Business-to-business firms, and professional services in particular, have a number of challenges when it comes to lead generation, but one rises to the top as the biggest concern: converting leads to revenue.
As we’ve mentioned here on the Services Marketing Blog before, between 40% to 80% of leads are dropped. For over a decade now it’s been within reach of services firms to automate lead flow to make sure leads don’t leak out of the pipeline. But in the last few years, the lead management automation tools have come a long way.
Indeed, best-in-class businesses that employ automated tools are seeing a significant return on their investments.
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.
Stuck in a Rut? Set Challenging Goals to Break Out and Grow Business
Michelle Davidson articulates the importance of setting goals that push you to the limit.
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.
How to Rev Up Your Referral Engine
Michelle Davidson shares an easy way to generate more referrals.
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.
Among the fastest-growing private U.S. companies that are using social media, the results are in—social media works. Not only are these companies listed on the Inc. 500 using social media as a key part of their marketing strategy, but it’s working for them.
The overwhelming response from those using social media, when asked whether it has been successful for their business is “Yes.” In the research conducted by the Center for Marketing Research, UMass Dartmouth, Twitter users reported an 82% success rate while every other tool studied enjoyed at least an 87% success level.
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.
Cookie, Oh cookie,
How you taunt me,
With your fiendish taste,
Your devilish charms
- Anonymous
I can eat a whole pan of fresh cookies if I have enough milk to smooth their passage, and if the wife isn’t home to witness the carnage. I’m not proud. Not ashamed either. Just another helpless victim of the all-mighty mixture of chocolate chunks, butter, vanilla extract, egg, flour, sugar, and baking powder.
Apparently, a couple of billion dollar corporations have tapped into the power of the cookie as well, and they’re using it to create competitive differentiation in their markets. The New York Times has published a nice piece about how DoubleTree Hotels and Midwest Airlines have baked cookies into the fiber of their business strategies, and how the strategies are paying off.
I can imagine a competitive differentiation strategy brainstorm at a professional services firm; the “let’s align around the cookie!” plan might not end up with the most votes. Yet it’s working for DoubleTree and Midwest. Here’s why it does, and how you can cook something up that might work for you.
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