Q:      In earlier postings you have described formulas professionals can use to write an article efficiently.  Are there any others?

A:      An interview format can be effective.
                                                                                             
Q:      But don’t you have to wait around for a journalist to find and then interview you or convince some journalist to?  And even then don’t you sacrifice a lot of control over the piece?

A:      Not necessarily. In my experience, though the journalist sometimes seeks out the expert, as likely as not it was the subject of the interview who sought out the journal.  Three times I have interviewed colleagues and once wrote out a series of questions and silently interviewed myself, typing my answers into my laptop.  All four interviews were published in reputable journals.

Q:      Is there an ethical issue here?

A:      I don’t think so.  As long as the answers are honest, I’m not sure it matters who asked the questions.  The publications didn’t name someone else as the interviewer.  The format does imply that you have some authority on a subject—a good thing—but so does a bylined article.  And most likely, you do have some authority on the subject of the interview

Q:      Are there advantages to the interview format?

A:      It’s engages the reader who can scan the questions and dip in to read the answers that interest her.  Its loose structure allows you to wander across an array of topics not possible within the development of a theme required in bylined pieces.  The questions can change the direction of the piece more abruptly than is possible in an article.

Q:      What about the time commitment?

A:      It usually takes less time to write than a traditional article.   

Q:      How does one go about writing one?

A:      It’s quite simple.  You sit down alone or with colleagues and develop a list of questions.  Include both those the clients frequently ask and some of those you wish they would ask.  Sort them by subject.  Winnow them down and then write down your answers.

Q:      Are there any disadvantages?

A:      Yes.  Many journals won’t accept a piece in this format.  Those that do are amazingly diverse, from blogs to trade journals to large circulation publications.

Q:      Do you have an example of another blog posting or other electronic media use of this format?
 
A:      Yes.  Take a look at my posting, He Talks Too Much.  Suzanne Lowe uses this format in her newsletter The Marketplace Master™.  Michael McLaughlin does, too in Management Consulting News.  It’s a flexible format enhances your reputation, and that allows you to put something together fast.  What more could you ask for?

For more advice like this, please see Ford Hardings’ new book: Rain Making, Attract New Clients No Matter What Your Field, 2nd Edition

“Rain Making, in its new edition demonstrates its position as the single most sensible, accessible guide to building a professional practice…”
David Maister, author of Strategy and the Fat Smoker and co-author of The Trusted Advisor (with Charles Green and Robert Galford)

I have been reading Shawn Callahan’s blog ever since he commented on one of my early posts, Sadder but Wiser, about the use of an anecdote to show you had really learned something. The Anecdote is a well-known blog, one seen as successful. Among blogs it has a Google page rank of five, something for the rest of us to aspire to. So, I thought it might be useful to see if he has turned up any business through it.

Shawn’s firm, Anecdote, consults on the use of business narrative and collaboration techniques “to redesign and improve the way people learn, share information, retain knowledge and build resolve to make changes in the workplace.” Asked what that means, he gave this example:

One of our clients is a leading financial institution and they have just completed an organizational culture inventory. These survey instruments can be a little dry and difficult to understand so we are helping them collect stories that illustrate the culture and then working with people in the company to design and implement initiatives that will shape their organizational culture.

The firm has served many large corporations and departments of the Australian government.

Shawn has been blogging since 2002, the Pleistocene by blog standards, and The Anecdote blog is his third, so he had two earlier ones to shake the ticks out of his approach. That accounts, in part, for its professional look and content. The Anecdote dates back to November 2004.

Callahan reports that he gets lots of leads traceable to the blog. Because I have not found many blogs that generate a significant number of leads for a professional firm, this becomes an important case. Here are the reasons that I think he has been more successful than so many others.

First, he had the insight to get in early and the persistence to keep at it. Yes, I mean that the blog’s high productivity probably results, in part, from its age, a factor of much importance in a network, as described by Albert-Lázlo Barabási in Linked: The New Science of Networks [Perseus Publishing 2002].

Second, it is also, in Barabási‘s terms fitter, because it has masses of content and lots of links. Type in “knowledge strategy,” “business narrative” or “storytelling training” into Google and you will find Anecdote on the first page.

More importantly type these terms in with a geographic location such as Melbourne, Canberra or Australia and it’s number one. That this may be a more significant differentiator in Australia than it would be in the US or Europe, because the nearest alternative, outside resources are likely to be a ten-hour plane ride away, does not diminish what Shawn and his colleagues have done. We all must adapt what we do to our local conditions for better or for worse. I mention it because each of us must determine what will make our blogs fit in our market places, meaning we cannot expect to succeed in exactly the way he did, using his approach as a recipe. Remember that Callahan had two blogs prior to this one. That experience undoubtedly helped him make this one fitter from the start. We, too, will have to do some experimenting.

The third reason his blog is so successful has to do not so much with the blog, itself, as it does how Shawn takes inquiries he receives on it and turns them into consulting assignments. Turning an inquiry from someone who has first heard about you on the web into new business costing the client a large sum is a big aspiration for a professional and a bigger increase in commitment than most people buying services are willing to make.

Callahan and his colleagues have addressed this problem by inserting a step between the client making a query on the basis of something read on the blog and asking him to sign for a full-blown consulting engagement.

In my book, Cross-Selling Success, I call this a portal service. In Anecdote’s case, it takes the form of courses that the representative of an organization can attend for a modest fee. During the course, the consultants get to show what they can do and what they would be like to work with. They also learn a lot about the client and its issues. After the client and the consultants take this small step together, both have learned a lot about each other and the client is more likely to sign up The Anecdote team to help them run their own business narrative projects.

It took between two and three years for the blog to evolve into an effective lead generator. It proved valuable in other ways earlier. Shawn praises the discipline it creates to get ideas down on paper and finds it a useful place to store and access ideas and information, a consultant’s stock in trade. Says Callaghan, “I often send links to specific blog posts to clients and prospects to keep in contact and show we care about them and their business.”

It’s not all fun. Like other bloggers, he feels the stress of perpetual demand for content (I can identify with Shawn’s concern: I feel that my blog sits at my feet all day, moaning, “Feed me. Feed me.”)

To address this problem, he has developed a set of posting categories: the quick link and short comment; the mini idea (a couple of paragraphs); the foundational idea (4-10 paragraphs). Assigning ideas he has for posting gives him a sense of how much time he must devote to producing the postings. Keeping his posts short, he can distribute ideas over more days When there is nothing substantial to say, he links to other people’s blogs which not only provides content for his readers, it also increases his social network.

In spite of the demands, Shawn is clearly hooked on blogging. He says, “I really love blogging because the more I think about how things connect, the more connections I make. The blog posts become conversation topics and you are rarely lost for something interesting to say while at the same time you become attentive and mindful for new ideas and perspectives.”

Here are some valuable takeaways from Shawn:

1. A blog is a major commitment, in which a professional will have to invest up to two years before you start seeing a return in the form of new business. I hope that some of my readers can prove me wrong on this, but I doubt it.
2. In addition to time, your blog’s success as a lead generator will depend on its fitness. What constitutes fitness will vary from market to market, but at the very least it means good content frequently posted—and probably the right links to other blogs and sites, as well.
3. Rather than trying to convert a lead generated by the blog into a full-blown client, it is probably better to have a small sample of what you do that clients can try first. A blog, like any other marketing technique, can’t just be glued onto the side of your practice. To be successful, it must be integrated with other things you do.
4. Blogs have many small uses as places to store information and to refer clients and prospective clients who are looking for a bit of information.
5. Blogging is fun and can be addictive.

And, now that I’ve had my jag for the day, I can stop writing. 

*******************************

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

Suzanne Lowe has published the results of her second mini-survey Are PSF Marketing and Business Development Functions Stuck in a Rut? This survey asked if firms were making their marketing and business development functions more strategic.

In her analysis, Suzanne notes “These findings highlight a critical concern for PSFs that are working to evolve their Marketing and Business Development functions: the need to better balance cultural initiatives with formal structural changes.  It appears — at least for these respondents — this isn’t what’s happening.”

Suzanne Lowe consults to professional firms on marketing. Because Harding & Company consults to the same market on sales, our practices naturally complement each other.  Her book (Marketplace Masters: How Professional Service Firms Compete to Win) and her blog (www.expertisemarketing.typepad.com) are must-have resources for marketers of professional services.

Our services don’t neatly abut each other.  Rather, they overlap.  This is hardly surprising given our market.  The distinction between marketing and sales remains murky at most professional firms.  This is complicate by the avoidance of the S-word at many professional firms, where “marketing” is often a euphemism for “selling,” and where the distinction has been complicated further by the injection of the term, “business development” into the mix, at first to replace the S-word.  Since its appearance the meaning of b.d. (as it is commonly abbreviated) has morphed.  Depending on the firm and context, it can now refer to selling, marketing and selling, lead generation or parts of all of these.

All of this makes it impossible for me to avoid meddling in Suzanne’s business.  She tolerates it, as the good soul she is.  So here I go again.

Suzanne is fighting to make the top marketing person (chief marketing officer, if you will, because every function must have a chief these days) as strategic a player in professional firms as is commonly the case at product companies.  She has been joyously stabbing and hacking at this windmill for quite some time: it’s a big windmill and her energy is boundless. 
. 
I would hate to see her give up, because it is a worthy cause.  Her thoughtful analyses, practical experience, and hard work have helped her define the eleven competencies of a competitively-effective professional firm which a CMO is supposed to help them develop.  I don’t question the desirability of getting CMOs to this level, but getting there from here will be a neat trick. That’s because of the four conflicting roles a top marketing person at a professional firm must play if a managing partner is relying on him for serious work.  (The other option is the marketer-as-gopher role, which I abhor as much as Suzanne does.)

The roles are:

• The marketing strategist:  In this role, the marketer conducts research on markets, clients and competitors and serves as a sparring partner and motivator to the managing partner and the marketing committee, if there is one.  This is the role of the expert and deep thinker.  To play this role, the marketer must have resources and access to the managing partner and relevant committee members and practice or studio heads.  To play it successfully she must be seen as an intellectual equal to the partners.                                                  
• The marketing service provider:  In this role, the marketer provides the various partners, practices or studios, with marketing support to their sales and marketing activities.  She takes orders from the heads of teams pursuing specific markets or clients. She and her team help make brochures and other marketing documents, qualifications packages and proposals.  This person and her team must work late into the night on every client submission because the professionals are always late handing in the parts of the documents they are responsible for.  This is a service role in which the marketer must treat the partners as customers.
• The brand and marketing police:  In this role the marketers demand, chide and threaten to keep others in the firm from damaging the firm’s brand. To this end, they read all proposals, press releases and anything that hints at being a marketing document to make sure they don’t hurt the firm or muddy its brand.  It is not a role that endears them to others in the firm.
• An extension of the managing partner:  When a conflict arises and the managing partner must attend two meetings at the same time, she will sometimes send a staffer to represent her at the less important meeting.  In this role of borrowed authority the marketer has substantial power, but must use it adeptly.  If the managing partner feels that her head of marketing makes too many mistakes when representing her, she will stop using him this way.

It is virtually impossible for one person to fill all four roles.  A person can’t be the loyal, marketing service provider working uncomplainingly to 1:00 in the morning because an inconsiderate partner failed to get his portion of a proposal in until just before midnight and then be the tough brand police officer and extension of the managing partner’s power the next morning.

In big firms the problem can be reduced by assigning these functions to different people in the marketing department.  The many small firms don’t have that choice.  The only choice they have is which of the four roles do they most need fillerd.  Unquestionably, that is the thankless job of getting proposals out the door.  That is also the lowest status marketing job, preparing neither the firm nor the proposal polisher for a marketing organization with a strategic role.

When my rainmaker-in-training clients talk about how hard it is to make time for business development, they often complain about the quantity of emails they get. Just throwing most of them away unopened takes time.

During one such discussion, a client named Steve posed the question: how many of the emails that we send out get tossed unopened, especially bulk, direct marketing mailings of whitepapers, newsletters and announcements. The answer: a lot. Just like us, busy clients faced with dozens of emails every day make blink-of-an-eye decisions about what to open and what not with a bias towards not. The busiest people, the c-suite executives we most want to remind of our services, don’t even make this decision themselves. A secretary is likely to trash anything that looks like a bulk mailing, before the boss even sees the notice of its arrival in her inbox.

As Steve noted in answering his own question, it’s important to see the problem from the client’s perspective. That isn’t too hard, because we all receive so much spam and bulk mail everyday. So, why do you open some of this mail and not others? Experience suggests that we are more likely to open emails when the subject line is personalized and provocative.

Our knowledge of many of the people we send emails to gives us an advantage over the spammers. We can often address the recipient by her first name in the subject line, something spammers try, but often lack the knowledge to do. If the recipient’s name is Katherine, and we know that she goes by Kay, rather than Kathy or Kate, we can differentiate our mailing from the spam by using her name in the subject line. As one executive secretary told me, “Everyone likes the sound of his own name.” Personalization also requires that Kay be the only person listed in the address column of your email In some cases we can further personalize the mailing by citing why the material in the mailing is relevant to a specific issue of importance to her. (“Kay, Relevant to Your Richmond Facility?”). If you can’t do that, you can at least make it provocative. (“Kay, Are New Trends in Exec Comp Causing Turnover?”)

I heard today that Steve has used this approach and found that his response rates have improved substantially

Too much success could lead you to using these techniques too often or to use them manipulatively. Two cautions.

1. Beware of deceptions. If you know a prospective client is called “Johnnie” by those who have known him for a long time and “John” by everyone else use the latter in your email. “Johnnie” would imply an intimacy that you don’t have, and a deception, no matter how small, is no way to attract the attention of someone you want to know.