Expertise Marketplace - Professional Service Firm Marketing Blog

I'm tracking others' insights - on Innovation

I've been watching how other bloggers address topics that I think are critical to the marketplace leadership of professional service firms.  Take a look at what I found recently, followed by my own remarks. 

High-fives to Michelle Golden, whose blog mostly focuses on law and accounting firm marketing, for providing a close look at how she advises clients on integrating service improvements (both to the offering itself and to its delivery) into a marketing plan.  Golden does a great job of illustrating the link between Marketing and a firm's Operations side, as well as the role of the individual fee-earning professional to ensure a focus on this critical area.  How many consultants put illustrations like this on their blogs?  (Only the ones who are actively generating their own innovations, that's who.)

Pay attention to anomalies and other nuggets from a conference

I went to a conference on Measuring Innovation Performance yesterday.  It was the first time in too long that I was an attendee, not a speaker, and so I enjoyed myself immensely. 

Some of the content related to classic business strategy, some to differentiation.  Some of the best nuggets related to professional service firms (PSF) included:

• When assessing the viability of any particular business strategy, make sure you understand the risks involved. There are three types of risk:  1) technical, 2) executional (can I do it?), and 3) market/competitive risk. Ask yourself the risk of pursuing the strategy and the risks of NOT pursuing the strategy.
• Quality is directly linked to innovation.
• Assess opportunities as well as risks. Most companies forget to do this. But when thinking about opportunities, remember there are COSTS to pursuing opportunities. (“This opportunity will cost us $x.  What other things could we be doing with this money that might be more important to us?”)
• Industry knowledge is a key differentiator.
• When thinking about differentiating with your people, hire TALENT over experience.
• Innovation ROI should be thought of more broadly than many firms do:  it’s more than CASH, but also indirect benefits.
• Pay attention to anomalies. (My favorite!)
• Most firms operate from a budget mentality. Too few operate from an investment mentality.

I found, once again, that most of the presenters and examples were product- and manufacturing-focused.  The professional service firms in attendance were left to extrapolate the models, concepts and frameworks.

 

Wouldn't it be great if content could be pertinent and readily available to the global, $3+ trillion professional services sector?  Or that thought leaders would GET it that we are unquestionably in a SERVICES economy?  Maybe I'll have to write another book, or develop an institute targeted especially to PSFs.

Could be fun.   

Lawyers ahead of management consultants

"We're in a relationship business," says Dennis Fleischmann, managing partner of law firm Bryan Cave's New York office as he discusses the firm's women-only networking events in Carol Hymowitz's "In the Lead" column in today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required).  Hymowitz reports on how numerous other professional service firms and other corporate leaders are employing women-only business-development events, and recounts perceptions about their pros and cons. 

While I prefer mixed-gender business events, I can't help applauding the companies cited in the column (Ernst & Young, Merrill Lynch, Sara Lee, General Electric) for "getting it" that women are a critical part of the future of business.

Contrast this, however, with the gender tone-deafness that continues to be apparent in the management consulting industry.  In its upcoming Consulting Summit_2007 this May, conference presenters Kennedy Information, BNA and Consulting Magazine feature NOT ONE WOMAN on the speaking roster. 

I simply can't believe that there aren't any women whose leadership in management consulting firms isn't making at least some positive differences.  And I simply can't believe that these conference organizers haven't figured out that women (and men) want to hear from other women (as well as men)! 

Come on, management consultants, ENOUGH with the white men's club!       

Embrace the unexpected

Seth Godin's blog post on embracing the unexpected appeared while my husband John and I were on a one-week driving trip to visit the small towns where our ancestors used to live.  It was a very low key and absolutely delightful trip.  Talk about not the mainstream! 

For professional service marketers, I found his final three points to be especially helpful:

"1. Embrace expectations and build a product or service that fits what people are looking for. No change of behavior necessary. Be in the right place at the right time with the right thing priced appropriately and hope the competition doesn't show up.

2. Change the expectations. No one expected to be able to buy digital music for 99 cents a song and have it show up on their iPod. Now, that's the default expectation in some communities. Changing an expectation builds a huge barrier to those that might follow. Change is time consuming, expensive and rarely happens on schedule.

3. Defy the expectations. Do the unexpected. This is tempting but often leads to nothing but noise.

Before you start marketing something, it helps to be able to describe which combination of the three you're setting out to accomplish."

Breaking out of the moldly old days

So you think your professional service firm has trouble breaking out of the mold to achieve innovative new practices?  Take a look Bruce MacEwen's fantastic post "The Birth of Innovation Requires the Death of Perfection."   

Are innovation and professional services incompatible?

I had a blast yesterday morning talking to Eric Mankin about innovation in the legal services arena.  (Eric is the Executive Director of Babson College's very dynamic Center for Innovation and Corporate Entrepreneurship -- check it out).

Many people assume that innovation narrowly means changing the product or service into something different.  Well, it ain't necessarily so! 

For a law firm, or businesses in architecture, accounting, management consulting, or beyond, innovation can and does involve adapting and changing internal processes, organizational structures, service delivery approaches and more. 

Eric explained that his research will also incorporate how law firms innovate in context to other firms in their own sector.  The main point here is that too many PSFs think about innovation only relative to their company's current state of doing business.  If you compared PSF innovation to other sectors, we'd look backwards indeed.  If you are in a manufacturing company, you might throw your hands up and say, "Well that's not innovative!" 

But it's not enough to consider "doing something new" only against your firm's own past approaches.  Instead, you should consider how this innovation will impact your company's competitive positioning in context to its rivals.  What might be the marketplace result of this innovation? 

In that way, innovation moves from an act of internal convenience to an act of competitive advantage.  Are there examples out there about how professional service firms are embracing innovation as an avenue toward market leadership?  Send them along, and I'll write about them. 

Diversifying professional services -- folly or genius?

Who would've thought that a rubber tire company would score a huge marketplace hit by diversifying into travel guides?  Think Michelin.  Think IBM and Linux.  Intel and its Centrino chips.  The latest issue of strategy + business features these and other great examples of how companies can succeed dramatically by not sticking to their knitting. 

The article "Complementary Genius" (reg may be required) touts the wisdom of thinking about portfolio offerings as "complements" to a company's core competencies.  It offers five great questions that are highly relevant for professional service firms, as they get better about considering their offerings through a service portfolio lens:

1. What complements are currently constraining demand in our markets?
2. What new product might boost demand for our core offerings?
3. Would our customers buy more if they had better information?
4. Would we learn valuable lessons by innovating in complements?
5. Do we have competitors whose fortunes are tightly tied to the price of complements?

Movers and shakers

Take a look at the new Business Week online piece profiling 25 Innovators.  Each Champion of Innovation features a great picture and a fun quick-read paragraph of the reasons why BW picked them. 

Interestingly, the majority are women.  They look like they are having the time of their professional lives.