The Professional Services Dilema
We have been working with professional services firms since 2005 to help them win more new business
Started with a heavy focus on marketing service firms and have since branched out into other professional services sectors.
When I first started helping marketing agencies, I quickly realized how much alike they all were. I also quickly discovered that what the principal of the firm thought was unique (relative to how they positioned themselves and talked about their benefits and value), wasn’t unique at all.
“Hard working”, “senior talent”, “highly strategic” were among the many things firms felt differentiated them. But reality was, it didn’t.
Being “hard working”, offering “senior talent”, and selling how “strategic” your firm is are all things that a client would recognize and see value in after they bring a new professional services firm on board.
It’s not something that is a differentiating selling proposition for a firm when making first contact with a prospect. Any firm can make the claim.
Not every firm can deliver – but that never stops firms from making the claim.
As we talked with accounting firms, and law firms, and IT and software development firms, we quickly discovered that the challenges facing the marketing service space was no different than that in the broader universe of professional services firms.
The differentiators versus the “non”
We have identified 5 central tenant questions that can help a professional services brand differentiate itself in a sea of sameness.
We can help you work your way through this exercise or you can do it yourself
Answering these five questions can quickly identify the critically meaningful components that can help distinguish your business from those you compete with.
- Why would someone want to sit down and talk with you in a first meeting or call?
- What technical or categorical expertise do you possess?
- What are the unique or different ways you can talk about what you do, beyond the standard/typical descriptor?
- When in competitive reviews, why do you most often win new business?
- What are the top 3 business challenges your firm solves for their clients?
The key is objectivity and diversity
Share these questions with your team members, gather up their responses and you’ll be amazed at the differences you’ll encounter!
And don’t just look to get your marketing team or strategy team (or point being, any one single team in the company) to be the only ones answering the questions. Look to some outlier teams to get a broader, more diversified scope of perspective.
And we also recommend sharing the questions with your clients/customers and see how they respond. Again the differences will likely be stunning.
Bring the team together and open up a meaningful and passionate dialogue about the responses. Have respondents stand up and present and support their responses.
And the last thing you want is for your group to feel like they can’t objectively share their opinions and can’t openly challenge others’ opinions.
Creating an environment of trust and openness is the key to successfully landing on a better way to talk about your brand or your firm.
If looking for some help, we can support the initiative.
We can certainly help you carry this exercise all the way through to the end – helping you define the right way to talk about your firm, what you do, and what you do that really sets you apart from other firms in your space.’
I’ve been doing work like this for the past 20 years and plan on doing it for another 20 more!
Happy to talk if there’s interest (mark@rswus.com).
