As I write eTips each week, it’s often the product of business development challenges and behaviours I’ve observed among our clients, or learned second hand. Now, I need your input on the eTips topics you find most relevant, how eTips can improve, and what you’d like more of.

This week, please take this brief, three to five minute survey, and tell me, and the whole JMA team, what you think.

As a thank you, you will be entered into a draw to win a bottle of fine wine.

Of course, if you have any queries or other comments, do get in touch.

Thanks for your support and important feedback.

Linda and the team at Julian Midwinter & Associates

Much marketing wallows in a sea of sameness. Enormous efforts are expended searching out small advantages in the quest to create differentiation among many apparently qualified, capable, and often similar professional service firms. Pursuing the holy grail of differentiation is often much less effective than going for the end game: impact.It’s an equation: insight + ideas + innovation = impact.

High impact is the product of:
• drawing on deep insights
• bright ideas
• lots of innovation.

You’ll gain great business development advantage when you:
• actively draw on deep understanding you’ve accrued about significant problems and business issues before your clients and target clients
• take a hard (and fresh) think about their challenges and opportunities to which you might make a positive contribution
• brainstorm to formulate some big ideas in response
• experiment with what may prove radically better ways to tackle the problem or work
• show the positive and measurable results your client can expect from your well-conceived and innovative service.

Rather than endlessly pondering minor points of difference which are unlikely to resonate with clients and prospective clients - or, worse, be meaningless and valueless to them - invest your efforts in increasing your impact, using our formula. We’ve proven it over and over.

Copyright 2008 Julian Midwinter & Associates Pty Ltd

The eTip I wrote last week presented a checklist to help you assess which of your client relationships are truly strategic, and which belong in the categories of just long, or costly, or both. Here’s how to get to strategic relationship status with like-minded clients who will value what you do - beyond its cost.

Go beyond baseline expectations and service levels. Do more than the minimum in most or all of the areas which matter to your client.

Exceed client expectations. Don’t just assume - make sure you really understand what each client expects now, then take it to the next level.

Truly focus on each client. Make certain you know what really matters to this client and that they know this now matters to you, too.

Become truly proactive in identifying, addressing, and constructively engaging potential future issues. Seize the advantage by getting in ahead of your client listing a neat and clearly defined set of needs. Anticipate problems and show you’re ahead of the game.

Invest in superior service. Constantly upgrade the service experience with the very best people and resources you can find.

Expertly manage relationships. Make certain this critical success factor is front and centre, where it belongs. Allow non-chargeable time in professional budgets for this important activity.

Add value to clients and their businesses well in excess of your cost. It goes way beyond value-added services: ensure that your services produce results, are a good buy, and truly valuable to your client.

Engage clients with a constant stream of ideas and recommendations to do better in future. Never take the client for granted - keep them interested, and keep your team on its toes, with constant improvements.

Audit outcomes and evaluate relationships. Invest in independent client interviews and other reviews to help you identify areas to do even better and take your business relationships to the next level.

A strategic relationship is a journey rather than a destination.

Delight in your achievements and progress, but never be satisfied. Always be restless to do better.

Copyright 2008 Julian Midwinter & Associates

Each year, I conduct many personal interviews with high value clients of professional service firms. Every interview is different and each turns up something unexpected - often a new service opportunity. While interviewees are often effusive in praise of their lawyers and other professional experts, there is a pattern to irritations, annoyances, and things which damage relationships.

It drives your clients nuts when:
• you should understand, but don’t
• you don’t build that understanding into your advice, strategies, and tactics
• you’re not prepared to change from how it’s been in the past
• you take the relationship for granted - or appear to
• you resist their decisions, preferences, processes, and standards - instead, you just keep wanting to do it your way
• you don’t look after their money (including their investment in your services)
• you don’t do your best to minimise what they need to spend with you to get the right result
• you don’t understand their financial constraints and budget cycles
• you don’t bear the cost of team churn
• you leave it to the client to get your early-career people up to speed with their work and their organisation
• you don’t bear the cost of your own mistakes, wrong-turns, and errors of judgement
• your behaviour reflects poorly on the executives and teams with whom you deal, leaving them with lots of “please explains”.

All these irritate, annoy, and damage relationships: I recommend a long, hard look at whether you’re transgressing. Better still, invest in some research to see how a client’s reality compares with your perceptions of what you’re delivering, and how.

Don’t drive your clients nuts - and drive them away.

Copyright 2008 Julian Midwinter & Associates

Clients have needs: some recognised, others unrecognised. Among the needs they recognise, some clients may have unmet needs - needs for which they have not yet found a professional service solution. Unmet needs present business development opportunities for an expert professional.By implication, unmet needs can be classed as:
• those which are unsatisfied - no satisfactory service has been availed
• those which are unaddressed - no solution has yet been sought
• those which are unrecognised - they don’t yet know they have a need.

Unsatisfied needs are great business opportunities since the client understands what they need and is likely to be open to a well-conceived solution.

Unaddressed needs yield the myriad benefits of greenfield opportunities for an imaginative and persuasive professional.

Unrecognised needs only become worthwhile opportunities for professionals prepared to do the groundwork to create need recognition with an action-oriented client.

In the legal services sphere, our research reveals several clusters of unmet needs. These include:
• intellectual property
• commercial dispute resolution, without recourse to litigation
• information technology services
• communication and entertainment technology services
• compliance awareness and training for front-line client personnel
• streamlining multi-handled processes involving internal and external resources and expertise
• workforce risk reduction and legal support for best practice in human resources
• financial risk reduction
• small business structuring and risk management
• family financial arrangements, estate planning, and intergenerational wealth transfer
• part-time outsourced general counsel.

Rather than battling for market share among clients whose widely understood needs are already being satisfied by others - and possibly with a long queue of aspirants jockeying to competitively displace the incumbent - why not create business development leverage by pursuing unsatisfied, unmet, or even unrecognised needs ?

Copyright 2008 Julian Midwinter & Associates

Large and significant clients frequently engage multiple firms within each professional discipline.In legal matters, formal panel and informal provider relationships often award “first place” or primary provider status to one firm, and secondary status to others. Sometimes, panel appointments effectively put every provider into a kind of “second place”.

Maybe there’s no clear first-placed incumbent at the present - possibly a field of second and third placegetters. You may formally be a secondary service provider to a large client - or perhaps you’ve just been one of many for some time.

This could be because you don’t have the full range of services your client needs and wants - or maybe they just don’t know that you have. Potentially, your secondary status derives from limitations on your capacity to service their entire work volume or their unwillingness to put all their eggs in one basket.

Second place puts you in a good position to improve.

Invest in the relationship. Be willing to really get to know the business, the key players, their business strategies, and their challenges and risks. Value added training, secondments, and in-depth relationship reviews are just three of many areas for investment.

Promote your specialist expertise. Make sure the client knows about what you do especially well. Even if you’ve told them before, find new and interesting ways to communicate your specialist expertise in areas of current or future relevance to them. Carefully tailored training workshops and targeted seminars are value adds which work.

Do the work you’re given extra well. Even if you’re up to high value and specialised work, do any routine and non-specialist work extra well. You may truly be capable of far more, but don’t expect to ever get it if you underperform on what’s allocated to you.

Create favourable economics for your client. Turn your efficiency and reliability in producing work for your client into both profits for you and economic advantage for them.

Don’t be precious. Don’t carp about the work you haven’t got. Don’t be resentful of the primary provider. Be gracious about working alongside another capable firm.

Know your limitations. You may not have the big brand, large size, impressive pedigree, or market clout the client wants to access. If you’re a local firm, regard a second place appointment by a large national client as a big win. If you’re a small firm, you may never be able to do more than a small slice of work for a significant client. If you are a narrow specialist, stick to your expert area and don’t pursue work for which you’re ill-equipped.

Think carefully about whether to play for first place. Realistically assess your prospects of success. Recognise that first place is often accompanied by a swag of onerous obligations and expectations. Don’t underestimate the difficulty of displacing long-standing incumbents.

Value second place. Second place can be great as long as you grasp how to obtain optimal benefits from this position. Position your offering as one that comfortably co-exists alongside their chosen primary provider relationship - wherever possible, piggyback off their efforts.

Choosing to play in second place - and for second place - can be a smart and strategically savvy move !

Copyright 2008 Julian Midwinter & Associates

Some of the greatest professional success stories are based on sustained commitment to breaking with tradition and doing things differently.

Big rewards await professionals who find new and substantially better ways of doing things.

Search for opportunities to deliver your services differently by:

Significantly reducing your cost of production.

Radically changing elapsed time to produce.

Substantially reducing number of steps involved.

Standardising or “packaging” what have traditionally been one-off or bespoke services.

Removing or transferring the risks to your client which are attached to using your service.

Developing a truly novel service.

Spotting an industry trend which may render your service obsolete and beating the market to it.

Tracking social or political trends which impact your market and responding truly proactively.

Challenging accepted wisdom in an industry or market.

The best opportunities derive from doing things differently - and better - before you’re forced, before your competitors, and well before your services are obsolete or even “ho hum”.

Copyright Julian Midwinter & Associates

Strategy is great, but it’s worth little without implementation. Make certain you put the disciplines and resources in place to make your strategy happen.

You’ll find plenty of talk about strategic business development planning, but the increasingly competitive professional services environment, where there is excess supply in many segments and services are becoming commoditised faster, you need to pay a whole lot of attention to excelling at execution.

Get yourself and your team together to perform your strategy - turn your business development aspirations into actions.

Here are some tips:

If you’re team leader, make sure you’re not just recognising and rewarding imagination, inspiration, and excitement - reward getting it done.

Recognise that your success may ultimately depend on micro managing low-level tasks - things like slipping letters into envelopes, spellchecking documents, proofreading, and so on.

Be fierce about prioritising what it is going to get done today, as opposed to what is going to get started, underway, or progressed today - work out what needs to get finished and what that involves.

Make lists to keep priorities firmly in mind. Even the best marketing and business development ideas need to be turned into action. If you don’t execute your plans, clever strategy is worth little - your aspirations must turn into action.

Copyright Julian Midwinter & Associates

Here are some specific actions you can take to add weight to your brand.

Research your client constituencies. Understand exactly how you’re seen, where your clients

“Pigeonhole” you and your firm, and what differentiates you from the rest.

Understand your practice. Define your key capabilities. Set your goals and objectives based on a clear understanding of what you can deliver especially well. Communicate these goals and objectives clearly and compellingly throughout your firm.

Work out what reputation you want. Advance your vision for your practice and create the strategy to support the reputation you want.

Document your strategic position.

Use communication powerfully. Ensure that every communication between you and the rest of the world works to support your positioning and promote your reputation.

Implement a cohesive marketing and communications plan. Pay attention to the details. Ensure that the messages that you send to the market are consistent and cohesive.

Pay attention to internal communication. Everyone on the team must have a clear understanding of the goals and plans.

If you are to build reputation and brand power quickly and convincingly.

Monitor performance. Track progress against your plans. Use a mix of research techniques to check that your brand and reputation are moving in the direction you seek.

Whatever the ultimate objective for your professional practice, doing a good job is no longer enough. Building your brand and reputation will help you to achieve your professional and business goals faster.

Copyright Julian Midwinter & Associates

You need to know how you and your firm stack up against the competition. Even basic, simple competitive information can be a powerful tool.

Here’s a quick list of useful information to collate about your key competitors:

Areas of work.

Firm size and structure.

Revenue per lawyer/professional and partner.

Profitability.

Charge rates and charge bases (time, fixed fee, event cost, etc.).

“Stars” on their team.

Key clients.

Special strengths and competencies.

Weaknesses and threats or risks.

Recent wins and losses.

Of course, you won’t be able to gather all this information about each competitor, but lots can be assembled or sensibly derived to inform your competitive strategy.

Copyright Julian Midwinter & Associates