Are you making the most of great ideas within your firm?

I have just heard a fantastic story, which has got me thinking about where we get great ideas from. Apparently Japanese school girls can be partly thanked for the advent of texting.

The story goes that, when cell phones were prohibitively expensive, Japanese school girls bought pagers and developed number codes to send to each other. So: 111378 might mean “I’ll meet you at 8pm”. The phone companies got wind of this and significantly increased their investment and development of SMS technology.

How true this is, I’m not sure (Wikipedia has a far more technical, and probably accurate, version of why we are addicted to texting). However, it got me thinking about the ways in which we tap into ideas to market our businesses.

More often than not the ways in which we formally market or develop our businesses are led from the top – the CEO, business owners, or the marketing or business development teams.

But good ideas can come from anywhere and everyone should be actively encouraged to share their ideas with the firm:

• Use your wider team to generate ideas on how to connect with clients.

• Take advantage of the similar demographics that exist between your team members and clients, to understand what might be appropriate.

• Encourage the development of relationships at all levels – for example many relationships rely on a great understanding and connection between key support staff, for example secretaries/PAs.

• Develop incentives internally to encourage marketing and brand building behaviour. Try competitions between teams to see which team can achieve the most client contact over a period of time.

• Encourage teams to identify areas in which they would like marketing /BD skills training, for example if they feel nervous about attending events, offer them networking training.

How do you continue to generate enthusiasm and ideas for building your business? Where have some of the best ideas come from?

Have you challenged your wider teams to develop their own ideas?

5 pillars of LinkedIn success

Have you ever noticed that there are some people who just seem to use LinkedIn really well? They’re the people you follow even though you’ve never met them, whose content you open because you know they provide good quality information, and who you suspect are getting good returns on their investment/engagement.

But, what is it that makes them so successful?

A number of these people were kind enough to agree to be case studies for some seminars I ran on social media for professional services firms. I noticed they, and others who I follow, are doing some similar things:

1. They have a clear plan – they know who their target audience is, what their goals are, and how they will measure the return on their investment/engagement. They are putting their plan into practice every day.
2. Their profiles are complete and compelling.
3. They regularly share good content, that’s of interest to their target audience. This includes both content they’ve generated as well as information others have produced. They usually have a blog as the repository for their content.
4. They regularly contribute to relevant group discussions and give away tips and good ideas for free. They ask questions and really engage with others. They make their target audience think. Often they ask questions designed to generate inbound leads in the areas in which they want those leads – thus pre-qualifying prospects.
5. They seek to move the relationships beyond LinkedIn – for example, by following up a discussion via LinkedIn email, sending something related to the topic you’ve been discussing, or setting up a time to talk. Their approach is intelligent and polite.

If you want to leverage LinkedIn successfully, I strongly believe that following these five pillars will take you a long way. And if you want to learn from some masters in the professional services space, I recommend you follow (or at least take a look at):

Adam Gordon

Robert Algeri

Kate Billing

Promod Sharma

Cordell Parvin

Nancy Myrland

What are the other secrets of successful LinkedIn users in the professional services space? 

Who else would you recommend following in this area? 

Great tools to help you with your social media efforts: part 1

Over the past 18 months, we’ve spent a lot of time looking for tools to help us with our social media efforts.  Some have been recommended to us ,while others we simply stumbled across while trying to find solutions to particular issues.

Here are the first 5 that we particularly like, that might help you:

1. Namechk.com – are your company and personal brands protected in the social media space? Namechk is a great little tool that lets you know on which social media sites a name is registered.

2. claim.io – this allows you to own your name on 300 social media sites (not that you will use, or ever use, all of them but unless you want to protect your name on the main sites yourself this is a real time saver). This makes it easier for your target audience to find you and protects you from name squatting and identity fraud, minimising risk to your brand.

3. hootsuite.com – this is a real time-saver as you can access all your social media sites in one place. I find it really useful when I want to share information across multiple platforms or to pre-schedule posts (as you can set these up in advance). I would advise using Hootsuite to post information to multiple platforms/groups with caution as you will usually want to tweak your heading/introduction to ensure it’s relevant to a particular audience.

4. bit.ly – allows you to shorten and share your links. This is especially important if you are sharing information via Twitter as you only have space for 140 characters and if you want your tweets to be retweeted then others need space to do so. I really like the fact you can go to bit.ly and get a real-time summary of how many people have clicked on a particular link.

5. addtoany.com – a great sharing button that you can add to your blog, website posts etc. so that others can easily share your content with their contacts.

Have you found any of the above tools useful? What other tools would you recommend and why?

Do you learn from your wins as well as your losses?

Tom Kane, in his legal marketing blog, published a great post about learning from departing clients as well as from opportunities you miss out on. He provided some good advice about conducting ‘loss reviews’ and keeping channels of communication open with prospects and clients who choose to go elsewhere.

While it’s true that you learn a lot from your ‘losses’, I also believe you can learn a lot from your wins. As well as conducting ‘loss reviews’ I would also recommend professional services firms conduct ‘win reviews’ in order to find out:

• why the client selected you,
• what aspects of your approach and style they liked, and
• what could be improved.

This is particularly important in a competitive tender situation. We had a client who won a major contract through a rigorous RFP process. We interviewed the company following our client’s win and found out some great information our client has been able to apply to future tenders. What was particularly interesting is that the reasons our client believed they had won, were not the reasons at all!

My rule of thumb is ‘don’t assume’. It’s easy to ask new clients (however you win them) why they chose to work with you and to seek their input into how you could improve your new business process. However, a word of caution: don’t take feedback from one win/loss review as gospel – clients have differing likes/dislikes and so you will need to use your judgement about what is likely to resonate with a particular target going forwards – the more you know about your prospective client, coupled with your past feedback, the better you will be able to tailor your approach to each opportunity.

And if you don’t get the work, as Tom said in his post – “losing a client does not have to be a total loss”. Here’s our two cents worth:

1. If you pitch for a piece of business and miss out, conduct a loss review. Find out what the prospects decision making criteria were, how you performed against these, what they liked about your pitch, what they thought could be improved, what the winning person/team did that made them stand out, and any other suggestions the prospect has for future pitches.
2. If a client (that you value) leaves you, find out the reasons why and what, if anything, you would need to do to work with them again in the future.
3. When you lose a piece of work, give the person a call after three months to find out how things are going for him/her. Make sure you send them information of value to them occasionally along with a personal note.
4. If a bill remains unpaid for longer than 30 days, call the client to find out if they were happy with the work you did. Don’t just follow up the unpaid invoice. Use it as an opportunity to evaluate your service.

I strongly believe that obtaining client/prospect and referrer feedback, wherever possible, is invaluable to building your business and improving your client service.

Learn from your wins and your existing clients so that you minimise the losses. But, when you do lose a client or a piece of work, learn from that too – and never assume it’s a permanent move – you may have to work hard, but you can win them back.

Do you conduct win/loss reviews on a regular basis? If so, how have these helped your business?

What advice would you give to others starting this process for the first time?

Why should we ask our clients what they think of our service?

“We work with them all the time. We already know what they think of us”. This is one of the most common objections we hear from professionals about conducting client feedback exercises. However, when questioned, this perception is often based on assumptions rather than hard evidence.

When you are working regularly with clients, it is easy to believe that you have a good understanding of the relationship, and how the client views the relationship. But unless you ask your clients, you will never know for sure.

I strongly believe independent client feedback exercises are vital if you want to strengthen your relationships with your clients and increase your share of wallet. These should be conducted in addition to CEO/Managing Partner discussions with the client and in addition to fee earner conversations – which are also important discussions to have.

So, why are independent client feedback exercises so important?

Because they give the client the opportunity to speak openly and candidly about what’s important to them, the state of the relationship, their understanding of your business and what they’d like to see from you going forwards. It’s vital that the interviewer is perceived as independent and impartial and that the process is seen by the client as more than simply a ‘marketing exercise’.

Having conducted client reviews/feedback interviews both as an employee of a law firm and independently as a consultant, I’ve found clients have been much more open and honest since I’ve been engaged externally.

So, having established that you need to seek the feedback, you need to have specific goals in mind, in order to ask the right questions. Client reviews not only tell you what’s important to your clients and how you’re performing vis a vis a range of criteria, but they also enable you to benchmark your performance year-on-year and to focus your marketing efforts on those things that will make the biggest difference to your clients.

12 good reasons to conduct client reviews are to uncover:

1. What is the true state of each of our client relationships?
2. How well did a particular project/matter go from the client’s perspective?
3. Why are we only getting a portion of a client’s work?
4. Why are revenues from this client declining?
5. How do clients and influencers perceive us? What is our current brand positioning?
6. How closely are the firm’s brand and one individual’s personal brand linked?
7. How are our competitors perceived and what does the market say our competitive advantage is?
8. How can we get into a specific market?
9. Why are we not winning business in a particular sector?
10. How can we win work before it goes to tender?
11. How aware is the market of the range of services we provide?
12. What are the client’s priorities over the coming year and how can we support them?

Clients, and other stakeholders, like to be asked for feedback. Conducting reviews demonstrates you value your relationship with them.  Provided there is appropriate follow-up, the process will enable you to strengthen your relationships and  build client loyalty.

Do you conduct client (and other stakeholder) feedback exercises? If not, remember others do.

How have client feedback exercises helped your business?

You’ve been recommended to a prospective client along with others: how can you tip the level playing field in your favour?

Imagine that you’ve been recommended by a client or contact to another prospective client. He/she has also been given the names of two of your competitors. You’ve all received glowing recommendations. It’s a level playing field – so how can you tip it in your favour?

It’s highly likely that, prior to meeting you, the prospective client will conduct a web search so the question you need to ask is: what will he/she find under your name?

Try it yourself and see. While your website profile is likely to be up there, your social media profiles are too – and they may even appear before your website profile. That’s because search engines, like google, rank social media pages highly. It’s therefore vital that your LinkedIn profile (and Twitter and Facebook if you use them for business purposes) is compelling and complete (see our earlier blog post for tips on how to develop a compelling LinkedIn profile).

You want the prospective client to get a sense of:

• who you help
• how you help them
• some of the results you’ve achieved, and
• who you are as a person

on both your website and social media platforms. If you want to persuade them that you are the right person for the job then you also need to seek to demonstrate your expertise before you’ve even met them.

How can you do that?

By regularly sharing useful and timely content that’s relevant to your target audience(s) and that demonstrates your understanding of your subject area(s) etc.

In order to really tip the level playing field in your favour we recommend you use a variety of online and traditional channels to share the content – both that you have generated and that others have produced – including LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, seminars, Podcasts, video, newsalerts, articles etc and that you have an online repository for the  information you share online. While this may be your website, if you find that your website doesn’t easily allow content to be uploaded, or doesn’t enable it to be linked to your bio/profile, you may want to look for alternatives such as a blog.

By ensuring your LinkedIn (and other profiles) are compelling, by regularly sharing relevant, useful and timely content, and ensuring this is easily accessible, you will be able to tip the level playing field in your favour.

If it does come down to an interview then it will be yours to lose. And that’s a much stronger position to be in than the alternative.

So, what will your target audience find if they search your name? Have you won work as a result of a content marketing strategy?

Is your marketing spend providing a return to your business?

Often clients come to us when they want to ‘do some marketing’. When questioned about what, where and why, the answers are often vague and unsure, but what they do know is that they need to do ‘something’. Marketing budgets are tight so they need to be targeted and add value to your business.

So how do you decide what is right for your business?

Often the easiest marketing activities are also the least valuable. This isn’t to say they don’t cost a lot, just that they may not provide value to your business. Some of the most common ‘high cost / low value’ spend we see includes:

• Sponsorship of an event or entity
• Hosting a dinner or drinks evening
• Advertising in magazine or newspaper

Any and all of these activities may be valid and valuable if they are part of an overall programme which is positioning your organisation in a strategic space. However, all too often the reasons for doing this type of marketing we hear are ‘because we’ve always done it’ or ‘because if we don’t our competition will’ or ‘because the client (or our senior manager / partner) expects it’.

If you are sponsoring a local fishing competition, hosting a wine tasting evening, and running brand advertisements in a daily newspaper, with random and differing targets in mind, you are likely to be getting far less return on your investment than a targeted approach.

However, if you are positioning yourself within an industry sector and, as part of that position you sponsor the annual conference, host a CEO dinner of target companies and clients within the sector, and advertise the value you provide that sector in their industry magazine, then you will be getting greater value from that marketing spend.

Don’t forget, you should always (at least) double the $ value you will have to pay of any sponsorship / event / advertising to get the real cost. For example, if a sponsorship costs $5000 you need $5000 to leverage that sponsorship to any effect.

So when you are reviewing your marketing budgets and looking for the things that ‘must stay’ ensure you are looking for the value, not just the historical or fear-driven reason for the spend.

What marketing activities do you get the most value from? What do you suspect you are doing purely out of habit?

Can you get business by being on LinkedIn?

No you can’t…not just by being on LinkedIn.

However, you can get business as a result of your activities on LinkedIn. If you regularly engage with your target audience(s), ask questions, promote others, share valuable content, start to build relationships…and then develop these relationships offline, you can generate work.

How do I know? Because I’ve given work to people I’ve never actually met but have engaged with on LinkedIn. This includes:

• attending a free webinar offered by someone in a LinkedIn group I belong to and then paying for the next installment. The thing is this person didn’t just offer their webinar. They shared some really useful tips and content first. Because I’d been able to read their articles and watch their videos I was able to determine that they knew their stuff. So when they offered the webinar, I really wanted to attend and, when they offered the next step at a cost, I was happy to pay because the free webinar was of real value.

I’ve also had discussions with others on LinkedIn and then continued the discussions offline (in person and via Skype).  All of them have been really impressive (and I suspected they would be because I liked the content they were sharing and their comments on LinkedIn). As a result I’ve recommended some of them to my clients and friends where appropriate and wouldn’t hesitate to put them in touch with anyone needing their particular skill sets.

And I’ve also found opportunities as a result of my LinkedIn activities.

• I’m a regular contributor to a monthly newsletter which is distributed to around 6500 accountants in Australasia
• I’m helping to develop a webinar
• I’ve presented to lawyers and accountants on topics I have commented on, including social media, and I’ve generated work as a result of these.

The opportunities haven’t come about simply by being on LinkedIn, but they have come about as a result of consistently engaging with others, taking the relationships offline and giving away some of my better ideas for free.

How can you make LinkedIn work for you?

• Be clear about what you want to achieve – have a plan.
• Use LinkedIn to get the right people into your sales funnel. Qualify them by asking questions about issues you want to assist people with (your network updates and initiating group discussions are great ways to do this). Those who engage with you in these discussions are likely to be interested in the same topics.
• Find ways to take the relationship offline – such as suggesting a coffee to further discuss an issue if a person is local or setting up a time to talk via phone/skype to find out more about what they do.
• Be curious – ask questions, and regularly seek others input and opinions.
• Be authentic – be yourself and be honest.
• Engage with others consistently – it takes time to build credibility, relationships and trust. And you have to be in it for the long haul…don’t expect things to happen overnight.
• Focus on how you can help others rather than how they can help you. Share content others produce that may be of value to your contacts, find out more about the other person, what they’re doing, who their ideal client is etc.
• Integrate your LinkedIn activities with your other marketing and business development initiatives both online and offline.

Like all marketing and business development activity, the more you engage, the more likely you are to see results.

Have you generated business for yourself, or for others, as a result of connecting through Linkedin? Do you have other tips on how to turn the connections into workflows?

Do you under-promise and over-deliver…or the reverse?

When we interview clients of professional services firms one of the themes that comes through, time and time again, is the need to understand, and manage, each client’s expectations on every piece of work you do for them.

We’ve put together 11 tips below to help you do just that. These are based on things that clients have told us they would like their professional advisers to do:

1. Find out your client’s expectations up front – including what do they want to achieve, what do they need from you, by when, in what format, what’s their budget, how frequently would they like meetings/updates and in what format?

2. Build in contingencies – when you set your timelines, wherever possible you should build in extra time to allow for ‘unforeseen circumstances’. However, if you are unable to deliver to original deadlines you must manage your client’s expectations early – ideally as soon as you become aware of the issue.

3. Provide a quote or cost estimate up front as well as a reverse brief setting out what you understand their needs and your role to be. Set out who their key point(s) of contact will be and who will be working on the file, including contact details.

4. Inform your own team of  the client’s expectations and what you expect from them. This includes other advisers you may be working alongside – agree how you will work as a team for the client’s benefit.

5. When issues arise, inform the client early. Always come to the client with solutions or options if problems have arisen – don’t make the problem solely the client’s issue.

6. If the scope of work changes, or unforeseen issues occur which have cost implications, let the client know early so that, together, you can agree a way forwards.

7. Let the client know of planned absences or dates/times when you will be unavailable well in advance and make sure they know who their point of contact will be in your absence.

8. Always try to deliver work early. However, if you are up against a deadline e.g. if the client wants the work next Wednesday, ensure you deliver it to them by midday on the Wednesday at the latest. Don’t leave it until 5pm as the client won’t realistically be able to do anything with it until the next day. You’d be amazed how many clients have mentioned similar scenarios in client reviews we’ve conducted and how frustrated this makes them feel.

9. Ensure you deliver what the client needs. For example if you’re a lawyer, does your client want an answer, a short opinion or a 20 pager? Deliver your advice in a format the client can use. This will depend on what they will do with your advice – if they need to present it to their Board deliver it as a Board report, if they need to get internal buy-in for something ensure your advice is structured persuasively considering the business and personal needs of those it needs to persuade.

10. Reflect your firm and personal values in everything you do.

11. Conduct face-to-face end of project/matter reviews after all large or strategically important work as well as a certain number for key clients or new clients. You can then keep doing the things that work well and tweak your service wherever necessary.

Do you agree with these? What other tips would you share?

Should you connect with people you don’t really know on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn says ‘no’: but I’ve recently been part of a group discussion on LinkedIn on this very topic and it seems people are divided. There appear to be three schools of thought:

 

1. Those who only connect with people they know (i.e. have met in person) because they want to be able to introduce their connections to others in their network and vice versa, they see LinkedIn as a networking aid rather than a network per-se, or their objective is to keep in touch with existing contacts.
2. Those (a minority group) who are happy to connect freely with others because they see LinkedIn as a giant search engine and the more people they are connected to the greater their reach. They see anyone as a potential referrer. I have seen this approach work amazingly well for some people – particularly if their product or service appeals to a broad target audience.
3. Those (and this is where I fall) who sit somewhere in between. They will connect, selectively, with those they haven’t actually met based on their own criteria – such as ensuring people are in their industry sector, share valuable content, have been involved in the same discussions etc.

A recent poll of over 11,000 LinkedIn users supports these three schools of thought. It found that 50% of respondents know virtually all their connections, a further 41% know their connections or are selective about accepting those they don’t really know, while the remaining 9% are connected to people they don’t know, either in their field of expertise or more widely.

These findings show how different we all are. Ultimately, you have to do what’s right for you. And that will largely depend on your objectives for being on LinkedIn. There may be very good reasons why you would connect with people you have never met in person.

However, if you want to connect with someone you’ve never actually met, you need to tailor your invitation to connect and provide some context. Explain how you have come across the person and why you would like to connect with them (what’s in it for them?)…and make sure you read their profile first!

Our recommendations:

• Do what’s right for you – if you are on LinkedIn simply to keep up with your current contacts and to introduce them to others in your network, then you probably won’t want to connect with others you don’t really know. However, if you want to grow your business/practice then there may be very good reasons why you might want to expand your network beyond those you have met in person.
• Ensure your firm’s social media policy is flexible enough that it allows people within your organisation, who would benefit from connecting with those they haven’t met in person, to do so – there is no one size fits all approach and it’s very much a personal choice. However, do ensure your team members have a plan and know what is/isn’t acceptable in terms of their social media activities. Clear guidelines and training are great, but then you need to trust them.
• Read peoples’ profiles before you invite them to connect. Tailor your invitation – let the person know how you have come across them and why you want to add them to your network. Think about the benefits to the other person rather than yourself – what’s in it for them?
• If people you don’t know invite you to connect, look at their profile before accepting. Are they someone with whom you want to be associated? Use your own judgment and, if you subsequently realise you shouldn’t have connected with someone, remove them from your network.

What’s your view on connecting with people you haven’t met? For those who have done so, what benefits, if any, have you derived?