PULLING NEW CLIENTS TO THE
PROFESSIONAL SERVICES FIRM
by John Graham
It's taken long enough, but the professional services field has discovered marketing or, perhaps more nearly accurately, the value of marketing. So if you're waiting for word-of-mouth to attract new clients, you have a long wait ahead of you.
Take a look around at who's marketing what.
Business consultants are marketing mavens. In fact, some of the largest advertisers in the Wall Street Journal are consulting firms. The number of business books authored by consultants keeps climbing. For example, a popular book on the value of chief executive officers is a thinly-veiled promotional piece for a major financial-services firm. A book-length quarterly journal published by a big management consulting company presents an intriguing and attractive mix of fact and opinion to position the company as the expert.
Several of Boston's largest law firms have gone to casual dress codes. Rather than hide this not-so-subtle change, the firms made sure they got national news coverage to recruit eager young lawyers and attract laid-back technology clients. Some more aggressive personal injury lawyers are abandoning their high-priced high-rise offices for shopping malls to be more approachable and accessible to prospective clients.
The walls of restraint are tumbling down. To be sure, stodgy tombstone ads still announce the appointment of partners in law and accounting firms. The debates over 'the ethics of marketing' are mostly irrelevant and marginalized, though.
Some professionals of all types - accountants, lawyers, financial planners, dentists, doctors - believe they're a little above everyone else in business. Some believe the quality of their work is the only marketing that matters.
Actually, marketing is perfect for professional services. That sponsored book has one goal: to make believers out of readers, some of whom will recommend hiring the financial-services firm it touts. The title of the book names the targeted reader - the CEO, the decision-maker who says, 'Let's get this company in here.'
By definition, that's good marketing: creating customers who want to do business with their company and no one else. Effective marketing harnesses the customer creation process.
Successful professional services marketing can be summarized this way: Be perceived as the solution to the problem when the customer has a need. The principles of marketing professional services are all the same for the international firm and the small local company alike. Here are the objectives:
- Marketing lets a professional services firm pre-establish a relationship with a client. For example, referrals are rarely based on detailed inquiries into a particular firm's competence. Usually the selection of a lawyer, doctor, or accountant is a low-involvement decision. Someone says, 'I know a great CPA firm,' and that's recommendation enough. Whether the firm has the necessary expertise fails to become an issue.
How many times do people engage a law firm to handle a particular problem without even asking if it has expertise in that field? This process is inefficient and often brings in less-than-optimum clients.
The basic marketing task is to pre-establish a relationship with a prospect to become their professional of choice. Without recognizing it, the prospect has made a buying decision, often long before they have a specific need.
- Marketing builds the perception that a professional services firm is the leader in its field. Marketing can be extremely powerful in this area. Clients gravitate to successful professionals. For example, a dentist specializing in implants has impeccable credentials but is less than successful. Another dentist who lacks the experience and credentials of the first one has an extensive implant practice. Why the difference? The second dentist, who has made a commitment to marketing their services, is perceived as the leader in the field.
In professional services, it's essential to be recognized as the expert, the cutting-edge leader.
- Marketing pulls clients into the professional firm's orbit. The goal is to be perceived as the professional of choice by client and prospect both. Clients like to act as if they have a close relationship with a professional services provider, regardless of whether they actually do: They refer to 'my' doctor, lawyer, accountant, insurance broker, and so forth.
- Marketing helps cement the client relationship. This is essential because professional relationships are more vulnerable now than they were in the past. Accounting firms can't depend on keeping the same client companies for decades, and other professionals have the same problem. To retain your clients' business, you must keep making them feel that engaging your services was the right decision.
The quality of your work is important, of course. But competence alone doesn't build relationships. Client relationships must be reinforced continually, or the client will eventually make a change. Marketing lets you communicate the reasons that selecting your firm was wise.
These techniques can help a professional services firm best utilize a marketing strategy:
- Marketing helps create the right identity.Many professional services firms cling to a dull, stodgy identity. Massachusetts attorney Thomas Montminy, whose firm specializes in collections, wanted to communicate a positive, businesslike image. The firm's logo features a contemporary 'M' that becomes an upward line on a graph - a subtle suggestion that collections are up. The logo's bright, attractive colors make it stand out among the less contemporary designs of the firm's competitors.
The objective is to create a brand identity, one that evokes specific feelings. The objective of Montminy's law firm was to position itself as innovative, effective, and aggressive to distinguish it from others in the field.
- Marketing lets you present the firm as a specialist. There will always be generalists, but more clients seem most comfortable with specialists. Professional services firms often neglect to take advantage of their experience in working with certain client groups or industries. Yet marketing this expertise properly offers the opportunity to build solid boutique business. The national accounting/consulting firms present themselves as specialists in a broad range of fields to attract clients.
Smaller firms can use this strategy, too. An accounting firm with four or five clients in a particular industry can build on that base. For example, it can create a brochure and separate letterhead for this segment of its business.
- Build a marketing database. The marketing database is perhaps the most crucial component of a professional services marketing program. The database helps the organization maintain its focus on the clients it wants and its activities to build relationships with prospects and maintain them with current clients.
The database should include present and past clients, prospects, and media and industry contacts. Build your prospect database by identifying those who best fit your client profile. For example, a law firm with expertise in environmental law should list companies, agencies, and organizations that can benefit from its services.
- Engage your prospects and clients. More than anything else, effective marketing is discovering ways to engage customers and prospects. This requires an in-depth understanding of what these groups want and expect.
For example, a marketing services firm wrote an article called 'Fourteen Ways to Waste Your Marketing Dollars' about its experiences with prospective clients over the years. Dozens of executives responded with calls, letters, and e-mail messages. Most of them began, 'We've done them all!' This is engagement - connecting with the prospective customer.
You can best engage your prospects and customers with a multifaceted marketing program that presents your firm in a variety of venues at the same time. The impact of the whole program will be greater than the sum of the individual tactics.
A multifaceted program might include the following:
- A firm newsletter. The content should help and inform the reader. Put the names of professionals in your organization on individual articles to help the reader associate knowledge and expertise with specific people.
A quarterly publication is generally adequate. However, a one-page email newsletter lets you present late-breaking information and offer additional information, such as a report or study.
- By-lined articles. One professional services firm gets most of its new business leads by writing by-lined articles for trade and business periodicals.
Professional services people work with ideas and information, so they're in a unique position to share their thinking with others. This is what makes by-lined articles such an effective marketing tool.
Ads and promotions masquerading as articles are a waste of time - editors are charged with giving their readers valid, helpful information.
When a by-lined article is published, its value is enhanced. It has earned third-party endorsement, and it can be reprinted and used in a direct mail program to cultivate prospects.
- Advertising. Professional services firms should advertise. Don't try to sell yourself - it's more effective to advertise to build brand awareness. There are two basic guidelines for good professional services advertising:
- a. Write every ad from the prospect's viewpoint. Unless the ad connects with the readers' specific needs, it's a waste of money.
- b. Include an offer in every ad, such as the free marketing pamphlet 'Twelve Questions to Ask Before Signing a Merger or Acquisition Agreement.' You'll develop leads with this interactive approach.
- An informative Web site. A Web site is one of the most effective ways to engage prospects and customers. But a Web site isn't much benefit if it isn't dynamic and doesn't get updated often. One firm received an e-mail asking why the usual rotation of articles on its Web site had stopped. The person who wrote the message said they looked forward to the articles and was disappointed not to find them. Of course, the firm began a proper rotation schedule.
An effective Web site carries helpful information, tells visitors about a company, and encourages interchange and requests for information.
The most pressing marketing issue when it comes to Web sites is promotion. A major source of advertising revenue for The Wall Street Journal, for example, is from companies spending millions of dollars attempting to attract customers to their Web sites. Any cost of a Web site must include an adequate promotional budget.
These are just a few of the effective marketing techniques that professional service firms can use successfully. As part of a consistent, unified marketing effort, they attract prospects to you.
Today marketing isn't a luxury for professional services - nor is it an option. It's a necessary element for building a stronger professional practice.
More importantly, an effective marketing program frees professionals to do what they do best - give clients top-quality service instead of squandering time looking for new business.