5 version, you can manage large numbers of résumé documents and do a full-text search combined with criteria such as location and salary range. Search results return to you already ranked, so you can quickly choose the top candidates and a click lets you e-mail them to your client.

Without time-consuming busy work and error-prone processes, you have more time to focus on your client, which puts you in the position of adviser and cost-reduction expert.

Goodbye, 1970s-style feature/benefit sales. Hello, partnering!

Gregg Dourgarian, CEO