“Complex problems have simple, easy to understand, wrong answers.” - H.L. Mencken
Client: “Mike, glad to have you here. We’ve been looking forward to this meeting about our corporate messaging for quite some time.”
Mike: “Great. Let’s start from the beginning. What do you do?”
What do I do?
Sure, most folks have something to say when asked what they do, but too often they seem lost in the middle of the street as the cars go swerving by. Feel familiar? Fret not! You can survive this question (and teach others to survive it) without any tire tracks running down your back. Here’s how to do it.
The strategies for marketing and selling for professional services firms aren’t that complicated. But getting the leaders together and choosing a strategy often is.
In this podcast we look at what leaders can do to make change happen at their firms with Dr. John Kotter, professor of leadership at Harvard Business School and author of New York Times bestsellers A Sense of Urgency and Our Iceberg Is Melting, as well as one of the world’s most influential book on organizational change, Leading Change.
He says people fail to successfully make change not because they lack capability and intelligence, but because they simply haven’t been through a lot of big changes. The good news is you can learn it. You can do it. You can make some remarkable things happen. You just have to think in a different way.
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RainToday.com’s Podcast Series “Marketing & Selling Professional Services” is produced by the Wellesley Hills Group.
Smoking a cigar in the Adirondack chair as the red sun goes down over the lake on a warm summer evening. Between this and me is a major remodel of the fixer-upper lake house my wife and I just bought.
Since I inherited from my father special skills like hammering a nail into a wall such that I ruin the wall, I realize I’m about to spend a lot of time with architects and contractors. All I’ve heard from friends and colleagues is, “Be careful!” Click to Read More
Inside all of us hides an inner nerd. I’ve been accused around the office of not hiding mine particularly well, especially when it comes to quoting famous and obscure movies alike.
A few years ago, I reviewed the American Film Institute’s top 100 movie quotes list, and shared the secret marketing messages hidden in each. When I saw Liquid Generation’s 100 best movie lines in 200 seconds, I realized that more hidden messages needed to be freed.
(Video caution: Some PG-13 in there…)
Here goes:
“He slimed me.” Ghostbusters, 1984
Secret message: People know when you’re trying to pull the wool over their eyes or use a cheesy sales tactic. Don’t.
“You’ll shoot your eye out, kid.” A Christmas Story, 1983
Secret message: Don’t let someone scare you out of doing something you want to do. There’s nothing wrong with a little risk.
Q. Why did the chicken cross the road?
A. Jack Bauer: Give me ten minutes with the chicken and I’ll find out.
The first time I heard the five questions I’m about to put forth as the five most important for services marketing, they annoyed me. Actually, the person who introduced them to me tended to annoy me in general. By proxy, I threw the important-question baby out with the annoying-lady bathwater. I shouldn’t have done that, but didn’t realize it at the time.
The concept is the Five Whys. Popularized by Taiichi Ohno, the architect of the Toyota Production System, the Five Whys is a root cause analysis technique, helping business leaders get past amelioration of the symptoms of a problem, and instead address the underlying causes. Regardless of my former colleague’s surface-level delivery of this fairly profound concept (she asked the Five Whys like a child who asked for ice cream and mom said no…WhyWhyWhyWhyWhy!?!), she does get credit for introducing the idea to me.
Becoming a “Trusted Advisor” to clients has been a long sought after goal for consultants and professionals. Professionals covet not only providing services regularly to clients, but becoming their clients’ sounding board for challenging and sticky issues of all types. A worthy goal, indeed.
You might think that if you’ve achieved trusted advisor status that you’ve reached the top of the client relationship Everest. Time to stick your flag into the ground, enjoy the view, and relish reaching the goal. With you as their trusted advisor they’ll never consider working with anyone else, right?
Q. Why did the chicken cross the road?
Very Satisfied Clients Switch Less Often
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