Professional Services Leadership, Marketing & Rainmaking
From the category archives:
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.
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.
He was…
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 few weeks ago someone said to me, “In this economy, I don’t think we’ll ever be able to get ahead. It’s been nearly impossible to get new clients to sign on, and I think it will be for some time to come. My team feels flat. It’s been a huge challenge to keep them motivated. And I understand why…it’s just so hard out there.”
We talked about it. The conversation went like this:
Mike: That sounds pretty difficult, but not an uncommon story these days.
(To protect anonymity, let’s call the other person David Lee Roth.)
DLR: My team seems like they’re running at 50% energy because no matter what they do, there’s just not the return on the other end for their efforts like there used to be. Click to Read More
Every year about this time we members of the tribe engage in a sacred tribal ritual: sending email jokes, videos, and other types of hah hahs to each other so we can have something to talk about at our family dinners over green bean casserole and boiled chicken. (Thank you, tribal leader Len Glazer, for leading this annual rite.)
Those of us MOTs in marketing recognize these not just for their deep religious significance, but that, while they don’t reach everyone in the population, they do become semi(te)-viral.
Viral marketing is often attempted—but not often achieved—by many firms. For those of you out there that haven’t figured out a way to get it right, here are a few tips from the yarmulke crew.
Service professionals know everything they need to sell their services. It’s how they organize that information and how they approach prospective clients that determines whether or not they make the sale. Michael McLaughlin, author of Winning the Professional Services Sale, talks about how services professionals can convert a sales lead into a paying client.
By connecting, collaborating, and getting commitment, service professionals work to get the sale without overtly selling, which can turn clients away.
(Time: 11:43)
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