Expertise Marketplace - Professional Service Firm Marketing Blog

Marketing and business development stuck in a rut?

I'm conducting another one-minute survey for my upcoming book. The title of this survey is “Are Marketing and Business Development Functions Stuck in a Rut?”

The professional services marketplace is rapidly changing, but many professional service firms (PSFs) have yet to keep pace by evolving the functional scope of their non-revenue generating Marketers and Business Developers.

We’re told many Marketers feel they’re treated like ‘cruise directors,’ stuck continuously putting out non-strategic fires. Their Business Development counterparts feel stuck, too, in an incessant ’shut-up-and-get-me-a-meeting’ mode.

Take this survey if you would like to find out how your professional firm compares to other PSFs at working to evolve the functional scope of their Marketing and Business Development positions.

This is the second of our quick surveys whose findings will be featured in my upcoming book, The Integration Imperative™: Erasing Marketing and Business Development Silos - Once and For All - in Professional Service Firms.

Please take this super-short survey and we'll give you a chance to see the results before anyone else. (Later, we'll post the results here and in The Marketplace Master™ newsletter.) If you have a blog of your own, you're welcome to post the results.

(If you’re interested in the results of my first one-minute survey, see: Hiring fee-earners who WANT to Market and Sell.)

Where are YOUR clients going

Earlier this week, I received a promotional e-mail from BTI Consulting about its new research on "How [Law Firm] Clients Hire, Fire and Spend."  The report summary outlines some of the findings: 53.7% of clients ousted their primary law firm; Only 30.7% of clients recommend their primary law firm; 64.3% of clients plan to hire a new law firm.

These are daunting numbers, but perhaps they will begin to shed light for law firms (and other professional service sectors) on one of the key findings that Larry Bodine and I recently found in our own study, "Increasing Marketing Effectiveness at Professional Firms."   

• Professional firms that said they were extremely effective used three particular client-focused metrics in combination with each other.  These three are:  (a) Growing client revenue:  “Did you grow revenue with your client or not?” (b) Moving the phases of a sale through a pipeline:  “Did you close the sale or not?” and (c) Listening to the client:  “Did you listen to your client or not?”

Let's face it: if the law firms in BTI's study were really doing a good job of measuring their "listening-to-the-client" initiatives, their percentage of retaining those clients, and growing their book of business with them, would be higher.  We found that it's not enough for firms to undertake simple client satisfaction surveys.  Rather, our findings reveal that successful professional firms take deliberate steps to improve their client satisfaction information-gathering approaches! 

Ask yourself:  "When is the last time we asked our clients whether our satisfaction surveys (feedback interviews, etc.) are really getting at their most critical issues?   When is the last time we revised our client research approaches to go deeper than shallow client satisfaction questions, or sytematically analyzed the factors that REALLY grow our client relationships?"   

Check out some fascinating new thinking on the subject of researching client loyalty in Fred Reichheld's new book, "The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth."  Our research findings and BTI's results offer additional perspectives on aspects of Reichheld's research: that one simple question -- "Would you recommend us to a friend?" -- is the one true measure of a firm's performance in the eyes of its clients. 

It may not matter where professional service marketers get the point (our study, BTI's work, or Fred Reicheld's fabulous new book), but get it they must:  becoming more competitively effective and attaining true marketplace growth will inevitably require professional service firms to think differently about how to measure and deepen their clients' loyalty. 

Why Buy?

As professional service marketers increasingly undertake client and market research in order to compete more effectively, many look to the field of consumer product research for guidance -- sometimes with less-than-thrilling results.  The buying decision for the consumer product is complex; arguably, the buying decision for an intangible service is more so. 

Brandweek's October 3 2005 issue had an interesting article, "Why Buy?", that explores the underpinnings of a person's moment-of-truth buying decision.  Essentially, psychologists are finding that people make buying choices based on their emotions, not on utilitarian requirements.  When one tries to drill down below the surface to reveal the components of that decision, one quickly finds that the decision is made on an unconscious level.  While most of the professional service marketers I know would say, "Of course!" many are still attempting to research their clients by using a products-oriented research technique.

The article describes how Gerald Zaltman's "Metaphor Elicitation Technique" can be used to reveal how people feel -- not just how they say they feel -- about brands, and about how they arrive at buying decisions.  Zaltman's highly qualitative method is applied in small research projects, not large quantitative surveys. 

It appears that the Brandweek article is no longer online, but you can see Gerald Zaltman's Harvard Business School publications profile for his bio and a list of books and articles.