Ahh, the fruits of unselfish play. Being at the Gaahden watching Rajon Rondo lead the Boston Celtics to victory with stellar team play over LeBron James and his soon to be former team the Cleveland Cavaliers, I thought I’d rack up a few dimes myself by making note of four excellent posts on the RainMaker Blog.
The Key to GREAT Service Delivery
Erica Stritch shares a bit too much about her recent drinking problems as she helps us understand the importance of setting and meeting expectations in service delivery.
Four Crucial Elements to Rainmaking
Allow myself to introduce myself. Here I share (surprise surprise) four crucial elements to rainmaking. And not one of them is a skill. Have a look and let me know what you think.
Professional services firms are rarely referred to as having “sales organizations.” But we can learn a lot from those that have them.
If sales organizations want to succeed, they must employ a combination of sales technologies. Using such technologies allows sales and marketing people to gather, and share, more information about their prospects and clients and gives them more ammunition to get the job done, according to Aberdeen’s report Sales Intelligence: Preparing for Smarter Selling.
Professional services leaders face all types of challenges on their way to growing revenue. Marketing, business development, strategy development, you name it. There’s no cookie-cutter growth strategy. One size certainly does not fit all.
But on the road to strategy development and revenue growth, there are areas that all B2B professional services firms should focus on. In Wellesley Hills Group’s recently published Five Drivers of Revenue Growth for Professional Services white paper, we’ve outlined the five major areas that affect a firm’s ability to grow.
Because there’s no everyone-should-do-this strategy, executives must first look at the core of their firm’s activities to know what’s working and what’s not for them, and develop a strategy that will work given their own desires and circumstances.
For a few years now, professional services firms have felt the crunch of the economy and held on tight. You’ve heard the horror stories and experienced the pain. Time to move on.
If you want to stop playing defense and start playing offense, if you think it’s time to take advantage of the opportunities to grow your firm and succeed, the first thing you need to do is set your mind to it.
There’s no shortage of advice about which strategies work or don’t work for services marketing. Yet they seem to conflict with each other regularly. So what’s the scoop? Which ones work?
It’s less a question of which ones work than it is which ones will work for you given the dynamics of what you sell. Answering that question requires many considerations, but there’s one that many firms overlook: whether the service they offer is demand driven or demand driving.
Batten down the hatches. Stick to your knitting. Trim the fat; trim some more. With no end in sight for the recession, you must embrace new ways of leading if you want to compete in a downturn…
STOP! You and your team have heard the mind-numbing drumbeat of endless how-tos “in a downturn” for the past 24 months. And it has wrought the following:
Cultural fear
Postponed innovation
Reduced client service
Quality breakdowns
Tepid marketing activity
Endless excuses about the economy from the rainmakers (and everyone else)
Defeatism
Now that the end of the Great Recession is here, services firms must renew hustle, passion, intensity, and competitiveness. It’s time to roll out words we haven’t used for a while: innovation, opportunity, and progress.
As always, it’s up to leaders to make sure they happen. This four-step process will help them stop leading in a downturn, and start leading in an upturn.
Most businesses head into 2010 with a healthy dose of uncertainty. I like it. It’s not because I enjoy not knowing what’s coming, if the economy will double dip, or if the banks will need more TARP funds to weather the financial storm.
I like it because where there’s uncertainty there’s change. And where there’s change there are new opportunities to tackle, mountains to climb, and successes to achieve.
As I speak with leaders of professional services firms these days, the big questions looking forward are about fear, risk, and reward. Early last year fear was rampant, few were willing to risk anything, and firms were playing defense to protect their margins by tightening their belts.
“They told me I had to become a thought leader or I’d never achieve great success as a professional.” This is what a leader at a professional services firm told me recently that a marketing consultant told him.
He didn’t say this to me matter-of-factly either. He said it with a mix of fear, skepticism, sadness, and hope.
Fear. Because he can’t write and doesn’t have much “new” to say, and neither do the rest of the folks on his leadership team.
Skepticism. Because he didn’t think it was true that thought leadership was now a requirement, but he was starting to hear it so much he thought maybe the tide had turned and it now was.
Sadness. Because he liked his job selling, delivering, and managing and didn’t want to become, as he put it, a “professor type”.
Hope. Because he was hoping I’d say what he wanted me to say: that it was not true.
Giving Away Products and Services to Create Loyalty
A reporter for a major business publication asked me whether businesses that lower prices and give away free services for buyers that are struggling to “give them a break” is a good strategy for keeping them loyal when the economy turns and their financial fortunes improve. Here’s what I told him…
A little while ago I was visiting Will and Holly, friends of mine who have a four-year-old son, Chaka. Chaka just got a new pair of performance-enhancing sneakers (Wildcats anyone?) that, in his mind, has him challenging Lebron for the MVP.
No question Chaka got game, but even with the bionic footwear his dunking ability still doesn’t extend much past Oreos and milk. Can’t tell him this, though.
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