Professional Services Marketing Part 9

Attributes of Similarity Attributes of similarity are things about your firm or services that are similar to other offerings or options in the market.

A quick study of the "about us" pages on the web sites of the big-four accounting firms reveals a number of emphasized key messages that are largely the same across al four firms.

ATTRIBUTES OF SIMILARITY SHARED BY BIG-FOUR ACCOUNTING FIRMS.

Depending on your type of firm, target market, and service set, certain key messages are necessary components to play the game. At the very least they are common and universal y important concepts (e.g., client focus and client service, commitment to results, "people are our most important a.s.set," etc.) that are often used as key messaging attributes but are rarely fundamental y different from the messaging of other firms.27 As H. J. Heinz said, "To do a common thing uncommonly wel brings success." It's often your attributes of similarity, not those of distinction, that if done wel , form the foundation of the strength of your firm.

Attributes of Distinction Attributes of distinction are things about your firm that can communicate a meaningful difference when compared to others.

One of our least favorite questions that buyers ask is: "How are you different?" If we're asked this question, we'l typicaly respond, "Different from whom?" Are they asking how we're different from every other firm that offers services in our s.p.a.ce? A particular category of firm? A particular firm?

As we noted earlier, difference implies comparison. Without comparison, the answer tends to be either why you're good (we win cases, our people are the smartest, we solve problems, we're big and we have global reach and a.s.sets to bring to bear for you, we're smal and wil treat you like gold, our foundations are rooted in our research, etc.) or something more granular that you bring to the table (we're the only firm with deep research on doing business with the financial community of Dubai, we have three former congressmen at our law firm, Dr. Emmett Brown is the world's leading expert on flux capacitor design innovation, etc.).

Attributes of Experience Attributes of experience are things about your firm that affect the perception of clients and the market regarding what it's like to work with your firm.

Is your firm b.u.t.toned-up or casual? No-nonsense or touchy-feely? Vanila or quirky? Is your downtown office worthy of Architectural Digest in elegance and sophistication, or is your suburban office Spartan and workmanlike? Do you wine and dine your clients or meet up for a dog and a beer at the footbal game?

The one place where every service firm can, indeed, be its own special snowflake is in the experience of what it's like to work with you.

Taken together, al of your attributes-everything the market and clients say about you and everything you know about yourself-form the foundation of strength of your value proposition.

It al comes back to the question we suggest as the second most important one for you to answer as you begin marketing your practice, your firm, or yourself: "What do we say about ourselves?" (Note that the first most important question is covered in Chapter 20 on targets-"Who should we be marketing to?") By answering each of the nine questions, you wil be finding relevant answers to help you articulate the value you provide to the marketplace.

11.

Your Firm, Your Brand Look well into thyself; there is a source of strength which will always spring up if thou wilt always look there.

-Marcus Aurelius The "visible" half of execution-the marketing professionals-can only perform as well as the "invisible" operations area allows it to. Moreover, the quality of operations can also determine an inst.i.tution's ability to innovate.

-Amar Bhide, "Hustle as Strategy"28 "Who am I? Why am I here?"

-Admiral James Stockdale In the previous chapter we looked closely at the questions you need to answer to unlock your key brand attributes. We noted that you need to find these answers from your market and your clients (a.s.suming you are not a start-up). Before you venture beyond the firm's wal s in your quest for knowledge, you must first ask the same questions of . . . yourself.

Much has been written about what makes great firms with solid financial results great in the eyes of their clients. Firms that deliver the highest level of client satisfaction enjoy the highest level of client loyalty and are most likely to get new business referred to them from their client base.29 Being the best firm you can be is (rightly) the subject of much attention, as the better you are at doing what you do, the more likely you'l be to succeed.

Let's a.s.sume most of us believe we can always get better at what we do and deliver stronger value to the market and our clients. For the purposes of this book, regardless of universal agreement that we can get better at what we deliver in the future, we need knowledge about ourselves regarding what we can deliver right now and how good we are right now so we can build marketing messages that wil support revenue generation.

Who Are We? What Do We Deliver?

Your capabilities are what you can deliver to clients. This may sound like it's a given, but the first thing you need to do if you want to establish a strong brand is get a grip on your capability set.

Companies often view capabilities as a list of services, but they're more than that. View your capabilities through two lenses: (1) what you do and (2) the outcomes you produce. A consulting firm might, for example, have a service that a.n.a.lyzes large firms' spending in corporate overhead and then implements changes to the overhead structure based on this a.n.a.lysis. That's the "what you do" part.

On average, this service produces 5 percent reductions in overhead spend. At a bilion-dolar corporation, overhead spend might be 10 percent of revenue, or $100 mil ion. A 5 percent reduction in spend equates then to $5 mil ion in savings. The same capability viewed through the lens of the outcome is: "We help large corporations create lasting reductions in overhead at an average of 5 percent without changing the quality of what the company gets from its overhead investments."

To recap: * What we do: a.n.a.lyze corporate overhead and implement new strategies.

* Outcome: Reduce corporate overhead spend on average by 5 percent.

The distinction is important because it affects how you ask questions about yourself when conducting brand research. Firms often ask about the value of their services in the light of what they do and don't dig deeply enough around the outcomes those services produce. Ask 100 chief financial officers if they value "overhead a.n.a.lysis and new overhead strategy implementation," and you might get answers like this: "Overhead is necessary and we keep tabs on it closely; but we focus on building new plants, product development, and mergers and acquisitions (M&A). a.n.a.lysis on administration and overhead is not an area I'm going to dedicate a s.p.a.ce for in my brain. So, no, I don't think I'd find it valuable."

Ask about the value of reducing overhead spend by 5 percent, and you might get a different answer. "A 5 percent reduction in overhead spend at my company would mean annual savings of about $15 mil ion. Over five years that would be $75 mil ion. It's something I'd pay attention to, for sure."

It's al a question of how you look at what it is you are capable of delivering.

Competencies and a.s.sets: The Building Blocks of Capabilities Capabilities are made up of two major components: (1) competencies and (2) a.s.sets. (See Figure 11.1.) Competencies-What Your People Can Deliver Professional services firms are made up of people who do things. (Shocking, we know.) Those things are made up of the col ective competence of the people in the organization. Competence itself is made up of knowledge, skil s, and attributes.

Figure 11.1 Value Proposition Foundation (The Firm) and Value Proposition Research How might al three of these come into play? Consider the case of the law firm with a specialty in helping clients pursue and close overseas acquisitions.

The top attorneys at the firm may have 20 or more years of experience each helping manufacturing companies acquire other companies overseas. Not only do they have the knowledge of the process and legal technicalities of a successful overseas acquisition, but they also have the knowledge of hundreds of deals, including what went right and how to avoid the common snake pits into which firms pursuing acquisitions can fal .

At this firm, the attorneys have personal skils in negotiation and meeting facilitation, technical skils so they can navigate the complex legalities of overseas acquisitions, and fluency in over 12 different languages.

The firm also has the attributes of extreme client focus, likable attorney personalities, and a culture of teamwork.

Together, this mix of knowledge, skils, and attributes creates the firm's overal competence in helping companies identify and complete overseas acquisitions.

Sounds like a great firm, right? If you needed to buy a $100 milion manufacturing company in Europe, it might be a great fit, perhaps the best fit, for what you need.

For this firm, there is one problem-another firm has similar knowledge, skils, and attributes. From the perspective of the competencies of the organizations, the two look fairly much the same.

a.s.sets-What Your Firm Has That Helps Your People Deliver to Clients Unfortunately for our example law firm, the similar compet.i.tor also has several a.s.sets to support the knowledge, skil s, and attributes that help it increase its overal ability to deliver to clients.

One resource the compet.i.tor has is an actively maintained database of 22,000 possible acquisition targets across industries, sectors, and countries that can, within hours, narrow down acquisition targets to the top 20 most likely matches given your industries and geographies of focus.

One tool the firm has is its proprietary 12-step methodology for acquiring overseas firms. Before the firm had this methodology in place, it created excel ent client results; but those results took six months longer per deal to realize. With the methodology, results come much faster.

One component of the firms' intelectual capital is the annual benchmark study of overseas M&A activity. While part of the research is available to the general public, the details and certain key components of the research are available only to clients of the firm.

In this case, the compet.i.tor firm's a.s.sets clearly contribute to its ability to deliver. It's not difficult to see how.

"When acquiring firms, I've always been very reluctant to pay for any sort of future revenue or earnings stream. I've always bought them because of their a.s.sets. They have a piece of intellectual capital, a model, or a tool that if we were to develop it ourselves it would have cost us a certain amount of money to develop."

-Mike May, Professor at Babson College, former Co-Vice Chair of KPMG, and former Global Managing Partner of the strategy business for Accenture Which firm would you want to be? Now that we've completed our short treatise on the definition of components of company capabilities, let's look at how it al applies to building a brand.

Informs client and market research. People too often view marketing as overhyped puffery that gets people to buy things. Seth G.o.din didn't help the image by writing books like Al Marketers Are Liars (Penguin, 2005). No one wants to be fooled or emotional y enticed to buy something they don't want, don't need, or that isn't right for them. Like it or not, there's no question that it happens, perhaps often in consumer marketing.

Not only does this kind of disingenuous smoke-and-mirrors marketing not work wel for marketing and seling professional services; but if you're the sel er, you don't want it to work. Let's say a consumer sees a great car ad and buys an old hot rod on a whim. Once he buys it, as long as it's not a lemon, the person who sold him the car is done with him. If the car's in great shape, purrs like a kitten, and is just like new, then great! If it turns out the buyer needs parts, service, upgrades, and the like, he goes to a garage, not back to the sel er. (Even at most car dealerships, the buyer gets shuffled off to the service department. The sales rep has moved on.) If you don't like the car or you decide you don't want it anymore, you can resel it.

Let's say you sel a consulting engagement. Who shows up at the kickoff meeting to get everything roling? Typicaly, you! During your business development process, you set a number of expectations: about what is going to happen, how long it is likely to take, what the process wil be like, and what wil happen when you complete the engagement. If what you promised would happen doesn't match what actual y does happen, your client won't be happy. Unlike a car, if the client doesn't like the consulting engagement, he can't sel it to someone else on eBay. You just have to face the music.

What firms should do with branding and marketing is similar to what they should do when seling. Marketing works best when it sets expectations that the firm meets. Before you start your market and client research processes, you must do so in the context of the realities of your firm. Too often service firms engage research to find out what messages wil resonate with the market for their type of firm, find out what those message are, and adopt them without enough attention regarding how wel those messages match up with the realities of the firm itself.

By engaging research couched in the reality of your firm, you wil find the intersection of what the market wants and the reality of what you deliver.

Marketing amplification effect. a.s.sume you work at a business law firm, Jones Jones and Jones. While you have a broad set of capabilities and can service many different types and sizes of client organizations, you are relatively unknown in the market.

One day you're at a yard sale, and you buy an old bottle. You give it a few rubs and out comes the genie, who promptly tels you about your three wishes. Since you've been dying to expand your marketing and your brand, you wish for $100 mil ion that you can use for marketing outreach. (If you do, you real y need to work on your wish list. But back to our example.) Bam! Your messages are everywhere. You're now reaching every decision maker, influencer, and referral source that could be important to you; and you've achieved top-of-mind awareness. You get inquiries directly, but somewhere along the line almost al buyers start checking you out by asking around. It goes something like this: Scenario 1: Steve is the CEO of a midsize technology manufacturer. He meets Angela, another CEO buddy of his, for golf on Sat.u.r.day. He asks her, "Have you ever heard of Jones Jones and Jones?" Angela says, "I have. They're terrible. Horrible. Run for your life. They were my law firm four years ago; and not only did they mess up everything, they were miserable people to work with."

Scenario 2: Same setup. Same question. Angela responds, "I have. They're amazing. Fabulous. I have heard al the promises that professional services firms make about smarter people, extra service, fair treatment, and value added. Rarely have I gotten said benefits, but Jones Jones and Jones is the poster child amazing firm. I trust them completely. They always get it right."

Somewhere in the middle (you probably think closer to scenario 2) is the truth about your firm. By creating conversations in the market among the various stakeholder groups, your marketing outreach amplifies whatever people actual y think about your firm. (See Figure 11.2.) Figure 11.2 Intersecting Circles Before you start communicating your value proposition to the market-a value proposition you want to resonate with buyers, differentiate your firm, and substantiate your claims-you want to make sure it's true. You can only do that if you base your messages on a solid foundation of what your firm is al about.

"Someone from another organization once told me about their marketing message: 'Oh, the marketing team came up with this great thing and plastered it all over the wall.

Too bad it was a meaningless slogan.' I'll never forget that as long as I live, and I told myself, 'I'm never stepping in that trap.' Make sure anything that becomes a core component of your brand messaging reflects what the internal organization believes they deliver. Do that, and it's going to resonate all the way through the firm."

-Paul Dunay, Global Director of Integrated Marketing, BearingPoint Uncovers opportunities for innovation. At almost al firms there's an ongoing discussion about what the firm needs to be doing that it's currently not doing. Even without research to indicate changing needs or client dissatisfaction, firm leaders often see areas where the firm can improve current services, expand the scope of services, or create new services and capabilities.

Ultimately it's up to firm leadership to create an environment where innovation and improvement can actualy take hold. And not every improvement or new service idea is the right one to implement. If you ask your staff about where the opportunities lie, you may find the next big thing, and a number of the next smal things, that wil make your company more compet.i.tive.

Uncovers barriers to brand strength and revenue growth. We once worked with a human resources consulting firm whose stated value proposition didn't match up with its actual value proposition because of an internal disconnect. The value proposition suggested that no matter what the human resources issue might be, this company could solve it. If they needed exposure to new thinking and vendors, they could go to company-produced conferences. If they needed learning, they could work with this firm's executive education division. If they needed consulting, they could work with the firm's consulting arm. And so on.

"Professionals go along with creative and messaging processes and nitpick, but they don't really focus where they need to: asking themselves, 'Is this really us?' Then they see an advertis.e.m.e.nt in print and they don't feel right. Have the discipline and honesty-the kind of intellectual and emotional honesty you need-to say up front who you are and who you want to be, and then be consistent about it. If it's not reflective of who you are, it will be rejected."

-Mike Sheehan, CEO, Hill Holliday The firm had a centralized business development function that maintained relationships with buyers. This group was charged with uncovering client need and crafting solutions to meet that need, given al the firm's capabilities.

One manager at the firm noticed a major variation in how often certain business development executives guided their clients toward executive education. When he looked into it, he found that about half of the business development team had been burned when their clients reported poor experiences with executive education: "I've sent clients to our executive education programs, and then I had to recover them as clients because they were quite dissatisfied and upset."

Regardless of the reasons behind the underlying problem, the lack of trust from one department to another inside this company (1) made it unlikely this firm could deliver on its brand promise of solving human resources problems through multiple service areas and (2) hindered revenue flow to the firm by probably several mil ion dol ars a year.

As you look seriously at the truth of your service (and don't lie to yourself), you can uncover the barriers to building your brand, such as: * Quality issues that create internal lack of trust and inability to deliver on company brand strategy (see preceding example).

* Lack of internal knowledge of company strengths.

* Lack of interest in the rest of the company. ("Why should I care about the other practices and capabilities? I have numbers to hit.") * Morale issues that can dampen or undermine the strength of any real brand effort.

* Need for a.s.sets to help the firm deliver better to clients.

* Underutilized a.s.sets that wil contribute more to client delivery and marketplace differentiation.

* Misalignment between what the firm currently says about itself and the truth about what the company is like and what it delivers.

Builds an army of brand advocates. Including your team in brand research can uncover lack of knowledge, lack of interest, and other chalenges, as noted earlier. Couple staff inclusion in research with internal marketing programs, and you'l also build knowledge, guide staff behavior, and connect staff to the firm's brand messages.

At most (not some, not quite a few, but most) firms, there's a gross deficit of staff knowledge of a firm's overal capabilities and value proposition.

"There are really three levels of brand. The 'big B' brand is the corporate brand, which tends to be ident.i.ty, tagline, letterhead, web site, overall standards, and the like. The 'little b' brand is the specific industry focus, channel, or specialty. And the third level is faces of the brand . . . the people who are walking into client sites every day. The trick is getting them all to work together."

-Paul Dunay, Global Director of Integrated Marketing, BearingPoint Don't believe us? Take everyone at your company right now-no preparation, no warning-and ask them to list every capability the firm has, who the firm serves with that capability, where the firm serves people with that capability, and the major outcomes of that capability. We provide a chart format for you to record everyone's answers. Perhaps everyone wil do amazingly wel . (But that's rarely our experience.) FIRM CAPABILITY CHART.

Capability Industry Geography Outcomes Recently we delivered a cross-sel ing training session to 40 or so senior staff at a superregional accounting and consulting firm. The essence of cross-sel ing is discovering need over and above the need you're currently addressing and then creating solutions using the firm's overal service set to solve the additional need.

The first thing people have to know, then, is what the firm can do. We asked them to list on sticky notes the services of the firm and the industries the firm focused on. We also requested that they work alone-no peeking at their teammates' lists-and that they put only one industry and one service per sticky note.

The company listed 64 major services on its web site and 33 specialty industries. Al in, the folks listed about 50 services and 20 industries. Not bad-except that that wasn't the average; that was the aggregate of what al 40 people could come up with! The most any individual person could list was 20 services and 15 industries.

The original purpose of the training session was to give people the skils to ask questions to uncover need, but what they needed first was the knowledge of what they could actual y do for clients. It's not much use to uncover need and then not know if the firm can even help.

From the perspective of brand, you have an opportunity to leverage your team every day to communicate what you can do for clients and what you can help them achieve. If they don't know what that is, or have inconsistent knowledge, you miss that opportunity anew each morning. (See Figure 11.3.) Figure 11.3 Service Firm Brand Strategy Moded 2009 Welesley Hils Group. Al rights reserved.

By now, if you have been asking and answering the questions about brand as we have suggested, you should have a good understanding of: * What your clients and prospects value.

* Who you are as a firm.

The next step is to put this knowledge together to form the messages for your marketing efforts and for strengthening your brand.

12.

RAMP Up Your Brand The man who whispers down a well About the goods he has to sell Will not make as many dollars As the man who climbs the tree and hollers.

-Lord Leverhulme As we have discussed, brand perception has a tremendous impact on a buyer's att.i.tude toward a company and disposition toward purchasing goods and services. In addition, we have shown how to craft the right messages based on your markets' needs and perceptions of value and your reality as a firm. In this chapter, we provide a way to think about your brand goals as you lay out your marketing plans.

In the Cahners Advertising Research Report, How Important Is the Reputation of a Brand Name? 30 79 percent of buyers agreed that a company's brand reputation is as important as the actual specifics of what is being purchased.

Specificaly, among the buyers: * 85 percent agreed that familiar brands provide good postsale service.

* 82 percent agreed that buying an unfamiliar brand is often risky.

* 81 percent agreed that a familiar brand usual y guarantees selection agreement among internal stakeholders.

* 53 percent agreed that a familiar brand usual y ensures good value for the money.

* 44 percent agreed that unfamiliar brands often indicate unreliable companies.

* 34 percent agreed that unfamiliar brands are of lower quality.

In our own research we found that 73 percent of buyers of professional services stated they are likely to consider engaging service providers of whom they already have "personal recognition or awareness." Among the top 20 ways buyers searched for providers, "previous awareness of the provider" was one of the most commonly cited, second only to referrals.

Brand works. But, as we have stressed, mistaking "getting your name out there" by engaging advertising and brand outreach like business-to-consumer marketing is an expensive mistake that too many professional services firms make. The reason behind the mistake is a misconception about how to approach becoming wel -known in your target markets.

If business-to-consumer advertising campaigns and business-to-business product marketing tactics mislead the professional services firm marketer because the thinking is fundamental y flawed, how then should a service firm think about brand building?

Imagine you are playing the strongman game at the carnival. You lift the sledgehammer over your head and swing it down onto the platform.

When it strikes the target, a metal cylinder rises up and up-20 feet up the pole until it rings the bel . On its way down the pole, the cylinder pa.s.ses the same words it pa.s.sed on the way up: strongman, tough guy, athlete, junior, and weakling.