As Spring approaches and more promotional materials for upcoming conferences begin arriving in the mail, I’ve heard many clients are assessing if conference attendance is worth the cost – - which today can be significant.  We are a big advocate of preplanning to get the most bang for your buck.  If you are a speaker at the conference you have lots of relationship development opportunities with both clients and prospects that don’t even occur at the conference!   

1. You can call clients or prospects for their advice and input on your presentation topic. 
2. You can invite contacts to be panel members for your presentation.
3. You can personally invite clients and prospects to your presentation, preferably by phone to continue a conversation flow. 
4. You can ask your contacts if there are other individuals in their organization who would benefit from attending your presentation and invite them too. 

These pre-conference conversations can result in the following benefits:   

-  It’s a great reason to call lots of your contacts to touch base and up your visibility in the marketplace.

-  You reinforce your credibility and industry expertise based on the presentation content. 

-  It reminds people of you and your services oftentimes prompting statements such as, “I’m so glad you called. . . we were thinking about  . . .”

-  Contacts are flattered that you seek their advice and feel good about giving it to you. (nurturing a relationship)

-  You can prepare a better presentation for your audience with greater knowledge as to leading industry challenges.

-  The conversation can validate your presentation conclusions leading to increased confidence in your offering.

-  You expand your network by client referrals to invite others within their organization. 

-  You may learn more about your client’s or prospect’s specific corporate challenges by asking the age-old question at the end of your conversation, “So how are things with you?” and listening.   

All of the activities described in this three part series on “A Speaker Who Knows How to Work It” occur outside of the actual conference.  The conference becomes a means to an end, not the end. 

Marketing meetings have become more frequent now due to work slow down.  Senior management at professional firms are spending more time meeting with each other to discuss clients, prospects and pursuits in an effort to capture the limited project opportunities in the marketplace.  At many firms, marketing meetings have become as frequent as weekly.  Participants at most marketing meetings include senior practice leaders and managers.  What most firms don’t realize is that these meetings come with a significant cost to their firms and oftentimes don’t provide a return on their investment. 

Marketing meetings are expensive!  Typical marketing meetings include 5 to 15 participants.  If they meet every other week for one hour, the total number of hours spent in marketing meetings per year is 130 to 390 hours.  As an example, at an average billing rate of $300 per hour, the cost is $39,000 to $117,000 per year.  Assuming gross margin of 12%, these meeting must generate roughly $325,000 to $975,000 to break even.    Larger firms with several group marketing meetings could be looking at a cost of several million dollars.  Depending on the firm and project size, these fees are a tall order in this economy. 

After years of working with consulting firms, I’ve seen all kinds of marketing meetings.  I thought I would share with you the Top Five Traits for the Worst Marketing Meetings with some tips on how to improve them.

1. Have participants report only leads and activity.  Lengthy information reporting becomes boring to most participants.  Don’t make the marketing meeting only a reporting session.  Adhere to succinct reporting of only relevant information.  Gather and distribute relevant data in advance of the meeting.  
2. Minimize idea exchange among participants.  Two way reporting conversations between each participant and the meeting leader squelches peer dialog and team problem solving.  Facilitate group problem solving and brainstorming for client development initiatives and challenges.  
3. Meet regularly without specific objectives.  Having regular meetings may feel like there is a focus on getting more work, but to make things happen you must establish action-oriented objectives for each meeting.  
4. Assume that your people are helping each other.  It’s a nice thought, but in reality, many individuals in different practice areas need specific action requests and follow up to cross sell.  Relationships are made one person at a time and that includes with colleagues within the same company.  Bringing people together with specific goals and action steps help facilitate development of stronger relationships among themselves and with their clients.
5. Invite everyone to marketing meeting to hear what’s going on.  Evaluate the number of regular meeting participants.  All participants should have specific action items to accomplish.  If they are not a player don’t take them offline for every meeting, invite them to only periodic meetings and learning sessions. 

Hopefully this doesn’t sound too familiar.  If it does, planning more effective marketing meetings is an easy fix which takes a bit of extra planning, but with focus can yield significantly more results and more regular attendance!

I would like to collect some stories about professionals artfully righting a sales effort that fallen in a ditch.  Here is one, for starters:

An executive recruiter accidentally called the client by the wrong name during a sales pitch.  Who hasn’t at least once in a career?  He apologized, but it was not his day, and he did it again.  The third time  he did it, he caught himself and without saying another word, picked put on his coat and started putting away his things.  The client asked what he was doing, to which he responded cheerily, “I would never hire somone who got my name wrong three times at an important meeting.  I suspect you wouldn’t either, so I don’t want to waste more of your time.  Thank you so much for the opportunity.  I wish you all success with the search.”  He had read his client correctly; the man laughed and told the recruiter to take his coat of, because he wanted to continue the discussion.  The recruiter got the search.

Do any of you have good stories about artfully turning around a difficult sales situation?

From time to time I have asked my colleagues at Harding & Company to submit posts on rainmaking.  Mimi Spangler  is now doing so regularly and has a fresh outlook which this old blog needs.  For these reasons, this will be a joint blog from now on with both of us providing content, separately and together.   Mimi brings many years of experience both making rain, herself, and helping others learn to do so.

By Ford Harding & Mimi Spangler

Over the years we have seen the leadership of many professional service firms frustrated by key account programs that don’t work.  There are, of course, many reasons that this happens, but one stands out: firms almost always start with too many key accounts.

A key account is one having such value or offering such potential to a firm that it warrants special attention.  Attention translates quickly into time devoted to the account by account team members, usually partners from a variety of practices and geographies.  The more key accounts a firm has, the more teams a partner is likely to serve on.

There’s the rub.  Partners at professionals must sell work, deliver services and administer the firm.  They are always stretched for time.  The more they are given to do, the more fractured their efforts become.  Assigned to too many accounts, they rationally devote their attentions to the one they are in charge of or the one or two where they see the greatest potential for their practices and ignore the rest.  As a result, many account teams lack the attention of key team members, so key relationships go undeveloped, opportunities to cross sell are missed and the account team falters.  Also, there is often a lot of finger pointing at those who let down a team that can cause lasting ill will, when the real problem is structural.

We believe firms fall into this trap, because management lacks the fortitude to tell a partner that his best client will not be designated a key account or to limit partners to membership on two account teams.  They pay for this weakness.

When Cortez landed on the coast of Mexico, he famously burned his ships before marching inland, focusing all attentions of his followers on the need to succeed.  Partners will always want to go after any account where they can make quick and easy sales.  Letting them do so, is akin to what Cortez would have done had he left his ships unburned, preserving retreat as an option.  If you want to focus time and attention on a client by making it a key account, you mustn’t make retreating from it too easy.

At some professional service firms, order taking is a common way to get business.  The client calls with no advanced warning and says show up tomorrow.  There is no competition and little, if any, fee negotiation.  Most litigation support firms get a significant share of their cases that way.  So do many valuation consultants.  Some kinds of legal services are also bought in this manner.  Firms that deal with emergencies, whether it be a client’s sudden, bad publicity or a need for a rapid environmental cleanup, are additional examples of those who often benefit from order taking.

It sounds like an easy way to get business.   But it isn’t.   In these cases the client feels a high sense of urgency and needs to trust the professional he hires.  This leads to a conservative approach to selecting a professional; the client is likely to go with the firm who did good work for him in the past.  That makes it hard to get new clients, including the new clients needed to replace old ones, who retire or cease to give you business for some other reason.  Firms or practices which get business this way run the risk of having too  much work with too few clients, exposing them to sudden revenue drops, if something happens to a key client.

Just as you would be unlikely to welcome a pitch from a watch repairman, if your watch was working, clients are often reluctant to spend much time with professionals who offer such services, when they don’t have an immediate need.  When they do, they are in a hurry to get help and don’t have time to expend much time researching alternatives.  The problem is compounded when the client’s need is confidential as well as being urgent, such as when a client knows his company is likely to receive some devastating publicity and doesn’t want the bad news to come out any sooner than necessary.

Effective selling of these kinds of professional services requires far more than answering the phone.  Rainmakers for these kinds of services typically select from three options:

• Public Relations:  They can seek publicity in order to increase the likelihood that prospective clients will stumble across their name when an event drives a need for their services.  This, of course, works best when the service meets two criteria:  First, it can’t be so confidential that the profession can never reveal work done and  client names and, second, it must have enough sex appeal to be worth of media attention.  For many years, I worked as a location consultant, helping companies pick locations for new factories, offices and research labs.  That service met both of these criteria, and we worked the publicity channel hard.
• Networks:  They can develop relationships with other professionals, who have early access to information about a client’s need for help.  So, for example, many turn around executives work hard to develop relationships with the workout specialists at bank and with bankruptcy attorneys.
• Developing Client Relationships: They find ways to develop relationships with clients in anticipation of the need, in effect making the sale before the need arises.  This works best when the client is likely to have intermittent need, such as a litigator’s periodic need for a jury selection consultant.  It is a hard route, given busy clients’ unwillingness to expend a lot of time learning about services they don’t have a need for now.  In such cases, the professional must link relationship-building to a client’s more immediate needs, for example, by providing training that will meet a client’s need for continuing education credits or providing friendship on the golf course.

When the phone rings and a professional selling such a service gets an order from a new client, it usually results from a lot of hard work.  Order taking isn’t so easy.

By Ford Harding and Mimi Spangler

Schmoozing is to networking what carbonation is to beer; you can do without it, but it’s bound to be flat if you do.  The definitions we have seen of the term are unsatisfactory.  It clearly is a way of conversing, though hardly casual, as one dictionary describes it, even if it may seem so.  It does have a purpose, though not solely to gain advantage, as another dictionary says, because often there is a give element, too.

We define it as low-key conversing on business and personal issues to give and gain advantage.  It is the conversational part of networking.  Done right, it is engaging, light, personal, caring, helpful and purposeful.  And it has undoubtedly been around since the dawn of commerce.  They schmoozed in the Hanseatic League, they schmoozed along the Silk Road, and they schmoozed before that in the prehistoric and early historic towns of the Fertile Crescent.

Schmoozing has had to adapt to technological change in the past. Today, much schmoozing is done by phone, though at some time in the past doing so must have seemed an oddity.  Tele-schmoozing became more frequent as the technology improved, phones became more common, and as telephone costs came down.

The rise of the internet has brought a new technological challenge to schmoozers.  To schmooze, you must converse, and conversing over what has in its early days been a largely asynchronous medium is hard.  And if you can’t schmooze over the internet, can you network over it?  Not effectively, we would argue.

The lack of easy synchronous communication still limits schmoozing on some social networking platforms, like LinkedIn, points out Elizabeth Sosnow, Managing Director and Social Media Lead at BlissPR.  But the ease of synchronous communications is developing rapidly.  Sosnow finds Twitter the preferred vehicle.  Starting from scratch eighteen months ago, she now has 4,500 followers on Twitter.  And she is generating leads from that source.

With advances in the technology, like Twitter and texting, that remove barriers to conversing, e-schmooze has arrived.  This is how it is done today:

• Information easily found on the internet serves as an enabler for e-schmooze.  Schmoozing is purposeful and it is easier to develop a purpose when you have greater access to information about your contacts.  For example, knowing in advance through Linked-In that Persons A, B and C are linked to Person D makes it easier and more efficient to have a conversation about D.
• Tweeting or texting contacts with bits of helpful news, congratulations and requests for information or advice provide starters for electronic conversations, just as they do when schmoozing face-to-face or by phone.  The advantage of the e-schmooze is the potential to start this conversation with many people at once, far more than can be done with the traditional schmooze, which requires calling contacts one at a time, or, at best, meeting with a small group.   This allows to e-schmoozer to out-network competitors.
• E-schmoozers then follow up with groups or individuals, depending on responses to a conversation-starter.
• As the e-schmoozer gets to know individual contacts through such exchanges, his conversations can become more personal and focused.
• E-schmoozing sometimes involves rapid exchanges that cover both personal and business issues.  These exchanges are more effective, if they sometimes meander between business and personal issues, just as voice conversations do, and if they involve humor and sincere interest in the other person.
• E-schmoozing works best if it is but a part of a wider range of communications, including voice and faces-to-face conversations.  Tweets and other electronic communications may first put you in touch with a contact and help you advance the relationship; the relationship will be stronger if you also eventually meet and talk by phone.

This is not rocket science, but are you doing it?  If not, the muscle the internet provides will allow others, more youthful and technologically sophisticated, to out-schmooze you.