How 90 Minutes in a Hot Room Can Help Your Business

By Sylvia Montgomery

Many of us have come to accept that some form of exercise is needed to maintain a healthy lifestyle. After experimenting with a number of routines, I’ve settled on Bikram yoga. What is most interesting about Bikram is the condition in which you practice it — a fairly large studio room set at a temperature of 105–118 degrees and approximately 40% humidity. It’s a total mind–body struggle that lasts 90 minutes in which students perform 26 poses, two sets each.

Lying on my mat during a recent class, it dawned on me that marketing, especially in professional services, is a mind–body struggle, too. All of the activities that you know your firm should be doing from a marketing and business development perspective become the “mind,” while the day-to-day fires become the “body.”

When running a professional services firm, there is a constant struggle between delivering a piece of business today and a more strategic activity like clarifying your differentiation or understanding what your clients say about your firm. The “body” focuses on today while the “mind” knows there are activities it should be doing but is neglecting.

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Social Media and Your Professional Services Marketing Mix

By Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.

It seems that just about every conversation I have with a professional services CEO these days eventually turns toward social media. Now perhaps it’s because I’m a social media butterfly (those of you who know me can stop convulsing with laughter now). No, I think it’s because social media is a topic so pervasive in the press (business and popular) that we feel like we’re missing out if we don’t embrace it.

As leaders of our firms, we should be… well, leading. Then along comes this phenomenon — time intensive, intimidating, and not clearly related to important business outcomes. Is it just an expensive waste of time? So we talk amongst ourselves, looking for something solid to grab on to.

Well here’s something solid. A new study on Integrating Social Media into the Marketing Mix was just published by ITSMA. If your not familiar with ITSMA, it’s the association focused on marketing IT services. The survey is comprehensive (277 slides!), but I want to focus on just a handful of take-aways.

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Should Your Services be Free?

By Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.

It’s a provocative question to be sure, but one that you may have to face sooner than you imagine. I’ve just finished reading Chris Anderson’s new book Free:The Future of a Radical Price. Chris Anderson is the editor of Wired magazine and the author of another very influential best seller The Long Tail about the market potential of very niche products in the internet age.

In Free, Anderson argues that the rapidly falling cost of internet based products and services is having a major impact on business models in general and pricing in particular. While this is easy to see in the world of search or data storage, how does “free” impact professional services? By my reading, there are two key impacts.

First, “information wants to be free,” as Anderson aptly observes. What once was knowledge “closely held” by professionals is now a Google search away. From health care to technology, the information barriers are coming down.

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The Deer Hunter as Professional Services Marketer

By Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.

Sometimes you hear a metaphor that just seems to work. That’s the experience participants had at a recent CEO Roundtable where we were discussing Hinge’s recently released study on High Growth, High Value professional services firms. We were discussing how professional services firms that conduct frequent research on their target client groups often grow faster and are more profitable.

As you might imagine, folks were very interested to explore how this relationship worked and exactly why. What kind of research? Why would greater knowledge of target clients impact growth? How would it impact profits? The discussion was spirited. Finally one of the participants offered a metaphor that made the relationship obvious.

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Marketing Tools For High Growth Firms

By Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.

Our recently released study on High Growth professional services firms identified high performers that were growing almost 9 times faster than average firms, were 50% more profitable yet spent less than average on business development. In previous posts we discussed the counterintuitive strategies they employ and their unusually strong client targeting. Now let’s open their marketing tool kit and see how they leverage their limited budgets.

The first thing to note is that the High Growth firms already have a strong advantage even before they start. Because they tend to specialize and have a well defined target client they have fewer people to reach. They also know a lot more about those potential clients, their needs and priorities. The same amount of money spent on reaching 1,000 target prospects goes a lot further than if you are trying to reach 100,000. Further, if know in detail what those 1,000 prospects experience every day and what their priorities are, it is much easier to craft a message that is relevant and compelling.

Here are six tools favored by High Growth firms:

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Client Targeting Drives Growth and Profitability

By Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.

You’ve heard it a million times before: to build a commanding reputation you need to narrowly target your prospects. But you probably don’t really believe it. After all, if a potential client goes to your website and sees that you specialize in a different type of client, won’t that turn them off? (Answer: yes, it probably will.) So most firms write their target client description to be as broad as possible. It seems safer. But does it really work?

Well, we have an answer to that question and it comes from our new research study, The High Growth Professional Services Firm. These firms grow 9 times faster, are 50% more profitable, yet spend slightly less than average on marketing and sales. How do they do it? As we covered in a recent post, one of the keys is strategy. High growth firms are much more likely to use counterintuitive approaches, such as narrow specialization, and tend to have easily understood, believable differentiators. But that’s only part of the answer.

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