Professional Services Marketing Part 2

Have each person share his or her story with the leadership team. Are your goals in alignment? Where are you at odds? Use these stories as the backdrop as you go through your marketing planning process.

Phase 2: Marketing and Revenue Audit Before you can decide how marketing is going to support your growth goals, you need to know the current state of your marketing efforts. You need to know where your clients and revenue came from in previous years so you can plan where it can and wil come from in the next year.

Marketing audits can be simple or complex, depending on your situation. A multi-office firm may break the audit down by regions and/or practice areas. A smal er firm can usual y put al its information into one audit. In any event, what you need to know is the same no matter your firm's size or complexity.

Menu of questions to ask: Revenue Audit.

1. Where did our revenue come from last year? What divisions? What practices? What services?

2. Did new clients usual y begin with one particular service and then migrate elsewhere into the firm?

3. Do different market segments buy different services from us? Which ones? Where are the overlaps and opportunities for cross-sel ing and marketing?

4. What was the volume of repeat business versus new business?

5. Where did our new business come from (lead sources)?

6. Why did we lose the clients we lost? (And can we be brutal y honest with ourselves about this?) 7. Why did we lose the new business opportunities we lost? (Get everyone in the habit of finding out the real answers.) 8. Given the company's growth goals, where wil the revenue come from next year? (No one knows this answer for certain. Don't be afraid to take a guess.) Marketing Audit.

1. What is the status of our database?

2. How wel are we known in our target markets? How strong is our brand?

3. Does our messaging currently serve us wel ? Wil it serve us wel for the areas in which we want to grow?

4. Are we better known for certain offerings, specialties, geographies, or industries than others? Are they what we want to be known for?

5. How have we segmented our markets? How have we performed in the various segments?

6. How wel do we sustain our lead generation and marketing efforts?

7. What worked and what didn't last year in our lead generation campaigns? Do we have something that worked wel ? (Do more.) That didn't work at al ? (Stop doing it.) That the jury is stil out about? (Have patience, but know what you are measuring.) 8. Have our target markets shifted in buying patterns or preferences?

9. Has the nature of our compet.i.tion changed? If so, how?

10. Is our value proposition resonating overal ? In specific target areas?

11. Do we have any special marketing a.s.sets (white papers, thought pieces, presentations) we can begin to leverage, continue to leverage, or get more out of?

12. Did any specific service launches or initiatives work wel or not work as wel as they could have? Why? Why not?

13. Do we have any external market data or internal research that wil affect how we approach our service offerings, growth potential, or marketing tactics going forward?

14. Is market share important to us? If so, where do we stand? (Note: Market share isn't usual y important for service firms. See Maxim 5 in Chapter 13.) 15. What other marketing efforts worked? What didn't work? Did we implement wel ?

Phase 3: Brainstorming.

You should include al stakeholders in any brainstorming process; but in services firms fil ed with smart people, al of whom wil have an opinion on marketing, it is even more critical. At the end of the process you want people to be on board with the plan.

The menu of questions to ask depends on your situation but can include virtualy any of the other questions outlined in this chapter. The purpose is to generate ideas and leave no stone unturned that could be a difference maker.

"With professional services firms, investment in marketing seems like a good idea in the beginning of the year. Then, as bonus time approaches, they cut back because the investment comes out of the leaders' pockets. By July they're doing nothing because the senior partners aren't fully bought into the long-term investment in marketing."

-Mike Sheehan, CEO, Hill Holliday.

Phase 4: a.n.a.lysis and a.s.sumptions.

After brainstorming, identify where the opportunities truly lie. You have your business objectives. You have ideas. Now generate scenarios of different marketing strategies and paths. Evaluate the pluses and minuses of each path.

Ask yourself what wil happen if it works and what won't happen if it doesn't work. Then look at the strategies in aggregate, asking how they wil work together (or not) to produce the results you need. Employ heuristics: Switch scenarios around, add and remove budgets and resources, add and remove tactics.

Menu of questions to ask:.

1. What is the potential for improvement in our current marketing and sales processes? Why do we think that's the case? What are the details here?

2. If we employed [insert marketing tactic here], what effect would that have on our success?

3. If we didn't employ [insert marketing tactic here], what wouldn't happen that we want to happen?

4. What would happen if we employed [insert marketing tactic here] that works for other firms?

5. What radical, outside-the-norm ideas do we have?

6. Where are the best opportunities we can take advantage of?

7. What opportunities look good but, in the end, aren't likely to work because we just won't get them done?

8. What are the most successful firms in our field doing? Should we do something similar? Should we do something different? What aren't they doing that we can do?

9. What are the most successful companies outside of our field doing? Can we apply what they do and thus be innovative in our field?

10. Are our marketing and sales (or business development or rainmaking) processes working together to produce the best results?

11. How long might it take for results to materialize? Based on what a.s.sumptions?

12. How wil we know if it's working? What do we need to measure? What wil be difficult to measure but we stil believe is essential?

13. Is there any low-hanging fruit that we can immediately address to either fix glaring problems or get fast results?

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."

-Albert Einstein.

Phase 5: Straw Man Plan.

Put together the highlights of a plan, including al parts relevant to your business-growth goals, tactics, budget, compet.i.tive a.n.a.lysis, responsibilities, expected outcomes, time frames, and so on. It could be one page, or it could be thirty. This wil depend on your need for detail; complexity of the organization (i.e., number of service lines, geographies, industry specialties, nature of compet.i.tion, etc.); and organizational expectations. Take care, however, to be able to summarize it al in a page or two, or on a slide or two. You must have something to look at so you can say, "Al together, this is what we're up to. Everything else is just the detail of how we'l get it al done."

Your straw man plan should include an a.n.a.lysis of the budget and expectations of outcomes. From here, you can make adjustments, see what happens with different scenarios, and get feedback from important stakeholders.

DON'T SPARE THE STRAW MAN.

A straw man is an argument (or person or doc.u.ment) that serves as a stand-in to be picked at, knocked down, and eventual y replaced by a final version. As you put forth your straw man plan, give explicit instructions to your col eagues to poke holes in it. The final plan wil be that much stronger for it; and when you rol out the final plan, your ability to defend it wil be stronger as wel .

Phase 6: Final Plan and Adoption.

Put forth a final plan, and gain commitments you need for budget and resources. Rol the plan out to important stakeholders within the company and communicate with al who wil have a role in the plan implementation.

Menu of questions to ask:.

1. Are we prepared to implement this plan?

2. Are we prepared to implement it wel ?

3. Final y, and possibly most important, does everyone agree that we want to press on to reach our revenue goal (even though we might have stated it earlier), and do we have commitment (not just compliance or lip-service agreement) from the leadership and our team to do whatever they can to help us get there?

REAL COMMITMENT OR JUST GOOD INTENTIONS?.

One law firm invites us to their office annual y to help them get marketing moving at the firm. Each year, they agree, "This is the year we make it happen!" The partners get excited. The team ral ies around going to market more aggressively. Then, each year, the managing partner states at the eleventh hour, "I don't believe in marketing. Let's get started slowly. How about a letter to a few dozen companies we'd like to work with?" Three years later that letter is yet to be mailed. We keep talking to them out of curiosity, waiting to see if something changes. So far, it hasn't happened.

Phase 7: Implementation.

As you implement, make sure you are constantly looking to evaluate better alternatives, to alter the plan to chase successes and discontinue fruitless efforts, and to take advantage of opportunities that may arise during the year.

The entire planning process often takes two weeks to three months, depending on any number of factors. It can take longer if your firm is very large and you're constantly building and refining marketing plans; but it shouldn't take longer because of organizational barriers, indecisiveness, or lack of energy and effort. Try to keep it as contained as possible.

Keep in mind that these seven phases are not always mutualy exclusive. For example, you may get a revenue goal from the company (phase 1), devise a revenue growth scenario (phase 5), and then go back to phase 2 and move forward from there. Your company may not announce a revenue goal until December 15 (or it may never announce one), but you might need to a.s.sume one in November so you can build the plan and recalibrate it when the actual number comes out.

It's also quite possible that marketing plans can drive the revenue goal. Perhaps through your brainstorming and planning, you build a plausible scenario that can add significantly to revenue. The possibilities for this are more available than most firms think.

If you have multiple divisions and practice areas, you should consider bottom-up budgeting and planning. Let the strategic business unit (SBU) or practice heads build a plan they can believe in, and then calibrate with them as al plans come in. If you do this, take care to standardize budget and other planning templates so you can easily rol them up.

Two Helpful Tools.

We've created two tools to help readers of Professional Services Marketing build their marketing plans.

The Budget Planning Tool is a simple Excel spreadsheet built to help you: * Lay out your marketing tactics so you can see your overal mix.

* Visualize when during the year your firm wil employ each marketing tactic.

* Visualize the budget for each tactic.

The Marketing and Sales Funnel a.n.a.lysis Tool is an Excel spreadsheet built to help you make a.s.sumptions with the seven levers described in Chapter 4. With it you can determine how many leads you need to generate and how many you need to close to reach your overal growth goals.

The tool al ows you to take your current lead generation metrics and see how changes, such as adding more leads, closing more deals from those leads, and changing your client retention rate, wil make a difference in revenue generation from year to year.

The tool calculates the five-year revenue implications of increasing your leads, close rates, retention rates, and referral rates. The data are presented in seven helpful charts and graphs.

This tool wil help you to: * Plan your revenue.

* Justify your lead generation budget and efforts.

* Determine where you need to invest your marketing dol ars (whether it be sales training, lead generation, customer referral programs, or somewhere else).

* Calculate the lifetime revenue of your customers.

* Establish your metrics (average revenue per customer, close ratios, client loyalty, etc.).

* Forecast return on investment (ROI) for both individual marketing campaigns and your overal marketing plan.

* Create real and meaningful new client-generation goals.

To download these tools, visit www.whilsgroup.com/booktools.

3.

Keys to Building a Terrible Marketing Strategy.

Man, how can a guy miss what's been right in front of him all this time?

-Bizarro.

Over the years we've worked with many professional service firm leaders to build marketing plans that wil work wel for them. There must, however, be a secret primer out there on how to build terrible marketing strategies for professional services firms. During the past two decades we've come across so many marketing strategies that have failed for similar reasons that we figure everyone must be in the know and we have simply been left out of the loop.

After much research to find the source, the secret codex stil eludes us. So, we feel compeled to seize this moment for posterity and codify the process of building terrible marketing strategies.

Here goes:.

Build the Strategy from the Top Down.

Question: In a ham and eggs breakfast, what's the difference between the pig and the chicken?

Answer: The chicken was compliant, but the pig was committed.

Nothing turns off partners, division leaders, and other leadership types more than being handed a strategy and told to "Make it happen." Force-feed the strategies from on high, and you're likely to get compliance, but rarely commitment. Practice leaders may take the strategy and run with it, perhaps even put a bit of effort and sweat into it, yet they can and frequently do walk away at the first sign of trouble.

Without going through the process of crafting the strategies and tactics themselves-brainstorming possibilities, performing what-if a.n.a.lyses, researching best practices, and backtracking when suggested actions don't seem likely to work-the team's dedication to implementation wil be weak.

Once the tactics feel burdensome to implement, or at the first sign that senior management isn't going to hold the team's feet to the fire, implementation grinds to a standstil . Nothing makes a terrible strategy more terrible than one doomed to be ignored or, at best, tolerated by the team members responsible for making it a success.

Don't Consult with Expert Tacticians.

Just as devastating as a top-down strategy is a strategy built without input from experts deeply knowledgeable about the underlying marketing and business development tactics. When you identify your specific tactics-even if the tactics are largely decent choices for a successful marketing strategy-without talking with people who have serious, relevant experience, the actual outcome wil probably differ from the one you envision.