ROBIN’S BLOG
Robin has 30 years of professional and financial services marketing experience. Here he provides commentary about some of the key evolving issues within professional services strategy and marketing. The aim is to provoke thinking and provide useful information that marketers can use within their firms as they continue to improve performance.
thriving… Improving marketing, business development, client satisfaction, and financial performance.
Client insight – some self-review questions
I recently wrote a piece on questions that firms should ask themselves, when reviewing their level of client insight. Here are some of them in case helpful for anyone as a check-list. Can your activities be improved to better answer these issues?
* What are the most profitable opportunities?
* What is the potential demand for new specialisms?
* Where should the firm position itself to gain more profitable business?
* How can more revenue be generated from the current client portfolio?
* How can we reduce client loss?
* In which clients is there untapped potential for more work?
* How can we improve the return from marketing and BD?
* How can we ensure all of our investments – including training and CPD – help improve revenue growth and profitability?
“They should have asked me 5 years ago!”
In our work in talking to clients of professional services firms, we mainly identify opportunities, risks, and key actions that the firm can take to strengthen or extend the relationship.
Occasionally we don’t though. A few weeks ago I spoke to a client of a firm who gave really powerful, valuable feedback about his experience of a firm. He also said, however that he had progressively reduced his use of the firm in 2 out of the 3 specialisms he needed.
The sobering thing is that, had the firm known about his reasons behind this earlier, they could have easily done something about it. As he said “they should have asked me 5 years ago…but now it is too late”.
Its a simple example perhaps but just reminded me very clearly of the need to ensure you have recent feedback from (at least) your most financially significant clients.
Thought leadership…an update
A while back, I wrote about how thought leadership was potentially very powerful but was being misused by some firms (who consequently did not secure the benefits they hoped for).
There’s a useful update on this which I saw recently in an article in the Legal Futures website (though the points are applicable across all professional services).
The authors note some more important elements to getting this right, and also some interesting research into the impact on decision makers and senior executives.
It’s worth taking a look and thinking if the suggestions can improve the effectiveness of your own activity.
New people. New services. New website. Same ethos.
It’s great to tell you about some of the ways Thriving has evolved and enhanced our capability to help firms improve their strategic, financial and marketing performance.
New people. We have two new associates – Genevieve Broutechoux and Shobha Bentley. Genevieve has over 20 years experience of in-depth research and, as a native French speaker, means we can now provide high quality French language research for those with clients where this is a better option than English.
Shobha joining as an associate also means that our ability to provide independent advice on CRM systems as well as providing effective CRM processes, data management and training is enhanced. Shobha provides our data audit service as well.
New services. Our services always recognise that growing a firm through successful marketing and business development is profoundly based on what people do, more so than what they say.
So in the past year we’ve developed greater capability in running employee surveys, as well as our improved online client feedback approach, ClearerView. We’ve added easy to access diagnostic tools which allow a firm, a practice, an HR function, a marketing function or even an individual fee earner to understand how they can improve the effectiveness of their own BD effort.
We’ve also got a new website. To be honest, the old one didn’t allow easy access to the range of things we did and was difficult to read on devices. We’ve sorted that out, and at the same time gained a fresh visual identity. The downside is the photos now show how old I am.
The same ethos. Thriving remains absolutely focused on diligent, thoughtful, and realistic help to help your firm grow in a way that works for your, your clients, and prospects – through appropriate not over-hyped techniques. Many clients have commented that we seem to care more and work harder for them than alternatives. Please give us a call or email me at to find out more.
Its still about what people do…
For most professional services firms, successful growth remains driven by how well aligned marketing, business development and the activities of fee earners are – and, of course, how well they are executed.
But it’s not a perfect world: what is there is a gap in the key activities you cover, or people duplicate effort, or the person responsible for the activity doesn’t have the skills (or desire) to do it?
Effectiveness declines.
Accountability, ability and appetite. Not all is lost if you don’t have all 3, and people can still drive results. But you do need to understand where people are at and how to maximise the impact of what you do.
How can you optimise the effectiveness of all the people involved in the marketing and BD effort?
Phil Gott, my colleague in the Winning Firm Alliance, and I have created a diagnostic which very inexpensively and quickly identifies how the whole firm, a practice/team, or an individual can really enhance the results from their activity.
Contact me if you’d like more information on 44 (0)7940 886677 or at robin @ thrivingcompany.co.uk
Affiliate marketing – a cautionary tale
As part of the family holiday preparation I “volunteered” to get the Euros we needed. “Luckily” my mobile network provider sent me information about the special deal available to their members via a well known high street name. All good, one would think so I dutifully queued up one lunchtime two days before our departure to get the special rate.
Nearly an hour later I emerged; no-one in the branch knew how to process the deal; once they had made several calls it turned out that the deal was of less benefit to me than promised, and definitely not enough to have spent an hour on. My loyalty has reduced a couple of notches.
This isn’t a pure professional services example but it’s still a good reminder that while affiliate marketing and partnerships can be great, if effective communication and joint effort is lacking, they can be counterproductive.
“There is too much data…data for the sake of data is the last thing anyone needs”
We recently completed a study titled “Big data – the truth in professional services” as part of our focus on capturing what really drives results (rather than what is “hyped”).
We found that big data may now be a cliché BUT effective data management to aid better decision making by a firm, and the provision of better value to clients, is unequivocally important. Also interesting is the sheer variety in approaches being taken by different firms, partly based on very different starting points and objectives.
However, any firm that generates high value for the firm and/or clients from its data management efforts performs these 4 “SECT” aspects effectively:
- Strategic vision, programme management, sponsorship and accountability
- Effective education and engagement
- Clearly defined data needs, referenced to clients and the marketplace
- The right choices about data items, processes and people
How does your firm do?
Legal comparison sites – broader implications for managing partners and marketers across professional services?
An interesting article on Legal Futures noted that the Legal Services Board has secured agreement from regulators to publish information in a way that can be used by comparison websites.
Is the volume of transactions that would be referenced on sites, for any but the larger, more private client focused firms, truly sufficient to create a “legal trip advisor”? However, as the author says, “Even if we don’t see full-blown comparison websites, the market will shift towards consumers demanding greater transparency and more information about the quality of service they expect to get from a legal practice.“
The overall direction is undoubtedly true; people in both corporate and personal life are using social media to gain a better understanding of the quality and service of legal as well as other professional services firms. This is something managing partners and marketers need to be thinking about. It generates a potential gain – but also a potential risk if you don’t understand your current performance and are not getting the more detailed feedback from clients that would allow you to improve it.
Strategic Relationships with clients?
Intelligent Insurer magazine recently reported that larger buyers of reinsurance are forming “closer and deeper relationships with their bigger reinsurance partners”.
This aligns with some of the messages coming though from a project we are undertaking with a reinsurer currently. It also represents a broader truth that we see coming from that, and many other projects in the professional and financial services sectors that we have run, including for law firms and accountants.
Clients are acutely interested in that element of added value that distinguishes one supplier – or partner – from another. Reducing time or complexity in managing different supplier relationships is valued – but provided the chosen key suppliers can demonstrate reliability and this deeper understanding of the client’s aims and how to help them get there.
Enabling fee earners and business developers to do this should be considered as a key aspects of a firm’s approach.
An accountant says…that law firms needs to spend more
Or, to quote author Robert Mowbray more fully from the Nat West financial benchmarking report, “For firms that have spent the last five years believing that in order to make more money they need to spend less, it may now be difficult to believe they may need to spend more to make more.”
You can click on further coverage of the report here; as well as points about investment and margin, it also emphasises the importance of cash management and understanding the key drivers of profitability.
For an alternative view on profitability and to assess how well your firm is positioned to achieve profitable growth, click and access the Thriving self-review diagnostic here.