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!

Many professional service firms have learned how quickly good times can turn to bad over the past year.   They are learning or relearning that developing business is something that must be done in good times, if you want to delay and minimize bad times like these.  Less often they realize that one source of their revenue implosion has been the failure of a single channel to market.  To reduce that risk in the future requires not just increased business activity, but a diversification of the channels through which business comes to them.  Now that a recovery is underway, it is a good time to do that.

Examples of channel failure include:

• The loss of a rainmaker who provides a disproportional share of a firm’s or practice’s new business.  This is the simplest and most common source of channel failure.
• The loss of a referral source who provides a disproportional share of the firm’s or practice’s new business.  A cost reduction consultant received all of his work from a turnaround manager.  When that person was forced into retirement, his sole source of business disappeared.
• The failure of education programs as a channel for new business.  Several consulting firms ran seminars on specific methods for dealing with corporate problems.  After the seminars some attendees would hire them for large engagements.  At first these seminars attracted high-level participants, but after time, more and more junior people entered the mix.  When senior people stopped coming to the seminars, lead flow declined and when even the junior people stopped coming to the seminars, there were no more leads.
• The failure of an internal referral channel.  There are many examples of this. The engineering studio of an architectural and engineering firm got all of its business from projects that originated with the firm’s architectural studios.  When architectural projects dried up, so did the engineering studios lead flow.  In later years the management of the studio developed personal relationships with client facilities managers, which gave them a second, less cyclical, direct-to-market channel.  Also, at the large accounting firms, the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act reduced leads from audit partners to forensic accountant practices specializing in litigation support to zero overnight.  The litigation support consultants, who had relied entirely on audit partners for a steady flow of new cases, had to scramble to develop new channels.

Channel failure is surprisingly common and can be devastating, all the more so, because the single channel usually looks as if it will never cease to provide new business.  It almost all cases, its failure comes as a big surprise.

The best way to avoid the problem is to have multiple channels to market.   Any professional who relies on a single channel and who doesn’t know how to go out and generate business through multiple sources exposes himself to grave career risk.  But, I don’t really expect many people to recognize and act on this knowledge.  History shows that it is all too easy to become complacent and to ignore channel risk.  You do so at your peril.

Two new books of interest to aspiring rainmakers and managers of profession service firms came out this summer.

The first is The Integration Imperative by Suzanne C. Lowe [Professional Services Books, 1990].   It deals with what I believe will be the single biggest issue in business development at professional services firms in coming years, the integration of sales and marketing.  Professional service firms are well behind traditional product firms in this area.  This results, I suspect, from two major causes.    First, selling was a forbidden word in the professions for many years and still is at a few firms.  If you can’t talk about it, you can’t manage it.

Second, marketing has been a poorly defined term in the professions, in part, because it was often used as a euphemism for selling.  When not referring to selling, marketing has been used vaguely to refer to a collection of activities, including public relations, advertising, running seminars and the like.   This is a far cry from the sophisticated understanding of marketing found at product companies where the term refers to the selection and positioning of products in carefully selected markets and the way a company goes about taking those products to the  markets.

Professional firms which successfully integrate sales and marketing will have a big advantage.  Some already do.  Lowe has sought out a number of these firms and studied what they have done.

The book is divided into three parts.  The first covers why integration of marketing and sales is important and the second provides guidance on how to do it.  These are both well worth reading and studying.  Still, it is the third part that I found most interesting.  I am a sucker for case studies, and Lowe has outdone herself in this section by providing detailed studies of eleven firms across the professions.

The second book, Winning the Professional Services Sale by Michael W. McLaughlin [Wiley, 2009], neatly complements the first by providing an in-depth look at how professionals should handle a sales meeting.  It covers both the strategy and tactics of face-to-face selling from how to prepare, draw out the client’s needs, deal with surprises, prepare proposals, present, negotiate and set up the second sale.  McLaughlin also addresses critical subjects that are infrequently written about, such as when to walk away from a sale.

McLaughlin provides practical advice that is clearly based on a lot of personal experience.  For example, early in the first chapter he states that in a sales meeting every client has three burning questions of a professional:

•    Do you really understand what we need?
•    Can you do what you claim?
•    Will you work well with us?

Anyone who has sold professional services knows that these are the fundamental questions.

Though I may not agree with everything McLaughlin says, his arguments are well worth reading and a valuable check on opinions that all of us hold about selling.  This book is a good choice for anyone learning to sell professionals services and also for those interested in refreshing and sharpening established skills.

(As in prior years, I am  only posting once a week in July and August.)

Harding & Company services are built using information gleaned from interviewing rainmakers and those who have observed them.  The database now includes information on over 300 rainmakers in management consulting, accounting, executive search, architecture, engineering, law and other professional services.  These interviews run for at least an hour and often longer.  We add to the database as we gain information on additional rainmakers or more information on those already in it.  It has been a major source of differentiation for our firm.  We know what rainmakers do.

So, it was fun to learn from Enforce: The Insurance Policy Enforcement Journal (Volume 7, Issue 1, published semi-annually by Anderson Kill Wood & Bender, LLP) that lawyer Eugene Anderson, one of the first rainmakers I interviewed long ago, built his practice on a database foundation.  As described in Enforce:

. . . an enthusiasm that kept him working 12 hours a day, seven days per week drove Mr. Anderson to delve deeper into insurance industry “lore” than anyone had before—that is, to unearth and contrast what insurance industry executives had told regulators and policy holders about policy language while getting it approved and selling policies, with what they told courts when denying coverage years later.  He pioneered building databases of such information—before personal computers were ubiquitous.

Armed with his “can,” Mr. Anderson kept winning business, to the point where he was billing $35 million per year.

Databases as differentiators is an old concept.  Shortly after World War I, Felix Fantus (yes, his real name) selected a site for a new office furniture  factory.  Firm lore has it that his wife, a former geography student, helped him by recording information on towns they considered on index cards.  That database became the foundation of The Fantus Factory Locating Service, one of the earliest management consulting firms, which later became The Fantus Company (now a part of Deloitte), where I began my consulting career.

But it is worth reminding ourselves of databases’ strategic value from time to time, so that we recognize the opportunity to create one, when we come across it.  Opportunities to create them arise in all of the professions.  Two weeks ago, an architect brought me a new business idea that lent itself to the creation of a database, and I was reminded of how two other architects had built successful practices off of databases.

Of course, competitors can create databases of their own, but it will take time and money to do so.  There is usually a first mover’s advantage, and, at the very least, a head start of one to three years.  Databases are one of the best differentiators when selling professional services.

We recently won some business from a firm we had been pursuing for six years. With little encouragement from the client, I had remained optimistic all this time of winning them, believing that when they were ready, we would get a shot. It is a fine firm with good people, a valuable set of offerings and attentive service. How could I be so certain that they would one day be ready?

My confidence was based on experience with other firms which suggested that this one would, one day, find itself lead hungry. The firm had enjoyed a steady flow of leads generated by an institutional marketing effort, and the firm’s partners would convert enough of them into assignments to keep their professionals working hard. Living off this lead flow, the firm’s partners had never learned how to generate leads on their own. When the institutional lead generation ceased to work, these partners didn’t know how to go out and dig up their own.

I have seen this happen at firms as large as the late CSC Index and at small firms. I have seen it happen at firms as different from each other as strategy consulting firms and structural engineering firms. And I have seen it happen to whole firms or just one practice or studio.

That we at Harding & Company flag over reliance on an institutional lead source as an indicator of future need for our services should be a caution to any firm heavily reliant on such a source. And it should be a caution to anyone rising through the ranks of such a firm without learning how to bring in business.

In the corporate world, as people rise though the ranks, they often move away from front-line sales activity. In the professions, the opposite occurs at most firms; the higher in the organization you go, the greater are the expectations that you will bring in work. If this is not happening at your firm, there are two possible consequences. For the firm, the failure of the institutional lead source will cause a crisis which your senior people will be ill-equipped to solve. That could result in buckets of red ink.

The individual partner set free from such a firm is likely to find prospects for employment within professional service firms limited. Other firms will expect people at that level to be able to bring in business. Unless there is strong evidence you can do that, they won’t want you.

Institutional lead flow is a great asset to a firm, practice or studio. But it can be seductive. It should never be allowed to replace the requirement that partners go out into the market and bring back business for the firm.

(This is another of our posts from one of our readers seeking advice.  Please feel free to submit questions that you would like help with.)

Ian Brodie, a smart man and rainmaking expert, sent in the following question:

I’m currently puzzling over the question of whether to focus on building a personal brand (my name) or a company brand. I know a couple of local associates who are in a similar position too.

When I first set up my practice a year or so ago I selected a “corporate” name for the business. At that stage I (perhaps lacking in confidence in my own reputation) wanted to give the impression of being an established business rather than just a “one man band”.

However, over the last year it’s become clear that no matter what the name of the business, my clients are hiring me personally – not a company.

With that in mind, I am now wondering whether it would be better to rebrand the business under my own name. That would make it easier for clients to remember and find me (by searching for my name rather than having to remember the name of the company) and also to refer me to others.

Over the long term, I also intend to publish a number of articles, and perhaps a book. This would obviously be under my name rather than under a company name.

A lot of the people I admire in consulting run their businesses under their own name: Yourself, David Maister, Andrew Sobel, etc. Others, however, have a company brand: Charlie Green as Trusted Advisor Associates; Suzanne Lowe as Expertise Marketing.

So the choice doesn’t seem obvious to me. At the moment I’m tending towards rebranding under my name. There would be a degree of administrative pain involved initially, but I guess better to go through that now than in 5 years time.

Any guidance?

A member of the audience of the Washington, DC chapter of the Society for Marketing Professional Services (SMPS) asked me if I had any opinions on brochures. He shouldn’t have gotten me started! My comments on brochures always start civilly enough and end with me ranting and foaming at the mouth. In this case, they went something like this:

Brochures have their place . . . but not on the planet!

Excuse me, I forget myself.

Brochures have their place, but they aren’t the foundation of a marketing effort that some people seem to think they are. They aren’t essential first steps in founding a firm or a practice or a studio. To the contrary, time spent writing (and bickering) about a brochure is time away from the market and, especially when you are starting up, you need to be out in the market talking with people, not in the office writing. Spend the time you would spend writing a brochure out in the market talking with people and you have a good chance of turning up some business.

Of course, that’s one of the comforts of brochure writing; you can postpone having to go out and talk with people. But time is precious during the early days of building a business. If you aren’t generating business you’re draining cash. Unless, you talk with people, you’ll never sell anything! That’s the only way you will generate cash flow. In that light, writing a brochure is like planting a flower garden when you are running out of food! Like planting flowers when starvation is staring you in the face! Instead, you should be out in the forest stalking . . .

Excuse me, I got carried away.

With modern desktop publishing technology, you can rapidly put together a presentable leave-behind document and get out in the market immediately. Offerings tend to shift rapidly during the early days of a business, and you can change your desktop document easily and cheaply as you adapt your service and the way you talk about it to the market. You can’t do that with a four-color glossy brochure, can you? No, those $3-a-pop wonders will become obsolete in a year and then sit on the shelf collecting dust. Then you’ll be sorry you . . .

Ahem.

Better still, before you prepare any document, do some market research. Take four or five potential or past clients to lunch and ask them to comment on you business concept and offerings and the way you intend to talk about them. You will get some great ideas and will have, in the context of the meetings, educated four or five buyers about what you do.

But don’t, don’t waste precious time and money writing a #*$!!>&^ brochure! The whole *(?>&%!@# is a *&^%)_? ?**&#!! and . . .

At this point, the man who had asked the question cautiously stood up and said, “Yes, but what I really want to know is, do you have an opinion about brochures?

In a post published in late October (Waiting for the Elections), Margaret Grisdela described a small law firm’s decision to put its marketing effort on hold until after the election. Grisdela, quite correctly, argues against this decision. The election is now over, leading me to wonder if the firm has moved ahead with its marketing or has found some other reason to delay. My money says they haven’t budged, and if they have, it is more because of Grisdela’s persuasiveness than their own inclination.

Some people always have a good reason not to market now. That especially applies to the most fundamental of business development activities, picking up the phone and calling. There are lots of good reasons not to call:

• He doesn’t like to be bothered
• She isn’t a decision maker
• He’s new to his job. Let’s let him get settled for a bit.
• They’re in bed with a competitor
• No one is likely to be buying in this economy
• I don’t have a compelling enough reason to call her
• Monday mornings aren’t a good time to call
• He’ll think I’m just trying to sell him something
• I’ve got other things to do
• The probability of any call resulting in a lead rounds to zero

The law firm that Grisdela mentioned can come up with good reasons for delaying year round:

• Let’s let the dust settle from the election for a couple of weeks
• People are too distracted by the approaching holidays to pay attention to our marketing efforts
• People are too busy closing their books for the year
• Let’s get the new administration in place,first

. . . and so on.

These are all good reasons, but there’s one reason for calling that trumps all of them: If you never talk to anyone, you’ll never sell anything.

(This is part of my series on Rainmaking Problems. I hope you will leave a comment with your thoughts on a solution to this problem.)

Today I place my own problem before you.  As a person who puts himself forward as knowing something about selling professional services, I have tried to keep abreast of changes in marketing techniques.  I do so by interviewing people who have used a technique, but also by using it myself.  I’m able to talk about how to write an article, because I have written over 100.  I’m able to talk about networking, because I have a large network that feeds me business opportunities year after year.

The Internet is changing the way that professionals market and sell their services.  One of my efforts to keep abreast of these changes was starting this blog.  Having published it for about a year and a half, I feel justified in making some comments about how blogging works.  I may not be an expert, but at least I have a grasp of what I know and of how much I don’t know.

In the first category is my knowledge and that if this blog is to be truly successful I must take it to the next level.  I know what this level looks like, but I don’t how to get there.  Having looked at a good many blogs by now, I believe that successful ones move from the driving force of content to that of community and that this is done through comments.  Let me explain.

The day you start a blog, you have no readers.  You may be able to attract readers once with an advertisement or a mass e-mailing, but to keep them coming back requires content.  And supplying that content can be deliciously fun at first.  I look back on writing some of my early posts, such as He Talks Too Much and Three Ways to Get a Good Seat, with pleasure.  In this way you build your first readership base.  I will call this Level 1.  Business blogs without solid content fade quickly.

While building to Level 1, your posts receive few comments.  A low percentage of those who read blogs ever comment—the figure one percent is commonly thrown about.  You simply don’t have enough readers to spark much comment, let alone dialogues.

But many people surf the net not just to receive information, but to exchange it.  If you want to grow your base of readers to the next level, you must engage them in a dialog.  That is, you must write in such a way to attract comments; not just any comments, but the kind that attracts still others.  If you do this assiduously, those looking to participate in a dialog, plus those interested in reading debate in addition to content will form a community of readers, which I will call Level 2.  It is much larger than achieved at Level 1.  The community comes to your site to read and to be read, to agree and to disagree, and to feel.  They come to feel smart or funny or provocative, but above all else they come to feel connected.

And that’s where I need help.  I believe I have plateaued at Level 1 and want to move ahead to Level 2.  But I don’t know how to do it.  There’s something wrong with either my writing or my format or something.  Or perhaps I’m just not patient enough.  As bloggers and participants in blogging communities, can you advise me how to move from content to community, through making people want to comment to making them feel connected?

Or am I looking at the problem the wrong way altogether?

(Got a problem selling professional services? Feel free to email me your problem and it may become a future “Rainmaking Problem.”)