Kevin Price, Host of the Price of Business on Business Talk 1110 AM KTEK (on Bloomberg’s home in Houston) recently interviewed Ryan Nickel . Here’s that interview
About the interviewee
Ryan Nickel is CVirtual’s Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and has personally directed the marketing efforts of numerous companies, including Kevin Harrington’s Pitch Tank. Nickel graduated from Brigham Young University – Idaho (BYU-I) and brings with him 13 years of marketing experience and expertise. Nickel’s marketing philosophy is to look at what everyone else is doing and then go and do the opposite.
Tell me about your firm (number of employees, location, type of companies you work with, etc.).
11 employees (9 employees at our corporate headquarters in Reno, NV and 2 remote employees in Maryland)
What type and size of companies do you have as clients?
We work with large private universities all across the US, online and tech companies headquartered in Silicon Valley and gaming casinos. Our clients need to recruit their ideal candidate to fill a critical position within their company, but don’t have the time to do it.
What comes to mind when you see this topic?
I have to be darn good at what I do. I need to be able to reach the CEO or CFO and have them respond back to me. I can’t sound needy or desperate either. If I do, I’m toast and my chances for influencing them to meet with me are shot.
Once I do have them on the phone, I have to sell them on the idea of meeting with me and how it’ll be worth their time to do so.
What are the best practices when it comes to this issue?
The best way to get audience with a C-level is through a referral.
The best referral that we’ve had year-to-date is when we tried to recruit away an employee of a large company. She wasn’t interested in leaving her company but was so impressed with our recruiting practices and virtual interviewing technology that she felt compelled to share it with her CEO. We have now filled 5 positions with that company.
We have now made it standard procedure to have the exiting employee that we’ve recruited away to introduce us their former company’s CEO and/or hiring manager.
