Ma Kelly needed to clear her son’s name. Johnny didn’t do it, but the cops thought he did so it didn’t matter. Ma put on her detective shoes and went to work.
Turns out that the guy that did it wasn’t careful. Mary Margaret Katherine Dineen was cleaning up in the building when she saw what really happened. But she wasn’t sayin’ nothin’. If you want to stay safe on the streets of the Lower East Side, you don’t say nothin’.
Ma went to go visit her.
Ma Kelly: Look, I need your help. I need to know who did it.
Mary Margaret Katherine Dineen: Why should I help you. We ain’t got nothin’ in common.
Ma: We got a lot in common, you and I.
Mary: Like what?
Ma: Well, we both scrub floors for a living, we’re both swell lookers, and neither one of us is Chinese.
Mary: Oh, well in that case, come on in…
Some time ago I observed an initial sales call between a professional services provider and a new prospect. The conversation went from handshake to brass tacks, with no pleasantries, no catching up, no connection making. It didn’t go particularly well.
A certain subset of people (who often choose to work in professional services) simply feel uncomfortable having conversations like normal people. Yet, when you make connections with people, you can make a lot more progress getting done whatever you are trying to get done than if you work and talk like a robot. To paraphrase The Shining, “All work and no normal conversation makes Jack a dull boy.”
Much as you might like to get straight to brass tacks, rapport is important in selling professional services, and in delivering professional services.
Why do you think so many professional service providers skip the important rapport generation part of building relationships and selling? If they didn’t they’d probably make more progress. It worked for Ma Kelly…it’ll work for you.
P.S. Johnny’s nemesis Danny Vermin did it in an attempt to usurp Johnny’s claim to the leadership of the Jocko Dundee gang.
Cleaning up prospecting lists. Deciding one-by-one which companies out of these 30…300….3,000 we should target for lead generation. Finding out the names and the titles of the specific decision makers that would be the most likely buyers of our services…
“I just don’t have time to do things like this!”
Or
“Boring.”
Or
“Just buy a list. Someone sells the right list for us, right?”
Or
“This menial work is beneath me. I should do more important things.”
There are many excuses for why people don’t spend the time and the diligence targeting possible buyers for their services one-by-one.
Let’s look at the excuses (and, yes, they are excuses) listed here, starting with the top two:
I just don’t have the time for this and boring. I’ve worked with many services firms over the years. When it comes to marketing, senior people at the firm meet again…and again…and again to talk about the website graphic design, or the new logo, or the new brochure colors. They go through 12 design round edits when they should have gone through three. Edits from the firm leaders come in volumes in terms of their mark-ups and commentary (didn’t they have anything better to do all weekend?), and they meet endlessly debating the final renditions. Design processes have a way of spiraling out of control.
I can’t remember the last time I heard partners and marketers complaining about the endless meetings talking about honing more closely into their specific targets. Doesn’t happen.
In terms of the list part being boring, so it is. I don’t know about your job, but not everything in my job compares to an afternoon extravaganza of Playstation3, my old friends, and a bucket of hot wings. Yet, the important tasks seem to get done.
Just buy a list. Someone sells the right list for us, right? Every once in a while a list broker or association has just the right list for you. Typically, they don’t. When it comes to list compilers (e.g. D&B and InfoUSA), in my experience, the data isn’t clean enough for decent lead generation without a lot of scrubbing of the lists. The mythical “perfect list” is usually just that: a myth.
This menial work is beneath me. I should do more important things. Leaders at services firms spend plenty of time on graphic design processes. Design plays an important role in marketing success, but the time leaders spend on design silliness is disproportionate to the success that good design can bring.
So how much time should you spend on targeting? In our upcoming Future of Lead Generation for Professional Services benchmark research report (to be released in late February, 2007), we asked 726 leaders in professional service businesses a number of questions about their lead generation practices.
Among the questions were these two:
1) Do you consider your company’s overall ability to generate leads to be Excellent, Good, Fair, or Poor?
2) When it comes to lead generation, does your firm know:
- The general profile of your target companies?
- The titles of decision makers at your target companies?
- The specific names of the organizations that are your best targets?
- The names of specific decision makers for your service areas at your best target companies?
Click on the graphic and compare how much the self-reported excellent-at-lead-generation companies know about their targets versus the self-reported poor-at-lead-generation companies.
How much time does your company spend on targeting? How would you answer these last 4 questions? Is this menial work still beneath you?
In our upcoming Future of Lead Generation for Professional Services benchmark research report (to be released in early February, 2007), we asked 726 leaders in professional service businesses a number of questions about their lead generation practices. Among them were these:
Question: Of all the leads that your company generates, what percentage is typically sales-ready?
Answer: 24.7% (mean average)
Question: Of all the leads that your company generates, what percentage typically requires further nurturing to be sales-ready?
Answer: 50.3%
Question: Of all the leads that your company generates, what percentage is typically disqualified from the sales process?
Answer: 24.9%
By industry mean, what percentage is typically sales-ready:
31.8% – Financial Services, Investments, and Real Estate
30.8% – Other Consultants and Professional Services
30.5% – Architecture, Engineering, and Construction
28.8% – Legal Services
27.6% – Accounting
24.6% – Marketing, Advertising, and PR
23.0% – Human Resources and Organizational Development
21.0% – Management Consulting
20.9% – Training and Executive Education
16.8% – IT Services and Consulting
By industry mean, what percentage typically requires further nurturing to be sales-ready:
58.4% – Training and Executive Education
53.1% – Human Resources and Organizational Development
53.1% – Marketing, Advertising, and PR
52.8% – Management Consulting
52.0% – Legal Services
49.0% – Architecture, Engineering, and Construction
49.0% – Other Consultants and Professional Services
47.2% – IT Services and Consulting
44.2% – Financial Services, Investments, and Real Estate
40.6% – Accounting
By industry mean, what percentage is typically disqualified from the sales process:
36.0% – IT Services and Consulting
31.8% – Accounting
26.2% – Management Consulting
24.0% – Financial Services, Investments, and Real Estate
23.9% – Human Resources and Organizational Development
22.4% – Legal Services
22.2% – Marketing, Advertising, and PR
20.8% – Training and Executive Education
20.5% – Architecture, Engineering, and Construction
20.2% – Other Consultants and Professional Services
Takeaway: Nurture the leads you have.
Many companies let the leads they work so hard to generate drop out of their pipeline. (A BtoB Magazine article April 14, 2003 cited a report by the Yankee Group that between 40% and 80% of new business leads are lost, not followed up upon, or otherwise mishandled due to poor company processes.)
In our experience, service businesses are better at staying on sales ready leads, and notoriously bad at staying on leads that need further nurturing.
If your company is one of the many that are poor at staying on leads that are not sales ready when they present themselves, you are likely missing out on 2/3 of your new business opportunities.
This is less a question of lead generation, and more a question of the systems and processes you have in place for lead nurturing: continuing to stay top of mind with prospects that will eventually look to solve their problems with someone’s help (e.g. your help, a competitor of yours, internal staff), and working to help get the issues you can help them with to the tops of their to-do lists.
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