Summary: Professional Services Marketing

Review and Analysis of Schultz and Doerr's Book

BusinessNews Publishing

• Publisher: Must Read Summaries
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9782511019726
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

The must-read summary of Mike Schultz and John Doerr's book: `Professional Services Marketing: How the Best Firms Build Premier Brands, Thriving Lead Generation Engines, and Cultures of Business Development Success`.

This complete summary of the ideas from Mike Schultz and John Doerr's book `Professional Services Marketing` states that, at one time, professional services firms could grow steadily on the strength of repeat business and client referrals alone. However, it is likely that those days are gone forever. In their book, the authors explain that these firms need to use smart and engaging marketing in order to grow, and get proactive about bringing a steady stream of new clients into your business on an ongoing basis. This summary provides five key areas that need to be covered to grow a professional services firm today and how to approach them.

Added-value of this summary:
• Save time
• Understand key concepts
• Expand your knowledge

To learn more, read `Professional Services Marketing` and discover the key to growing a professional services firm in today's market.

Summary of Professional Services Marketing (Mike Schultz and John Doerr)

1. Marketing

Create a customized marketing and growth strategy

When you market effectively, you create four desirable outcomes for your professional services firm:

• You generate new conversations with potential buyers.
• You increase the odds you will win new clients.
• You end up generating more revenue per engagement.
• You enhance your firm’s reputation to potential new talent.

All four of these outcomes are obviously desirable and therefore marketing should be something which is happening all the time rather than just whenever a business downturn arises.

Marketing is essential for any business which hopes to grow and prosper. In particular, marketing can achieve four desirable and measurable outcomes:

1. Marketing can generate new conversations with potential buyers – it can expand the pool of potential clients you’re targeting. Marketing should be generating worthwhile leads on a regular basis and thereby be expanding your client pool.
2. Good marketing will improve your odds of winning new client engagements – it will make it easier for prospective clients to respond positively to your proposals. People will move forward with engagements because they know about your company and have a degree of confidence you’ll do what you say you will do. Marketing can also position your firm as the thought leader in your industry which can be very helpful.
3. Marketing can lead to higher revenue and higher fees – by increasing the amount of business existing clients and new clients do with you. When you’re both adding new clients and increasing the size of the deals simultaneously, geometric growth can be generated for your firm. This may be a matter of putting together value-added packages of products and services or it may be more cross-selling other services. Marketing can be used to do both.
4. Solid marketing can enhance your firm’s visibility with the new talent you want to hire in the future – it can establish your firm as a highly desirable place to work. Ongoing marketing makes it easier for you to recruit good people and retain their services. Better-known firms are often perceived as industry leaders and therefore more desirable places to work than no-name firms.

To achieve these four outcomes, you have to proactively plan your marketing programs rather than allowing things to happen by accident. A workable marketing planning process for professional service firms typically has seven stages or phases:

1. Align your marketing with your firm’s overall goals – so it doesn’t happen in isolation. The starting point should be: “What are our firm’s revenue and growth goals?” Once that is decided, marketing can then come in at the appropriate level.
2. Look at the current state of your marketing – what’s working effectively and what is not. Basically here you determine where your current revenues are coming from and how much of that business is the direct result of your current marketing.
3. Brainstorm – new marketing ideas and approaches with all stakeholders. Get everyone onboard with what needs to happen in order to move your firm forwards.
4. Test your assumptions – and identify where the opportunities truly lie. Evaluate the pluses and minuses of each potential marketing approach and look at how the various ideas will come together. Do fine tuning in an effort to make your marketing mix the best it can be. Don’t forget to also look for low-hanging fruit you can access immediately to good effect.
5. Write a one-page summary of your proposed marketing plan – with the budget and your anticipated outcomes. Step back and ask: “Does this make sense?” Share the summary with everyone and ask them to pick holes in your plan, make suggestions and give their ideas for enhancements. Be very inclusive in this once over.
6. Flesh out your final detailed marketing plan – and then gain commitments for the budget and resources which will be required to make it happen. Explain the plan to all important stakeholders and seek their commitment. Share the plan with everyone who has hands-on involvement in making it happen.
7. Implement – get your marketing plan happening while at the same time keeping an eye out for better alternatives and opportunities.

The entire marketing planning process could take anything from two weeks to three months to complete - depending on how your firm makes decisions and how it is structured. To keep things moving forward, you might try and run a few of the phases in parallel at the same time rather than sticking to a strictly sequential time frame. If ...

Table of contents

• Title page
• Book Presentation
• Summary of Professional Services Marketing (Mike Schultz and John Doerr)
• About the Summary Publisher
• Copyright