The Recruiter Sprint

The $179K billings difference between consultants

AI won't fix an agency BD problem. It'll just add an extra bill and encourage more of what's not working. Everyone wants to talk about AI right now, but if your team's BD is inconsistent, that's not what needs fixing first. This is.

In our September quarter data (over 1,500 consultants and leaders took part), the bottom 10% of senior consultants billed under $57,000. The top 10% billed over $236,000. Same title. Same base expectations. Four times the outcome. Team leaders show almost the same gap.

Hume Scope September quarter data from over 1,500 consultants and leaders. These figures show the spread across the market, not a performance guarantee.

This is what I'm hearing from owners in SME agencies when I bring this up. Some consultants doing really well. A large portion doing okay but capable of a lot more. And then the ones sitting in the bottom 10%.

What it does to you as an owner

As an owner, this is the biggest challenge right now. Inconsistent performance that swings this much hits you harder than it hits anyone else. Here's what I see it actually doing:

1. It's hard to plan around. Do you have the funds to invest in a new project, another consultant, whatever's next? One good quarter gets eaten by the next underperforming one.
2. Your own wealth takes a back seat. New investments, property, shares, whatever it is, gets pushed down the list because the business needs the cash first. One good quarter balances out an underperforming one, and it feels like you're never actually getting ahead.
3. Your love of the business wanes. If it's causing this much stress, some owners start to resent their team and their business, and even start rethinking if they want to do it anymore.

It's also why so many owners can't properly switch off. Let's be honest, a big reason for the inconsistency in billings is BD, or the lack of it. If BD only happens when you're driving it, two weeks away means two weeks where the pipeline doesn't move.

And further down the track, if you ever want to sell, it's the thing a buyer looks at hardest. A business where billings ride on one or two people having a good quarter is worth less than one where performance holds up evenly across the team.

What it isn't

What I don't think this is: a motivation problem, or even a hiring problem. Look at the data again. The gap shows up at every experience level, not just junior versus senior.

The consultants billing $200K+ aren't necessarily "working harder" than everyone else. They've just got a repeatable way of generating conversations that doesn't depend on being naturally good at cold outreach. Most consultants have never been handed that.

They've been told to do more BD and left to work out how.

Here's what I'd recommend doing about it, and I've broken it into two parts below: fixing how your team actually generates conversations, and making sure your database can support it.

Give your team a reason to call

The fix I'd start with: give each consultant a segmented slice of the database, not the whole list.

Say Priya recruits into supply chain. Her slice is supply chain leaders, nobody else. Once a month she sends them something genuinely relevant to that market, a trend, a salary shift, something worth their time, with one link to read more. Anyone who clicks goes on Priya's call list for the week.

And here is the most important part: she's not calling to sell. She's calling to talk about what they just read and what's happening in their world. That's it. That's the whole system, and it turns BD from a discipline problem into a structure that doesn't rely on anyone being naturally good at cold calling.

What follows from it

A few things follow from this. Open rates on future sends climb, because people recognise the follow-up. Priya's building an actual relationship instead of cold-calling a stranger trying to sell, and she gets more confident fast, because prospects are more willing to talk to her about what's going on in their world. This then increases her success rate of calls to meetings, and in turn impacts her jobs on and placements.

It also quietly fixes a retention issue we're seeing across agencies, because recruiters who go out on their own usually say their old agency gave them nothing but a desk and a salary. If recruiters aren't being supported to bill more and make more commission, they'll start thinking they can just do it themselves. Not saying that thought process is right, it's just what I often hear from consultants who ring me asking for advice.

Your database needs to support this before anything else does

None of the above works if your database can't actually segment properly.

Everyone asks me which CRM is best. Which one has the best AI capability. Wrong questions. The right one is whether you can structure it the way you need to run something like Priya's system above.

Check three things first

Before you consider switching anything, check three things on what you've already got.

1. Can you add custom fields and coding, and remove what isn't relevant for your business?
2. Does it have email tracking and website tracking capability through good email marketing and automation?
3. What AI is built in? That's an important one for the future, but ultimately, the question I'd be asking, the one I personally think is more beneficial, is: can it connect to an LLM like Claude or GPT?

Almost all of them can now, whether they like to admit it or not, so a flashy new platform promising AI isn't automatically a reason to move.

My honest read on AI for recruitment right now: it's only worth adding once the fundamentals above are actually working. If your consultants are hesitant to pick up the phone, AI won't fix that, it'll just be an extra bill.

We've also just opened up a few spots for private BD training Team training info: Worth a look if you want your team building this kind of BD system properly.