Marketing Professional Services

Michael Roe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136007453
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Marketing Professional Services is a uniquely focused, incisive and practical introduction to new business planning, marketing and selling skills for those in the professional services sector. It is for professionals who have to sell to professionals. Professionals of all types, from accountants and consultants to surveyors and solicitors who have trained in a specific technical skill will understand the power of good clear marketing practice reading this book. If you have to sell yourself and your service to clients this book shows you: * The importance of winning new business in an increasingly competitive, deregulated market * How to plan for winning new business including a full script for cold calls * The techniques, skills and resources required in order to achieve your goals focusing on the three P's of Preparation, Prospection and Persistence Individual chapters provide you with a basic grounding in separate sales and marketing issues - from prospecting and cold canvassing to direct marketing and public relations. The book includes sample interactive conversations and provides a constant source of reference for the professional sales person. It is based on long experience of training in this sector and is a short, practical and appropriate introduction to the key concepts.

Chapter 1 Winning new business — your duty

DOI: 10.4324/9780080938912-1

The lion and the gazelle — a new business parable

Every morning in Africa a gazelle wakes up.

It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.

Every morning in Africa a lion wakes up.

It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.

So it doesn't matter whether you're a lion or a gazelle, in new business …

WHEN THE SUN COMES UP, YOU'D BETTER START RUNNING!

Attributed to Sanders Consulting, 1992

It's a jungle out there! Working in professional services, you may see yourself as being above the life or death struggle of sales, being a ‘purveyor’ of professional expertise rather than a ‘seller’ of services … but nothing could be further from the truth. Unless you win (read, sell) new business you will die like the gazelle or starve like the lion.

My book aims to provide you with life-preserving skills, hopefully lifeenhancing ones too. It is based on the premise that new business is the lifeblood of all commercial activity, no less so in professional services. And it stresses that the duty of getting this new business is yours. If your job description includes the words ‘ new business’, ‘business/practice development’, or ‘marketing’, then there can be no doubt about the book's relevance to you. But whatever your job involves — fee earner/consultant/partner — you are billings and profit responsible and it is vital that you start now to commit to business generation. You and your firm's business life depend on it, so you cannot avoid your duty.

My aim is to help you generate lots of new business (as a solus activity or alongside servicing existing clients) … in other words, to sell successfully. But I am not a salesman myself. I am a professional servicing the marketing industry, like you the reader, I am a professional selling to other professionals. What I am is a professional who has been bitten by the new business bug and who determined some time ago to pursue my objective using a little less luck and rather more skill.

Professional skill. Because the objective is to add a third professional element into the equation: to professionally sell professional services to other professionals. The noun ‘salesperson’ doesn't sit comfortably in this context — but the verb ‘sell’ must never be avoided. No salesperson, however brilliant at his or her craft, could ever replace you in front of the client, because he or she would not possess the professional qualities that remain vital in the above situation, namely in-depth professional services training, skill, experience, and knowledge. You do not sell from a rate card. The client expects to talk to you as an equal in professional competence. In fact, the people to whom you're selling are so similar to you that in many cases the roles could be, or already have been, reversed. Sellers switch to being buyers and vice versa all the time.

You may not wish to be a salesperson, considering yourself a practitioner, but you should not be snobbish about the salesperson's skills. They are finely honed and you would be foolish to ignore them … just as you would be foolish not to apply them without some sensitivity as to the professional nature of your prospect (you are not a double-glazing salesperson) … just as you would expect to add them to other professional marketing skills, some of which may be your own basic stock in trade: advertising, PR, direct marketing, etc.

Those already in marketing are familiar with the fact that most of the classic mnemonics start with ‘P’; the same applies to the winning of new business. In fact, there are three Ps here: prepare; prospect; present. By employing all the above-mentioned skills, this is what you should achieve — lead generation, appointment getting, and then arriving face to face with the prospective client. Not surprisingly therefore, the core Chapters 5 and 6 of this book focus on prospection and cold canvassing, the centre of the new business process.

Why should the face-to-face presentation be so vital? Well, what you are selling is an intangible, a service. And when it comes to selling intangible products, or indeed product intangibles, there is one guru. He is Ted Levitt of Harvard Business School from whom two quotes are relevant:

‘the product will be judged in part by who offers it’ ‘people use appearances to make judgements about realities’

Harvard Business Review, May-June 1981

What this makes clear is that you are the tangible representation of your service, the main judgement criterion. All the rest is trust — you are the reality on which the prospect will have to make his or her judgement. As well as representing your agency/consultancy/partnership, you also differentiate it — you are the most distinctive element, the unique feature. So, you must present yourself to the prospect along with your service.

Halting a moment on this issue of ‘trust’. A US consultancy, Synectics Inc., has spent a considerable time determining what impacts on trust. In fact they have developed a formula for it:

It is the correlation between ‘intimacy’ and trust that is particularly relevant here. It confirms the need for the face-to-face interaction that forms the core of this book. ‘Credibility’ can be built through other marketing activities, ‘risk’ is related to the spend of the client and so usually out of your control (although the plus point for professional services is that often a low cost trial of your organization is possible before a major commitment is necessary.)

This book will, however, cover the full range of sales and marketing tools available to you. Their employment (or deployment) will be based on your own specific new business needs evaluation coupled with marketplace judgement. A full-time commitment is recommended (from its earliest days, the original Saatchi and Saatchi Advertising Agency had always used a dedicated team working on new business which did not divide its time with another job.)

Can you/your firm afford this? It may not always be possible, particularly in the case of a very small consultancy. But full time or part time one thing is clear — you will need to devote quality time to new business. Because always remember — investment will be rewarded. A skilled and effective prospector/ cold canvasser should return gross margin equivalent to well over three times his or her total costs.

And enthusiasm. It is only through a combination of skill and commitment that you will be successful, only through this combination that you will overcome the basic fear of selling. Make no mistake — it is really fear that produces what masquerades as superiority over the lowly salesperson; fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of raising your head over the parapet and shouting ‘ buy me!’.

Philip Kleinman, reporting in ADMAP magazine on a meeting of the Association of British Market Research Companies (ABMRC), noted:

‘an interesting question put to the audience was how many of their research agencies employed someone whose principal job was getting new business. Out of 28 firms, only 5 said they did’.

So why not take inspiration from some people who can be admired without reservation for their professional skills, and yet who placed equal emphasis on selling skills. They are drawn from the world of advertising, and represent three generations of success within that world, from the classic ad man, David Ogilvy, via the next generation Saatchis (first time round), on to the 1990s new wave, Rupert Howell of HHCL.

Ogilvy: ‘Tour first duty is to get new business.’

Saatchi: ‘Our new business department is the account handling department of all the clients we don't yet work for.’

Howell: ‘There is no magic (new business) formula — just a system, energy, and resources.’

Campaign, February 1991

Why did these ultimate professionals place so much emphasis on the selling function? Could it be that they all appreciated the ‘leaky bucket’ theory of running a service business?

Your business can be represented by this leaky bucket; your objective being to keep the bucket full of water (read, business), indeed full to overflowing, the overflow representing profit, the water level representing work-in-progress. But the bucket has a hole in the bottom. Try as you may, you cannot completely plug this hole. It does not necessarily represent unhappy clients. There is a multitude of reasons why today's live client becomes tomorrow's lapsed client: budget cuts, absence of suitable briefs, personnel changes, etc. There are a number of ways you can attempt to reduce the diameter of the leak: contractual business, client maintenance programmes (see Chapter 11), etc. Yet there is one unavoidable solution: opening the tap above the bucket and letting the new business flow in, continuously.

The danger is to see this as a short-term measure — a quick fix (see Chapter 3, item 2). If you truly believe in new business then you will realize that the only way to proceed is to consider every existing client as vulnerable and new business as a constant need. Your working hypothesis will be:

‘however busy I am today, I must sell now for tomorrow.’

Wait until you are less busy, with time available for selling, and by definition you'll be too late; by the time your emergency actions take effect, you'll be out of business.

When reviewing the sad decline of Colletts Advertising Agency, John Spearman was quoted by Campaign magazine as follows:

‘In my day, we anticipated a loss of 20 to 25 per cent of billings a year, and therefore we needed new business. You are foolish if you do not work on that assumption’

Campaign, March 1992

Your client base is fluid. Probably, like my own analysis year on year, your client tracking will reveal two crucial facts:

1. one-third of last year's top twenty clients are not in this year's top twenty;
2. year on year, 10 per cent of clients disappear from your list, 40 per cent spend less than before, 50 per cent spend more, so it is the new business alone that drives growth.

What greater incentive than this sort of analysis can there be to drive home the selling message? The need is clear, the skills available (read on!) — but is there a motif, a commonality that distinguishes selling marketing services from other kinds of selling?

In my view there is, and it can be simply represented.

All clients think they have unique problems, are special and as a result they buy ‘a la carte, only rarely off the shelf, because they're looking for their own solutions.

The professional services supplier understands this and has the answer:

‘I can help!’ This is the motif that permeates every page of this book — ‘your problems are unique, my solutions are customized/tailored to meet your needs.’ After all, if I canno...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• To the prospective reader
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• How to use this book
• 1 Winning new business — your duty
• 2 The role of marketing inside a professional services organization
• 3 Running a successful new business programme
• 4 The elements of business development
• 5 Getting there! Prospection
• 6 Being there! Cold canvass presenting and pitching
• 7 PR
• 8 Advertising
• 9 Direct marketing
• 10 Print material
• 11 Keeping the customers happy
• 12 A view from the other side
• 13 Researching your market
• 14 Next steps — Putting the skills into practice