Everyone loves a train wreck…
Curious for more ways to destroy your marketing effectiveness? Read Six Keys to a Terrible Professional Marketing Strategy.
From the monthly archives:
August 2009
I’m in conversation with the marketing department chair of a prestigious graduate business school about teaching an MBA course on professional services marketing. Last week he asked me to develop a syllabus. Coming up with the topics: no problem. Coming up with possible cases: no problem. Developing a reading list: no problem. None of it is a problem…there’s more excellent content out there than we’ll ever have time to cover.
I’d like to solicit your help. If you were back in business school, what cases or topics would you want to cover? I’m looking for those articles, cases, books, blogs, and any kind of content that has helped define how you think about and approach professional services marketing.
Here are some of my initial thoughts on cases and readings:
Reading:
- Professional Services Marketing by Mike Schultz and John Doerr
- “Hustle as Strategy” by Amar Bhide
- “Putting the Services Profit Chain to Work” by Heskett et. al.
- “The One Number You Need To Grow” by Fredreck Reicheld
- “Competing on Resources” by David Collis and Cynthia Montgomery
- Managing the Professional Services Firm by David Maister
- “Corporate Postioning: How to Assess – and Build – a Company’s Reputation”
Cases (most are Harvard Business Review):
- McKinsey & Company (A): 1956
- Addleshaw & Goddard LLP
- Infosys Consulting in 2006: Leading the Next Generation of Business and IT Consulting
- The Architect’s Collaborative, Inc.
- Duane Morris: Balancing Growth and Culture at a Law Firm
- Hale and Dorr (A) & (B)
- ENSR International
- ThoughtWorks (A) & (B)
- Being a Professional
Any favorites? Am I missing anything?
Chances are you’ve had difficult client relationships. Communication stops, the client doesn’t give you what you need, and you don’t get the results you want. Before you throw in the towel, you should make every effort to resolve the problems and get the relationship back on track.
In this podcast, Andrea Howe, founder of BossaNova Consulting Group, talks with Mike Schultz, President of Wellesley Hills Group and Publisher of RainToday.com, about how to identify a relationship that’s falling off track and what you can do to set things right.
(13:24)
Click here to subscribe to the series via iTunes.
At a recent RainToday.com webinar that I delivered, someone sent in this question:
Do you have any advice for firms where the majority people or staff are primarily project focused, meaning, they are supposed to be focused on billable work only? Business development isn’t “billable,” where do they find the time?
Here are a few ways I could rephrase the question:
Tony Bettencourt, one of my closest friends, is the chef/owner of Sixty2 On Wharf, an award-winning, Italian-inspired restaurant in Salem, MA. I always enjoy hearing him talk about his visits to other Italian restaurants he respects because, while the chefs might all draw from the same list of fine ingredients from this one particular part of the world, each outcome bears the unique stamp and flavor of the chef that created it.
I’m thinking about this as I write a recommendation for Winning the Professional Services Sale by Michael McLaughlin. My area of focus is selling and marketing professional services, so, when I opened the book, I felt like Tony must feel when he walks into another Italian restaurant. This is my area. My tastes are discerning. I can be picky and I’m easily turned off by sloppiness, lack of talent, and underwhelming execution. On the other hand, I’m open minded (at least that’s what I tell myself), and I’m always waiting to be pleasantly surprised.
Definitely in the second camp with Winning the Professional Services Sale. Michael McLaughlin has done a fabulous job. Full disclosure: Michael writes for my publication, RainToday.com, and we’ve known each other professionally for a number of years. You can bet, however, that if he wrote a bad book I wouldn’t be talking about it here on my blog.
Here are five things I like about Winning the Professional Services Sale:
Opportunities are abundant to expand your consulting services into global markets, as there are many industries that are doing well despite the depressed economy. And according to famed consultants Alan Weiss and Omar Khan, technology makes it so that you don’t need a physical presence.
Weiss and Khan, authors of The Global Consultant: How to Make Seven Figures Across Borders, talk about how to get started working internationally, how to make inroads in developing markets, and how to build critical mass and establish yourself in overseas markets.
(Time: 14:52)
Last week, I was interviewed by the estimable Michael McLaughlin, author of Winning the Professional Services Sale, for an article in his well respected Management Consulting News.
His questions to me were:
- How would you rate the current effectiveness of services marketing? Is it getting better, worse, or just muddling along?
- Based on your research, is there a marketing strategy that you believe most every professional should use?
- What do you advise for professionals who struggle to make enough time to serve clients and market their practices?
- Of all the choices available to professionals to market their businesses, are there any tactics that don’t seem to work as well as others?
- How effective have the newer social media tools (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and so on) been for professional services providers?
- If you could give a professional service provider just one piece of advice about how to market most effectively, what would it be?
Visit Management Consulting News if you’d like to read my answers.
Everyone in professional services at one time or another thinks, “We should run our own seminars!” When folks call me for advice or help about running seminars, they’ve often read some book about how easy it is to get started with seminars, generate attendees, and make lots of money.
In my experience, there are more “first time, out of the gate” failures than successes, and it all starts with misconceptions about what it really takes to make marketing with short seminars successful.
So we at Wellesley Hills Group and RainToday.com have produced the Short B2B Seminar Planning Starter Kit. Above, you’ll find the video that goes along with it, featuring the dulcet tones of narrator Mary Flaherty, our research and content development manager. The rest of the kit includes the following tools and topics:
As students of marketing, we thought you might be curious to follow along the results of our “become a bestseller on Amazon.com” 48-hour campaign for our new book Professional Services Marketing.
The campaign centers around providing premium content to book buyers from ourselves and highly respected thought leaders in our field when they purchase from Amazon within a limited time frame. The thought leaders have all agreed to share with their constituencies the complimentary content, and to do so during the 48-hour window of the campaign. The content contributors and their excellent contributions include:
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