Win More.

We talk about your competitive edge a lot.  It’s in our tagline, our brand promise.  Ever wonder what we’re talking about?  How about an example:  think about increasing your proposal win-rate and getting a higher return on your time invested in proposals.  Now that’s an edge over the competition!  So let’s talk details - take a look at our five sure-fire ways to improve proposals and increase win-rates:

1.       Start with the prospect’s needs – don’t even begin writing the proposal until you have a meeting, phone conversation, or at the very least an email exchange to make sure you know what the prospect is looking for, including both services needed and desired service attributes.  Start your proposal document by restating these needs - you’ll set your proposal apart from the others and let the prospect know you’re listening!

2.       Talk benefits – many of us in the professional services industry love to talk about what we do.  How effective is that in proposals if your prospects don’t understand what’s in it for them?  Of course you have to describe how you’ll meet the prospect’s needs, but don’t stop there – state clearly what result you will bring to the prospect, what will improve in their business, what problems you will solve for them.  And even better?  Quantify the benefits you’ll deliver when at all possible. 

3.       Differentiate – ever notice when you’re looking at your competitors’ Web sites how similar they all sound?  It can be tough to differentiate in a competitive market, but if you don’t…you’re competing on price and price alone.  What makes you the right choice for the prospect?  What are your strengths vis-à-vis your competitors’ vulnerabilities?  Don’t be afraid to point these out directly – but professionally – in your proposal.

4.       Deliver the proposal in person – Don’t email, mail, or even just drop off your proposal if at all possible.  Schedule a face-to-face meeting with your prospect to go through the document and highlight the important elements – this is the only way to make sure your prospect sees all those benefits and differentiators you worked so hard to incorporate!

5.       Follow up – If the decision date passes, don’t give up.  Continue to follow up, offering to help with the decision process or answer any questions that have arisen.  The extra effort will let your prospect know they’d be an important client to your firm and just might tip the decision in your favor.

How Much is Too Much?

I was surprised to learn that a friend of mine had recently changed jobs. He, in turn, was surprised that I hadn’t heard.

“I posted it on LinkedIn yesterday.”

And, indeed, when I looked back through THREE PAGES of older posts I finally saw the indication that he had changed positions. I also checked the digest of my Linked in network activity; it was listed as one of about eight items at the very bottom of a page I had to scroll, scroll, scroll down to find. Past all the updates of the great business books people are reading, past the twitter feeds, past the same blog link posted by three different people at the same company.

As I started thinking about it, I wondered how much information is too much information. What is the right frequency of contributing information in a medium that moves at the speed of light? I had missed something really important, something I really would like to have seen, because it was displaced by so many other pieces of information.

Let me just state that I don’t have a huge network of people. I think I just recently topped 100 connections, and even that seems like too many. How can I possibly keep track of all that information?

There are tools to help manage all the information posted, tweeted, re-tweeted, whose updates you see, whose you don’t. But if I use these settings to hide everything from certain connections, I have to ask myself, why are we connected in the first place?

If I could make one plea to the users of online communication tools, it would be this: Please don’t post for the sake of posting. I call these random acts of posting, and if you are doing it you risk becoming such a part of the landscape that even people you know will stop paying attention to you. You don’t have to share information about your reading list, travel plans, and daily routine just to stay top of mind. The more you do this, the more likely I am to tune you out.

Conversely, there are certain people to whom I ALWAYS pay attention (assuming I see them amid all the junk) because they post so infrequently that if they are making an effort I know it is important. If you have made social media part of your personal business development activity you want to be one of these people. What is the right frequency? I say a couple times a week.

Something else I learned--if you have important information you want people who are professionally important to you to see, make the effort to contact them directly. Send a quick email. Make a short phone call. Mail a note. But don’t assume the world is paying attention to you online 24/7.

A Friendly Reminder about Marketing Budgets

You need one.

Ok, so maybe that wasn’t as friendly as you might have imagined based on the title of this post. But seriously, you need a marketing budget.

Why, you may ask? After all you’ve been getting by ok without one. You’re still marketing. Last year you sponsored 25 different golf holes at 20 different outings (those 5 overlaps were due to an unfortunate lack of internal communication). You have people out networking in the community and serving on boards. You take your clients to lunch and got a sweet deal on your yellow pages advertising. Last year your firm offered a couple of seminars and sent out a few letters. And maybe you even are investing in an email newsletter. Of course, you don't really know if any of this stuff works, but at least you're doing it, right?

So if you have all this activity going on, why do you need a marketing budget?

Here are five reasons:

1. Control spending. The fundamental purpose of a marketing budget is to give firms control over their marketing spending. A budget enables firms to put aside a set amount of money that they would like to invest in growth and manage the way that money is spent each year. It precludes the open checkbook policy that causes firms to end up spending too much (or in many cases, too little) on marketing and sales activities.

2. Avoid random and ad-hoc marketing activities. Creating an effective budget requires some marketing planning to take advantage of the best opportunities for growth. This ensures marketing dollars are being spent in a manner that supports your firm’s growth strategy. Without a budget and this forethought, firms often struggle to reign in their spending. These same firms almost always find themselves engaging in one-off marketing activities that may or may not support a firm’s vision for growth.

3. Leverage investments. A by-product of developing a marketing budget is the ability to leverage marketing investments by creating activities that support each other. For example, investing in an advertisement in an industry journal can also support an investment in telephone lead generation that is also focused on that industry segment.

4. Measure results. Without a marketing budget it is impossible to measure the return your firm is generating from its marketing investments. Measuring results is critical in determining which activities you should continue to implement, and on which activities your firm should not waste your people’s time or firm’s money.

5. Ensure the proper balance between marketing and sales. Firms need to implement the right mix of marketing and sales activities to be successful in meeting their growth goals. By evaluating your firm’s marketing budget you can get a feel for how your firm’s business development efforts are divided among marketing, transition and sales activities to make sure the mix is appropriate based on your firm’s goals.

Yes, five awesome reasons you need a marketing budget. What are you waiting for? Don't know where to start? Visit our website to learn how we can help.

Boring concept. Big payoff.

Last month we posted about the importance of database maintenance—with some guidelines on effective data management.  We made the point that most companies realize they need to segment their target market, but "segmentation" goes beyond just identifying the type of companies you want to target. Not flashy, but pretty darn important.

Shortly after we posted our commentary, we came across a cool report by ITSMA and the good folks at RainToday.com* that details the lead generation best practices of high performing companies. The report is full of great strategies and tactics you can employ to generate more leads and get a higher return on your marketing investments.

Among other things, the report found that the highest performing companies take segmentation a few steps further to figure out the title of the decision maker(s) for their services, and the names of those individuals at each company.

This finding is in complete alignment with our experience.

We've really seen those additional steps make a tangible difference in direct marketing campaigns.  We worked with a client who was skeptical about investing the time and budget to research the names of individuals at their target list of companies. Like many firms, they thought they had a pretty clean list already. But, they were willing to test the scrubbing process. So we divided their list in half. On one half we called to update contact names. The other half we used “as-is”.

The "scrubbed" list produced 2.5 times more appointments (qualified leads), and the total cost per appointment was 50% lower, even with the added cost of scrubbing the list!

So, yeah, we scrubbed the rest of their database before embarking on their year-long lead generation program.

This is just one highlight of what can be found in this great study.  Click here to find out how you can get access to the full report. 

* Lead Generation Benchmark Report: How the Best Firms Fill the Pipeline, 2010 ITSMA & RainToday.com

Building Your Brand in 30-Seconds or Less

In professional services, it can be difficult to differentiate among firms that offer (from the buyer’s perspective anyway) the same service. After all, you all subscribe to the same credentialing programs. You follow the same set of professional practice standards. You all do quality work. On the surface—your firms all appear the same.

During the course of consulting with a firm it’s common for us to ask professionals at various levels (staff, associates, managers, partners, etc.) as well at those with different aptitudes for business development, “why should companies work with you?” Inevitably, we receive as many different answers from professionals within the same firm as individuals we ask.

Most of your firm’s branding is done through your people. Your professionals interact regularly with clients, prospects, referral sources, and even the media. If each of those individuals is telling a different story about what makes your firm great, how effectively will your firm’s brand be built? Branding is about message consistency. And if you’re inconsistent you are squandering your firm’s branding opportunities.

One of the best branding investments your firm can make is to develop a 30-second speech. A 30-second speech is your firm’s answer to the question “tell me what you do”. It consists of standard talking points that everyone in the firm should know and practice. The purpose is to ensure when employees from your firm interact with someone in the community they all talk about your firm’s brand the same way.

Talking points include:

·         Who your firm serves (target market)

·         What business issues your firm helps solve

·         Benefits of working with your firm

·         What makes your firm different

Any facts you introduce about your firm should include a response to “why is that important to a client?”

Once your firm has this useful tool in place, leaders in the firm should present the talking points to everyone, and let everyone practice delivering the points in their own style. Remember, it’s a 30-second speech—so the guideline should be that answers are short and succinct. Practice is important to both keeping it short and making it sound natural. The 30-second speech can also be the basis for all your firm’s other branding materials—brochures, advertisements, website content, etc. This consistency, over time, will help the market understand why you’re the best choice to meet their needs.

And, it all starts with 30-seconds or less.

The most neglected part of your business development strategy

I received an email from LinkedIn recently with a subject line indicating that nearly a third of the contacts in my network changed jobs in 2010. It got me to thinking about the most critical and neglected component of most firms' business development strategy—database management.

Your database may contain all the companies that reside in your geographic footprint. If so, you must use your defined target market criteria to zero in on those companies that would be the best fit for your firm as clients based on industry, size, ownership, etc. But that's only step one.

The mantra of professional services firms is: "Ours’ is a relationship business". Does a relationship happen between entities? I have a mortgage, but when I need something I don’t call “the bank”. I call Dave. When Dave left the bank, I moved my business with him.

Your database should contain updated information about the individuals at the companies you would most like to have as clients. And maybe not just one individual, but several who play different roles in the decision to hire your firm—influencer, decision maker, gatekeeper, etc. That's step two.

Now, consider the fact that those individuals are not static. They don’t stay where they’re supposed to, and if you look away roughly a third of them (by my admittedly unscientific measurement) may take off on you. How can we prevent this from raining on our business development parade? More importantly, how can we use this as a business development opportunity?

If your list is already out of date – meaning you haven’t made any efforts to clean it up in, say, the past six months—a good exercise is to have someone call each company and ask if CFO is still the CFO, the CEO is still the CEO, etc. Make these changes and add any new contacts you discover to the list. Yep, that's step three.

Within the target list, you probably have a handful or two of individuals that you would like to get to know on a deeper level—and who you would really, really like to land as clients.

Social media (as we have recently discovered) can be an excellent tool to help keep this targeted prospect list updated. When you receive those messages indicating that someone in your network has updated his/her profile—don’t ignore it. As a matter of fact it’s a good idea to check in on your network at least a couple times a week to make sure you don’t miss anything. If you see someone has changed positions post a congratulatory note on their profile. Better yet, call him or her with congratulations and offer to find out more about the new position and employer over lunch. And don’t forget to update your firm’s marketing database with any new contact information. Steps four, five, six, etc...

If your targeted prospect leaves it’s not only important to follow that person, but also to make sure you know who his or her replacement is. You can probably find this out by a quick phone call to the company’s receptionist.

Promotions within the same company can be treated similarly. Ask this person how their role has changed. Are they overseeing any new areas? Do they have additional decision making authority? Again, makes sure your list is updated internally—especially titles. Receiving something in the mail that doesn’t acknowledge his/her accomplishment is pretty off-putting to a lot of people.

All business development efforts, whether virtual or not, are fundamentally dependent on keeping your data updated. Implementing a few of these ideas will profoundly improve the results of your business development efforts.

Five Trends for the New Year

On the heels of 2011 – here are our predictions for five business development trends among professional service firms in the New Year:

1.       Specialization will continue. With the development of new technologies, the abundance of information available to consumers and the marketplace becoming more and more crowded, successful firms will continue down the path of niche development and specialization. What will be the key to these firms’ success? Developing and communicating a clear definition of specialization within the organization and aligning all other operational facets—training, client assignments, marketing, lead generation and results tracking—with that.

2.       Firms will continue to incorporate social media and other electronic tools into their business development activities, but the most successful firms will achieve a balance between electronic communications and face-to-face/phone activity.

3.       Strategic growth planning will become a higher priority for firms who are serious about growth. The not-so-distant past’s recession has caused many firms to re-evaluate their growth activities, emphasizing those areas that have proven successful and de-emphasizing those that have not. The most aggressive firms will continue to look at diversification opportunities for the long term.

4.       Firms will continue to focus on client service. If the past year has taught us nothing else, it’s taught us that our client relationships are not to be squandered in lieu of chasing the “next big thing”. Management teams that build a clear process and vision for how the firm serves its clients, including accountability and measurement, will enable their firms to demonstrate a clear competitive advantage over those that do not.

5.       More and more firms will explore ways to get everyone in the firm involved in business development—both as succession strategy for partners and as a way to ramp up revenue. With training and specific tweaks to the way staff, managers and partners do their jobs, these firms will experience expediential growth results.

All our best to you in the New Year!