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!

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.

Professionals who have developed skill at selling work in their areas of expertise, often find it hard to sell a broad solution to a problem that extends into areas about which they know relatively little.  Yet, rainmakers do this all of the time.  In an earlier post, I described a change in mindset needed to become an adviser on broad sets of issues.  Clearly, a change in mindset is not sufficient.  The professional must learn to conduct a discussion about a broad business issue.  Used to having command of a subject, they often say that they don’t know what to say and ask about issues where they have limited expertise.  It is a legitimate concern.

When talking with a client in their areas of specialty, professionals ask relatively narrow questions.  Borrowing from Chomskian linguistics, I will call these surface questions.  The surface questions used to learn about a client’s desire to redesign her company’s pension program differ greatly from those required to learn about her need for a new headquarters or her need to make a merger or for any other specific problem.

However, regardless of the issue, surface questions in all specialties gather information in the same categories, such as information about the nature of the client’s issue, its source, its size, its complexity, its urgency, its risks and opportunities, and so forth.  With that understanding, it is relatively easy to construct questions, which I will refer to as deep questions, that are more generic in nature and that will allow a professional to converse with the client in areas that go beyond the professional’s area of detailed knowledge.

Here is a comparison of some surface questions with some deep ones.  For the surface questions I will assume that a location consultant is interviewing a client about moving its corporate headquarters.  The deep questions, of course, can handle a much broader set of issues.  Note that these are just sample questions, not a definitive list.  Also, keep in mind that the same question can be worded many ways.  For example, Why would that be a problem for you?  is essentially the same question as I can think of several reason why that would be a problem.  Which ones stand out to you?  I have chosen brief versions of most questions to make a point.  If you don’t like the specific words shown, see if you can reword the questions to make them more palatable.

To determine the nature of the problem:

• Surface Questions:  Why are you thinking of moving your corporate headquarters?  What kinds of talent are difficult to recruit at this location?  Why is being in a peripheral location problematic?
• Deep Questions:  What is it that you wanted to talk about?  What seems to be the issue?

To establish cause:

• Surface Question:  Why are you thinking of moving now?
• Deep Question:  How did the problem arise/develop?

To establish urgency:

• Surface Questions:  How soon does your lease expire?  If you continue to fall short in the number of researchers you recruit, how soon do you end up in competitive difficulties?
• Deep Questions:  What kind of time pressure are you under?  Why the rush?

To establish goals:

• Surface Question:  What do you want to accomplish from a move?
• Deep Question:  What does success look like?

Top establish size:

• Surface Questions:  How many people are based at the headquarters?  How do they break down by job type?  How many would you expect to move?  How many square feet do you occupy?  Do you expect space requirements to go up or down?
• Deep Questions:  How big is this issue?  How many people does it affect?

To establish scope:

• Surface Questions:  Is the current location under consideration or are you definitely going to move?  Would you consider a long distance or only a local move?  Are there certain other locations that must be considered?
• Deep Questions: What are its parameters?  What areas will be affected?  How broad a set of solutions are you willing to consider?

To establish risks:

• Surface Question:  What happens if word of the move leaks out prematurely?  What if insufficient members of the research team choose to transfer to the new location?  Are you subject to political pressures in making this choice?
• Deep Questions:  What are the risks?   What could go wrong?

To establish opportunities:

• Surface Questions:  If you move to a new location and your recruiting problem goes away, what difference will it make?  How would easier access to your customers help the business?
• Deep Questions:  What are the benefits of making the change?  How much would you gain from the change.

To establish barriers:

• Surface Questions:  Why are you considering staying put?  Why not explore alternatives directly with economic development authorities instead of working through a consultant?
• Deep Questions: What stands in your way?  Why are you considering doing this with external resources, rather than in house?

I could go on, but suspect the point is made.  Professionals who are used to showing off expertise in the questions they ask, sometimes fear deep questions are too general and so highlight their lack of content knowledge.  But clients almost always answer deep questions without hesitation.  When they are focused on talking about their problem, information that draws attention to the professional can be a distraction, even if that information is posed as a question.

Jenny, a young professional at a big firm, had spent four years in a specific practice area.  Because of her smarts and interpersonal skills, she was seen as having high potential for rapid advancement.  This assessment was confirmed when a senior executive at a client where she was working invited her into his office to talk about another issue he was facing.

Jenny quickly realized that the issue was outside of her area of specialty, though well within her firm’s capabilities.   After a ten minute conversation, she offered to identify the right person at the firm to help with the matter, but by the time she had done so and could get back on the executive’s schedule, he had found someone else to work with.

It is doubtful that the executive expected Jenny to have a ready-made solution to his problem; he knew what she specialized in.  He was, more-likely, looking for someone who understood his organization, could understand his problem, participate with him as a thought partner about it and marshal the right resources to help him.  If that was the case, Jenny didn’t demonstrate the confidence and technique to serve as this kind of trusted adviser.  She lost the opportunity to advance her relationship with the client and to provide him greater value by cross selling a number of her firm’s services.

This is a limitation of many narrow specialists, including many who are older and more experienced than Jenny.  They don’t know what to say and do when presented with a problem outside of their specialty, other than to off-load it to someone else as quickly as possible.

So, what are people in this position to do?  They need two things, the right mindset and good questioning technique.  I will address the first of these here and the second in a later post.

The mindsets of trusted advisers and specialist differ on several dimensions, including:

Goals:

• Specialist:  To prove my knowledge of the special characteristics and implications of the client’s problem.
• Trusted Adviser:  To help the client articulate his concern and its implications and bring him the resources that can help him solve it.

Role:

• Specialist:  Solver of the client’s problem.
• Trusted Adviser:  Thought partner, representative of the client’s interests and needs within your firm and with others who will assist in providing a solution, the one who marshals the right resources.

Method:

• Specialist:  Ask questions that, by their nature, reveal command of the specialty and allow scoping of the assignment in detail.
• Trusted Adviser:  Ask questions that help the client explain and develop his own thinking on the matter at hand by helping him amplify his own beliefs and judiciously challenging them.  When appropriate, empathize with the client showing a shared understanding of the stresses, costs and opportunities that he faces.

Resources:

• Specialist: Largely from within own practice
• Trusted Adviser: From wherever needed; inside the firm, inside the client organization or elsewhere

Duration:

• Specialist:  Often one, and seldom more than two or three conversations, prior to submitting a proposal.
• Trusted Adviser:  Often several conversations, in order to ensure that the right problem is being solved and the right resources applied.

Once you have the right mindset, you are ready to learn technique.

In an earlier post I posited that anyone who wants to cross selling his services in a professional services firm had best treat his colleagues like any other market.  Selling them is the first step in selling to their clients. You must meet with your colleagues, learn about their needs and their clients’ needs, help them understand how you can help meet these needs and then provide fantastic service to them, so demonstrating how attentive you will be to their clients.  In this context, returning a colleagues phone call promptly is every bit as important as returning one from a prospective client.

This, I think sound advice, but it isn’t a one-way street.  All members of a firm have responsibility for finding opportunities at their accounts for their colleagues.  Firm management must find ways to make everyone accountable for cross selling.  There are many tools for this, most noticeably compensating people for helping their colleagues win work.  But, in our experience, some of the simplest ways are often overlooked.

Take, for example, teaching the firm’s partners about the capabilities of practices they might introduce to their clients.  Typically, this is done by giving the practice head a podium to describe what his team can do.  In the worst cases, this is done over hours at an off-site meeting, with one presentation following another in mind-numbing monotony, and the listeners soon find their minds wandering.

Here are two alternatives to make the process more effective:

• Structure the session as an interview, rather than a presentation. Announce to the participants that they won’t learn anything about the featured practice, unless they ask about it.  Then, don’t allow the person seeking to cross sell his service to say anything, except in response to his colleagues questions.  If his colleagues aren’t interested or intelligent enough to ask good questions about the service, he is probably wasting his time anyway.  This puts the responsibility on the listeners to extract the information they need, keeping them engaged in the conversation.   You may want to provide a few sample questions to get the interview started.
• Try speed dating.  Start your monthly firm or office meeting by paring up partners from different practices to have a half-hour conversation about how they can help each other sell their services.  At the next meeting shuffle the pares, so that everyone spends time with someone new at each meeting.  Among other things, trust is more easily built in one-on-one conversations than in a presentation.

Cross selling, like selling professional services, requires lots of little acts like these on the way to landing the big assignment.

Do you know how your clients spend their time?  You should.  That information can help you in numerous ways.  First, it will reveal their priorities, and to a large degree, their priorities are yours, too.  You want to work on things that are most important to them.  And knowing how the client spends her time will sometimes reveal opportunities to cross sell other services your firm offers.  A lawyer I know, who was trying to schedule a meeting with a client, learned as a byproduct that the client was planning a trip to Boston.  “What takes you to Boston?” asked the lawyer.  “We’re thinking of acquiring a firm up there,” responded the client.  The Boston office of the lawyer’s firm ended up doing the legal work associated with the purchase.  If the lawyer hadn’t been curious about how the client was spending this time, this never would have happened.

Knowing how a client spend her time can also tell you when your priorities are out of sync with hers.  A management consultant I once worked with couldn’t understand why a client delayed authorizing a project that would save his company over $40 million.  When he finally asked the client what was holding things up, the client replied that he was currently working on two projects that would each save over $100 million.  He would get to the consultant’s project once those efforts were completed and he had more time.  With this knowledge, the consultant was able to shift his own priorities away from making an immediate sale.

The way a client spends her time has implications for how she interacts with us.  A client who spends ten percent of her time meeting with service providers to keep abreast of what is going on in the marketplace will respond differently to your calls and requests for meetings from one who rarely does so.  One who spends all his time in internal meetings will want to interact with you quite differently from one who prepares legal documents, crunches numbers, writes reports or creates drawings under deadlines.

Knowing how a client spends leisure time can also be helpful.  An accountant learned that an executive he wanted to do business with teed up at the golf course at the same time every Saturday morning with three friends.  The accountant, a member of the same golf club, took to hanging around the first tee at the right hour on Saturdays.  Sure enough, one Saturday one of the foursome failed to show, and the executive and his friends invited the accountant to join them.  The executive ultimately became a client.

So how do your clients spend their time?  If you don’t know, you had better find out.

(Two earlier posts, Networking Up, Part 1 and Part 2, described how rainmakers network with executives, who are their seniors in age, authority and income.  Here is another on the subject.)

Few of us can shanty up to a senior executive’s office and just pop our heads in to say hello.  These are busy people and they have little time for casual visits.   Gatekeepers bar entrance to those who might fritter away the executives’ time.  So, even if you meet a senior executive during the course of your work, maintaining contact is hard.  To do so requires knowing more things of substance to share with her than most of us do.  And, if you don’t maintain contact, you will lose the relationship.

Carl whose slow, easy-going manner masked a fast, hard-charging mind, was easy to talk to and even easier to underestimate.  He built relationships with senior execs and so a successful practice, also cross selling many of his firm’s other services.  The execs learned that he was an astute observer of their organizations and so, worth talking to.  He was well briefed on matters that were just beginning to filter up to the executive suite.  His way of coming up with insights into client organizations, like many successful rainmaking techniques, was simple:  He drank a lot of coffee and listened to gossip.

“People want to target the big guys in an organization and not waste time on people in lower levels. They forget that you can’t just buy a senior executive a cup of coffee and have a chat, but you can with someone lower in the organization.  Those people will tell you what is going on and what you need to know to talk with someone higher up,” Carl explained.  “Talk with enough of them and you can learn about anything you want to know.”

Of course, Carl isn’t the first to discoverer of this technique.  In modified ways, it has been used by professionals for a long time.  In some current cases, LinkedIn replaces coffee as the medium through which information is passed.  But the underlying method is the same and forever being rediscovered, because it works so well.

Two years ago I was coaching a young German strategy consultant.  When I asked him to make some calls, he refused, arguing that later in the week he had a meeting with the general manager of a major business unit of his biggest account.  “I need to spend my time figuring out what I am going to say,” he protested.  I asked if he knew people working in the business unit with whom he could gossip a bit.  He did and agreed to call and talk with them.  Half an hour later, he came back beaming; one of the people he had talked to had laid out an agenda for his meeting with the boss.

Coffee and gossip, that’s not a bad way to spend some time each day!

In a previous post I described professionals who wanted to hire business developers instead of doing the hard work of getting business, themselves. These people don’t think like partners, because they want to abrogate the single most critical responsibility of an owner in hard times, making sure there is a flow of work to maintain the staff and pay the rent. *

Contrast these people to Cleo. A year or two away from being put up for partner, she already thinks like an owner. She established herself as a high potential employee when the economy was hot by doing excellent work in large quantities and mentoring junior professionals. She also built a small, but productive network that feeds her new business. A staff member at one name corporation goes out of her way to find Cleo opportunities at the company.

Last fall, as the cold hand of recession gripped her firm, Cleo asked to have much of her client work reassigned to others who were under-utilized, so that she could devote more time to finding new business. She has found it tougher going than she had expected and hasn’t generated as much revenue as she had hoped. Even so, she has increased her already substantial respect among some key partners. She thinks like one of them.

* Note: Business developers can be hugely valuable to a firm. Here I refer to a partner’s recommendation to hire one as a way to avoid revenue responsibility, himself.

Rereading the notes from one of our several hundred interviews with rainmakers, I came across this story about Edwin Heft, an accountant and partner at Touche before it began its long series of mergers with other firms: 

A senior partner, Edwin Heft, decided that there had to be a way to get the more junior members of the firm out in the market learning how to develop business.  He decided that this should be done by establishing a practice development committee composed of senior managers, managers and staff accountants.  A senior manager was to be chair and Heft served as an advisor. 

The committee was given a small budget to allocate as it wished on business development. Heft understood that in the early stages it was important to reward efforts rather than results.  You can sell professional services by a shot gun or rifle approach.  With a shot gun approach, you make many contacts and get the message out to all, but the net you throw is wide and it may not pay off for a long time.  He realized that if you want to encourage young professionals to get out in the market place, you must reward the effort, because the young person otherwise is doing it strictly on faith, and that faith is sorely tested.

Becoming a rainmaker is ego-deflating.  There is a lot of rejection, or what looks like rejection to the inexperienced.  To boost morale, committee members were rewarded with a small bonus.  They set goals, but didn’t evaluate themselves; Heft did that. 

It was a small effort for four or five years, and it worked.  Heft had been savvy about who he picked for the program and insightful about how to make it go.  The experiment was highly successful.  Three of the four senior managers became great business-getters.  One later became chairman of Touche.

Edwin Heft was one of the rare rainmakers who knew how to help others learn to sell.  Almost fifty years later, we at Harding & Company had to reinvent through hard practice what he got so right the first time he tried.  I just wish I knew more about this singular effort to create rainmakers.

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Order your copy of Ford Harding’s new and revised edition of Rain Making, called ”…an essential guide for anyone responsible for business development in the professional services industry…” - Mark Mactas, Chairman and CEO Towers Perrin

Inexperienced at selling, some professionals struggle to find the words to use to introduce a colleague. Of course, given enough time they could, but the opportunity usually comes unexpectedly, offering no chance to prepare. Once it passes, the professional forgets the need to prepare in the frenzy of client work, until, too late, the client springs another opportunity on him.Here is some language you can adapt to your needs. Once you have revised them to better fit your circumstances, practice them five or six times over the next two days. Then review them once a month until the opportunity to use them with a client welds them to your memory:

Sample Language #1

I sense this is important and urgent. Could I make a suggestion? Two of our partners are extremely knowledgeable on this subject, having helped such companies as A, B and C. You’ve been a good client, and I would like to arrange a meeting with one or both of them to share with you some of the experiences other companies have had and what they learned about dealing with it. Of course, they would very much like to work with you on this matter, but both take the long view about marketing and would want you to come away from the meeting feeling glad you spent the time, regardless of whether you chose to work with them or not.

Sample Language #2

On this matter we can do a better job for you if I bring in Richard Sanchez from our XYZ Practice. He is extremely knowledgeable in this area and, I think, would fit well with your people. I will bring him with me next week, if that’s okay with you.

Sample Language #3

Part of my job is to share with you things that we see in the marketplace that it might benefit you to hear about or about which we can bring a different point of view. Kathy Kelly of our XYZ practice has developed some fascinating insights into the recent movement towards ABC. Would you be interested in hearing what she has to say?.

Is there any language that you have heard or that you use that works well and that you would like to share?