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Welcome to eTips
eTips is despatched weekly by email. It's packed with important business development tips from the team at Julian Midwinter & Associates.
eTips 2010
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Each time I stay in a fine hotel the experience is both enjoyable and truly impressive. And I'm struck by how different my guest experience is from client experiences at many professional services and law firms. For a few hundred dollars spent with a fine hotel, my service experience is much different from what clients who spend tens, hundreds, or even thousands of times that recount of their interactions with their lawyers and expert professional advisers.
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By taking control of our time, we can often achieve more than we previously thought possible.
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The right training can make a big difference in performance in business development situations.
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Make sure you set yourself on a course for successful business development in the new financial year.
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Every year, we make resolutions, and most years we break them. Let's not continue to set ourselves up for failure.
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Last week's eTip outlined how a tiny amount of time in doing the "little extras" will:
- increase client satisfaction
- encourage more work
- yield referrals
- cement valuable and satisfying relationships.
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Being marketing minded means investing energy and a small amount of time in doing the "little extras".
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Teaching may be the pinnacle of selling. Educating the world at large, your target market, referral sources, clients, and prospective clients about why they need what you can expertly do for them is the highest and purest form of marketing.
An education approach really helps with need recognition. If your market doesn’t know it has a problem - or isn’t aware of the extent or impact of the problem it confronts - it isn’t ready to buy expertise to solve the problem.
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An angry client is not usually a threat to your practice.
If a client is sufficiently angry to make it visible to you - letters of complaint, phone complaints, angry feedback on client surveys - they probably have enough emotional attachment to you and/or your firm to care about restoring a good working relationship.
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Reputation, profile, and brand are preliminary backdrops which make you appealing and attractive from afar - they turn you into a professional in whom a client or prospective client may have heightened interest. Rapport is that sweet spot at the intersection of showing lots of interest, asking plenty of questions, sharing information, and giving advice.
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Some marketing campaigns make firms feel good. Some make the firms look good. Some help produce sales.
But professional service firms can't simply leave business development to the marketing department !
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Sometimes still referred to as charities, community organisations, or clubs, this not-for-profit “third sector” is vast.
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Sometimes nerve-wracking and mostly requiring a fair amount of effort and preparation, presentations are not the easiest thing in the world for everyone. But these proven techniques - open secrets - will make a positive difference.
Make your next presentation more effective by taking this good advice.
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There are mailing lists… and then there are mailing lists. One is built of clients, contacts, and people interested in what you have to mail and say. The other kind is a mailing list cobbled together from anyone and everyone - people with whom you don’t have any real connections in terms of shared interests.
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Effective business development is about far more than merely getting work. It's about getting the right opportunities to service and satisfy the right clients for the right rewards.
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It’s a thorny problem when you’re called on to break news to clients that their key lawyer or service professional is about to depart.
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Keen business developers often ask our advice about how to fire up their colleagues. Here are some conversation-starters and stimuli to help you get your colleagues to "think business development".
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“Get out there - make as many contacts as you can - follow them all up - don’t give up on any of them - network like crazy - the more contacts you make the better your chance of getting new business.” This is not sage advice for selling more of your expert professional services !
If you are playing a numbers game, think again. Refocus on more effective and more satisfying techniques for developing business.
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Work on professional behaviour in client interactions. Every client contact matters, but some matter exquisitely.
Professional firm reputations, branding, facilities, systems, and policies don't create the chemistry with clients: they're just a backdrop to all-important moment-by-moment professional encounters with clients.
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Whatever the chosen strategy for your professional services firm or professional practice, the more sharply focused, rigorously defined, carefully articulated, and clearly communicated, the greater its prospects of success.
Build strategy around a sound value proposition for clients, and you’ll have a sharp and resonant message which your clients will want - and need - to hear.
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You may not always delight your clients, but make sure you never disappoint them. Be certain not to let clients down.
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Whether a tender response, proposal submission, or presentation to a prospective client, be sure that the material you include performs as you want rather than just occupying space.
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Credentials documents, client lists, expertise summaries and service descriptions are all helpful pieces of marketing collateral, but impact is increased powerfully by case studies, hypotheticals, and well-drawn anecdotes.
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Professional service firms tell us they know their clients, understand what they want, and that some end clients are just permanently dissatisfied. Those same end clients tell us that they say what they want, are clear about what they expect, but that too often their professional advisers miss the point or just don’t “get it”.
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Your clients and prospective clients probably won't remember all the facts and information you give to them, but they will remember precisely how they felt about you and what you told them. Through history, humans have been programmed to respond to storytelling.
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