Professional Services Marketing

Highlights

• Doing at least some marketing research increased both growth and profitability. But doing frequent research resulted in still faster growth and greater profitability.
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• Boil it down, and only seven levers matter to increase your revenue:
  1. Number and/or quality of targets
  2. Number of overall leads
  3. Number of qualified leads
  4. Number of qualified leads converted to clients
  5. Revenue per client
  6. Revenue retention
  7. Growth rate per retained client
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• According to our fee and pricing research, premium-price firms are less likely to break down the prices of retainers and fixed-fee engagements to their component parts, such as hourly rates, and share this information with clients.
  • Tags: [[consulting]] [[pricing]]
• Obsessing about the competition to this degree is simply a waste of time and money. Most people would laugh at an accountant who confidently stated, “I have discovered that there are 62 other accounting firms in the state and can confirm that 51 of them offer a number of services similar to ours.” Yet somehow this information shows up in service firm marketing plan after marketing plan as if it were a necessary component.
  • Tags: [[consulting]] [[competition]]
• Law firms, consulting firms, information technology (IT) firms, financial services firms, and other professional services firms are not Coke and Pepsi. The market dynamics for services firms just don’t work like this
  • Tags: [[consulting]] [[economy]]
• “We have a unique methodology that allows us to deliver projects more efficiently and with greater ongoing success. There are five major steps: discovery, design, development, implementation, and measurement.” Reaction: Sure, it’s unique—there’s just one process exactly like this—but, with some variances, it’s used by hundreds of firms.
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• If you look for a unique space to create a market and be the first mover, there’s a good chance nobody’s there because nobody’s buying.
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• Monopolistic competition—the type of firm most service businesses fall under—are characterized by:
  • Many producers (firms) and many consumers (buyers).
  • Perception from the market that there are nonprice differences between firms but that those differences vary in degree and are often termed as subtle.
  • Typically small barriers to entry and exit (lots of firms in your field can and do hang out a shingle).
  • A degree of control by producers over the price they can command, versus monopolies that can charge whatever they want versus perfect competition firms that can charge only the same price as anyone else.
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• Finally, and perhaps most important, realize that for most product companies, the competition is another product company. For many service businesses, the stiffest competition is the indifference of your client to do anything at all or the desire of your client to “just do it with in-house resources.”
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• For many service businesses, the stiffest competition is the indifference of your client to do anything at all or the desire of your client to “just do it with in-house resources.”
  • Tags: [[consulting]] [[sales]] [[competition]]
• When it comes to marketing against the competition, remember the three outcomes we stated that marketing can deliver for you:
  1. Help you create conversations with potential buyers when they have a need. Firms often say, “I can’t believe they bought technology services from Firm X, and we were never even part of the conversation!” You don’t want that to happen.
  2. Ease winning of client engagements by affecting the prospect’s perception of your firm.
  3. Increase your revenue per engagement and client, and increase your ability to generate premium fees.
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• Through substantiation, you take who you are and what you say that you do (positioning) and give the market the sense that what you’re saying is genuine and defensible. Substantiation can be delivered in one of two ways: deep-dive messaging and personal interaction.
  • Tags: [[strategy]] [[consulting]] [[marketing]]
• The strength of your value proposition is a three-legged stool, the legs being resonance, differentiation, and ability to substantiate (see Figure 8.3).
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• Although $2 million in savings would seem large by many businesspeople’s standards, that’s not always the case. One decision maker, when presented with a way to save $10 million by one of our clients, said, “I see that you can save me the $10 million, but right now I’m solving $50 million problems.” What resonates with one buyer won’t necessarily resonate with another.
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• It’s been said that buyers buy with their hearts (emotion) and justify it with their heads (performance). This kind of statement is often associated with consumer buying, not business buying. Although the contexts might be different, it’s just as true with business buyers that emotions and feelings influence their decision making and budget allocations.
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• Many a branding guru has said something to the effect that if you can create a new market category and can be perceived as the first player in that market, you can dominate the market as its leader. As we mentioned earlier, this is generally not particularly sound advice for most service firms and serves only to muddle the service firm marketing strategy process with unnecessary complexity.
• As H. J. Heinz said, “To do a common thing uncommonly well brings success.” It’s often your attributes of similarity, not those of distinction, that if done well, form the foundation of the strength of your firm.
• One of our least favorite questions that buyers ask is: “How are you different?” If we’re asked this question, we’ll typically respond, “Different from whom?” Are they asking how we’re different from every other firm that offers services in our space? A particular category of firm? A particular firm?
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• Attributes of experience are things about your firm that affect the perception of clients and the market regarding what it’s like to work with your firm. Is your firm buttoned-up or casual? No-nonsense or touchy-feely? Vanilla or quirky?
• It must be meaningful to clients. Just because a differentiator is true doesn’t mean it matters to clients.
  • Tags: [[marketing]] [[consulting]] [[favorite]] [[positioning]]
• Unless you have a solid answer to the “prove it” challenge, don’t waste your time. Many firms have tried, to no avail. If you can’t prove it, it won’t work.
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• The narrower the range, the stronger the differentiator. You just have to make sure there’s enough business for you to grow to the extent you wish, inside that narrow range.
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• What many firms fail to recognize is that just because something is true, doesn’t mean it’s a differentiator (see Chapter 12).
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• Who could blame a prospective client for drawing the conclusion that the firms in a certain industry are all the same? If faced with a choice between several interchangeable firms, most businesses will choose the one with the lowest prices.
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• What pages should you optimize? Start with your home page and services pages. Next, you might want to add industry pages (if you have them) and your locations page(s). And if you are implementing a content marketing plan, optimizing your blog posts is essential.
• We usually recommend that you optimize a page for a single keyword phrase.
• Using PPC in place of SEO. Studies have shown that web searchers trust organic results far more than paid ads. PPC is best used to supplement organic SEO.
  • Tags: [[seo]] [[advertising]] [[consulting]] [[marketing]]
• A good rule of thumb is to share nine pieces by others for every one of your own.
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• Ideally, you will spend an hour a day or more sharing your expertise and content on social media.
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• Research from Hinge has shown that banner ads aren’t as effective as other marketing tactics at generating leads and revenue in the short term. But they can be useful for building brand awareness or promoting content pieces to a specific online audience.
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• In our research report, What’s Working in Lead Generation, we surveyed 731 leaders of professional services firms. In it, we asked them, “What offers are most effective in generating new leads?” White papers were among the most effective offers, as 28 percent of respondents rated white papers as “very” or “extremely effective.”
• By and large, our experience and research with proactively generated leads shows that: 25 percent are short-term leads. 25 percent are bad fits. 50 percent are long-term leads. If you’re focused only on the short-term leads, you might be missing out on three-fourths of your opportunities.
• If you are driving demand for something, selling something new, selling ideas, or in any way selling something that the buyer doesn’t have to buy but indeed should buy, then they usually won’t have a budget. Think about it. If the purchase is unplanned, why would they establish a budget?
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• Funds. Focus initially on organizations and buyers that have the financial capacity or funds to buy from you. They may or may not have a budget, but they have the overall financial wherewithal to spend. Sell where the money is. Authority. Focus on finding the individuals who have the authority to make decisions on how to use funds. If the organization has the financial capacity to spend if they found something to be worthwhile, you must deal with the people who have the authority to allocate said funds. Interest. Generate interest from the buyer in learning what’s possible and how to achieve a new and better reality than the one they have today. Need. Uncover specific needs that you can solve. They’re likely to be latent—hidden beneath the surface—but they’re there if you can uncover them. Timing. Establish purchase intent and a specific timeframe for doing so. This can, of course, take a number of conversations, might involve a number of decision makers and influencers, and may take some time to do. Once you do it, however, you now have a qualified prospect and a real opportunity in your pipeline.
• Great professional services businesses can still win in this situation… sometimes. More often than not, however, the prospect says something like, “Wow, you were really good and made this a much tougher decision than we expected, but we’ve decided to go with another option.” (The one they had in mind all along.)
• To entice these long-term prospects (typically buyers with authority and need but no budget or explicit time frame to buy) to become ready buyers or to keep your company in consideration when the prospects become ready buyers is a function of sustained lead generation and lead nurturing. These functions cross the traditional line between marketing and business development (or sales).
• If professional services firms want their clients and prospects to believe that they’re credible and distinct, they need to demonstrate that they are credible and distinct. Simply stating the words, “I’m credible and distinct,” is not only insufficient but can even create the wrong impression.
• As we describe in Chapters 8 and 12, your value doesn’t need to be unique—but it does need to resonate with the market.
  • Tags: [[marketing]] [[consulting]] [[positioning]]
• How do you make the intangible tangible? Take a cue from your local ice cream shop: let your clients and prospects have a taste. Professional services businesses can do this by creating and leveraging offers and experiences that allow potential buyers to see, touch, and taste a bit of what you will provide for them as clients.
• Offers and experiences break through the noise and give prospects a decision to make. “New research—that sounds valuable. Do I want to take 15 minutes to hear the results?” The more valuable and interesting the offer, the more it breaks through the noise.
• As much as you (the seller) might like to shorten the sales cycle, buying complex, important, trust-based services takes time. The initial lead will culminate only if the buyer, when she has a need that floats to the top of her to-do list (the elusive time of need), thinks of you.
• If you’re going to call someone to “just follow up,” don’t. Call to offer some insight on new research your company just completed. Call to offer a discussion with one of your clients who just succeeded in conquering the issue that this prospect is facing. Call to see if you can take the prospect out for coffee when you’re in town next week. Call to see if the appointment of a new president at the company is going to affect what they need and offer to speak to them. But don’t call to check in. As Jill says, it’s lame.
  • Tags: [[sales]] [[consulting]]
• “An 11 percent reduction in dropped/lost leads, combined with a 1 percent improvement in lead-to-order conversion rate, increased annual gross profit by 136 percent.”
• High-growth firms are three times more likely to have a well-defined, well-understood target market.
• at the heart of RAIN Selling is the word RAIN, an acronym that stands for rapport, aspirations and afflictions, impact, and new reality.
• After you uncover the potential client’s aspirations and afflictions, the question then becomes “So what?” If the afflictions don’t get solved, what will or won’t happen? Will they get worse? How do they affect the bottom line of the client’s company, division, or department? If your aspirations don’t become reality, so what?
• Although many people do indeed talk too much during the business development process, others learn somewhere along the line that good business developers ask great questions. They then take the advice to an extreme and ask question after question, offering no advice and making the people on the other side feel like they’re getting the third degree. So instead of talking too much, they’re asking too many questions.
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• At the end of a well-managed sales process, your job is to create a new reality that will be the best for your client, given the client’s specific aspirations and afflictions and the impact of doing (or not doing) something about them.
• Ask prospects what they want the world to look like once your work is done. Broad questions that start them envisioning the future are a good way to get the creative juices flowing.
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  • Note: This is the N (New reality) part of RAIN selling.
• The crux of the Relationship Strength Meter is asking and answering six questions about your client.
  1. What is your level of partnership with senior leaders? (That is, what is the access they would allow you to their power players?)
  2. What is the account’s perception of the value you deliver to them?
  3. How would the account describe the severity of challenges they would face if they lost their relationship with you?
  4. If someone approached your client and suggested replacing you, what would your client’s reaction be?
  5. How much competition is there, and what’s the competitive bidding process like in the areas where you can work with your client?
  6. Would your client seek to replace you?
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• If you want to expand your time with senior executives, you need to: 1. Establish a peer dynamic. 2. Get over personal hang-ups. 3. Resonate on the business side. 4. Resonate personally, emotionally. 5. Lead masterful conversations. 6. Stay with it; don’t give up. 7. Craft a meticulous personal brand.
• Ultimately, if you want time and relationships with executives, you have to make sure they see you as in their league. It’s up to you to do what you can to get there, and stay there.
• Some people have an overall preference for trusting slowly. This doesn’t mean they don’t ever trust and don’t have intimate relationships. They do. It just takes awhile to get there with them.
• Know, as well, that if you do build trust with Skeptical Steve, you’ll find yourself with a very good long-term business relationship. Your competitors will also have a tough time getting in his inner circle, and often they won’t put in the effort to get there. He’s all yours if you don’t mess things up.
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• When you meet a Skeptical Steve (or, indeed anyone) for the first time, the person’s initial skepticism will often focus around three areas: mistrust of competence, mistrust of professionalism, and mistrust of motives.
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• Package services and products in pilot tests or phases that can prove the case and prove your ability to deliver.
• Make and keep promises. This means even for little things such as, “I’ll get you that by Tuesday.” Whatever you promised must come on Tuesday. If it comes on Wednesday, it’s a signal about how you operate.
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• If they were to think about letting their guards down with you, ask yourself what it would take to make them feel more faith than fear.
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