Is Your Professional Services Brand Promise a Lie?

By Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.

Is your firm is living a lie? More specifically, is your firm truly delivering on your brand promise?

Your brand promise is what you promise your potential clients you will do. It is either explicit (“your satisfaction is our highest priority”) or implied by everything you do and say, from your tagline to the behavior of your business development team.

Now there are several common ways that professional services firms lie about their brand promise. The most common lie comes in the form of overpromising. Unfullfilled promises are all over professional services websites. Observe all the technical expertise, attentive service and the intense passion for solving clients problems. We are fortunate to be in an industry where everyone is above average! The unfortunate result of this flood of superlatives is that it all becomes unbelievable. Sad but true.

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Government Buyer Tells All

By Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.

Please forgive the tabloid-like headline. I simply couldn’t resist. This story is so revealing and so relevant for professional services firms that want to sell their services to the government I didn’t want it to get lost beneath a less provocative headline.

How valuable would it be to have a top government procurement executive tell you the right way and the wrong way to sell to him? Well, that’s exactly what happened to me this week. Now at Hinge we don’t sell directly to the government, but many of our clients do. So the topic was of intense interest to me.

The procurement executive was none other than the legendary Greg Rothwell. If you are not familiar with him, here’s a brief introduction. Greg recently retired after 34 years in the federal acquisitions community. During that time he served in 10 agencies, including Interior and Treasury. But perhaps his most notable achievement is that he stood up the massive procurement function for the newly created Department of Homeland Security (DHS). He personally developed several of the largest procurement programs in history. After his retirement, Rothwell started a private consulting firm, Evermay Consulting Group so he is now free to tell it like it is.

He did not disappoint. Here are a few of his key insights:

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What You Should be Asking Potential Clients

By Ian Altman, Guest Author

When you are meeting with a potential new client it’s all too easy to fall into a pattern of asking a few well worn questions then rushing to blather on about your firm. This is usually a bad idea. One of the best comments on this very point came from Ian Altman. Ian is a former CEO and now helps firms boost their sales. When I heard him speak at a recent gathering of CXOs it became clear that this is the voice of experience speaking. I immediately asked Ian to guest blog on a few key points. Here’s the first installment…lwf

Want an answer? Ask the question.

A client of mine recently asked me to review three vendors for professional services they needed. As I met with each one, they all started by asking why the organization was seeking their services – good question. I gave each sales team the same answer, and clearly conveyed the issue we faced, the impact to the organization, and the importance of finding a solution quickly. Given what I do for a living, you might suspect that I spent most of the time evaluating what they did and did NOT ask.

There are key questions none of them asked:

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Chris Brogan is a Genius ... and You Can Be One Too

By Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.

Chris Brogan is a genius. I can say this with complete confidence — even in the absence of an IQ test — because I have seen the evidence. And he’s just not your ordinary garden variety genius like Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawkings. No, he comes from a higher plane. He is a marketing genius.

What is this miraculous piece of evidence of which I speak? It’s a blog post entitled “An Author’s Plan for Social Media Efforts”. Now, Brogan may not be Shakespeare, but his piece is a near-perfect example of how to do content driven marketing. If you are a professional services executive or marketer (and if you’re not, why are you reading this blog?), this is a piece of content you can go to school on.

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