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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On Being 100%: A Social Media Tale

By Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.

Yesterday, I turned 100. More precisely, my LinkedIn profile registered at 100% complete. If you are a social media butterfly this may not seem like much of an accomplishment. But for me it was a big deal. You see, for many moons I hoovered around 40% and didn’t much care. I couldn’t see the benefit, nor did I know the way to reach this lofty goal.

So what changed to awaken me from my social media slumber? Two things, really. First, the world changed. My colleagues pointed to the need to understand and embrace social media as an important part of brand building and marketing. They were right, of course. The data were unambiguous and persuasive. If you are running a professional services firm you know it too.

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Too Many Referrals?

By Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.

Can there be such a thing as too many referrals? After all, referral business is the mother’s milk of professional services business development. Referral leads close faster and more easily than leads from any other source. And referral business usually means you have satisfied clients. So referral business is good and non-referral business is ... not so good?

This seems to be the prevailing wisdom. I’ve seen many professional services websites and pitch decks that tout their firms’ high rates of referral business. Well there is another side to the story.

While referral business should be an important component of any well balanced marketing plan, there are some downsides to a referrals-only diet.

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The Differentiation Difference

By Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.

Everybody knows that you’re suppose to differentiate your firm if you want to be successful, right? That’s what they teach you in business school. You’re suppose to reel off what makes your firm different as an integral part of your elevator pitch.

Apparently a lot of professional services marketers haven’t internalized that message. In our recently released research on high growth professional services firms, we found that most firms say they have a differentiator. But when they describe it, only about one in ten firms really comes across as different.

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