Expertise Marketplace - Professional Service Firm Marketing Blog

I should hate David Maister

In the traditional view of business competition, I should hate David Maister.  He targets the same types of clients that I do -- professional service firms -- and his work is designed to help them achieve the same goals -- marketplace gains. 

But I just can't do it.  Here's a guy who smashes many of our traditional notions: that academics (even former academics) can't be practical, and that consultants who haven't worked on "the inside" can't teach us anything about how to run our professional firms better.  His writing is a pleasure to read, and almost makes it feel like we're in a conversation.  He gives away a treasure trove of fantastic tips, tools, and techniques to help professional service firms improve in almost every way.

What in the world would cause me to issue such praise?  Hey, I know good stuff when I see it.  I just reviewed an advance copy of Maister's upcoming book, "Strategy and the Fat Smoker," available for pre-orders here.

Here's what I liked about the new book:

• Maister’s anecdotes about his own professional journey, and commentary from real people (his trainer).
• In Chapter 3, a fantastic list of a firm’s optimal behaviors and states of mind.
• In Chapter 5, two big suggestions about how firms should build commitment toward pursuing a common purpose.
• The entire Chapter 8, which specifically deals with the management of marketing.  Most marketing leaders would recognize this chapter as critical to becoming more effective.  (The ones who don't are smoking something.)  In particular, I'm intrigued by Maister's point: "Firms do not need to teach their people how to sell.  They need to find out, person by person, what kind of work turns each partner on and what kind of clients each person could actually get interested in."  This point alone deserves deep examination by all marketing leaders in every professional service firm.  It's one I will also address, in my upcoming book, The Integration Imperative, which I plan to publish in 2008.

Buried deep in the book, in Chapter 9, Maister boldly admits: "I don't know (yet) how to get short-term thinkers to become long-term thinkers.  I've tried logic.  It hasn't worked well on nonbelievers.  I've tried presenting conclusive data.  It hasn't worked well on nonbelievers.  I've tried appealing to matters of principle, standards, values, and meaning.  It hasn't worked well on nonbelievers.  I now wonder whether people can be ‘converted’ on this topic.  Preferred styles seem to be well entrenched in people's personalities long before the age at which I'd meet them.  The best any of us can do, probably, is to help the believers develop the courage to implement what they already believe." 

His metaphor of “The Fat Smoker” works very well with individuals, as Maister acknowledges, but the vast majority of professional service managers are indeed nonbelievers and short-term thinkers.  They will need to see examples of real firms that have begun to make the significant changes that he describes.  This book doesn’t provide them. 

On behalf of all those who could be converted to believe in Maister’s views, I’d ask:  “Who’s becoming a believer?  Which firms are transforming into long-term thinking enterprises?  Beyond the usual suspects (Bain, McKinsey, Goldman Sachs), is there any firm that has even begun becoming a non-smoking, fit professional service firm?”  Please, please, tell us their stories! 
   
And, knowing David Maister, that’s exactly what’s coming next. 

Damn it. 

Let's get small

There's been talk recently about the new way that people are buying services: in small chunks. 

• When I attended an audio conference call on Wednesday, presented by the Consultants News editor Jess Scheer, he cited research by ITSMA that IT projects are getting smaller, taking longer to sell, and involving more people to sell them.  The "getting smaller" part caught my attention.
• A new book, The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson (editor in chief of Wired magazine), although not targeted solely toward professional service firms, says that "the future of business is selling less of more."  Anderson's research finds that business sellers are increasingly having to focus on smaller and smaller niche markets, satisfying all of them but for smaller-sized and "unbundled" sales. 

Are others seeing this phenomena?  Are professional service firms destined to "get small" in order to maintain or grow their revenues? 

If so, what will this mean for marketing and business development?  More moving parts?  Mini-marketing plans?  Chopped up business development programs?  Micro-practices?

What's Your Must-Win Battle?

I love reading the 800-CEO-Read Daily blog because it clues me in to new books that I'd probably miss.   Here's one that came out while I was away, and it looks like a great concept for professional service firms:   Must-Win Battles by Peter Killing and Tom Malnight.  Their point is that an intellectual approach to strategy is not enough.  They say, "Strategic priorities with heart will win the day." 

Here's a wonderful synopsis of the book.   An MWB:

• Has impact: On the whole organization, not just one part of it.
• Is externally focused: If you are pre-occupied with internal battles you will lose in your markets; a common external goal creates energy.
• Is tangible: Specific and measurable; generalizations such as “innovate more!” don’t work.
• Creates excitement: Goes beyond the incremental and captures the emotions!
• Is winnable: Going "beyond the incremental" does not mean impossible. 

How many professional service marketers have used a method like this one to galvanize their firms toward marketplace breakthroughs?  I'd guess that this kind of initiative would itself require a keenly designed internal marketing effort. 

But it might be just the ticket to effectively herd those professional cats!  And fun to boot.

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.