Thoughts For Strategy

Byron G. Sabol

(This article appeared in the Winter 1999 edition of Professional Marketing)

  • Today's competitive market has resulted in a more sophisticated consumer of professional services, more concerned with productivity than with long-established relationships and more sensitive to accountability and costs.

  • Of all the marketing and client development activities in which firm partners can invest their time and energy (and the firm's money), an effective face-to-face client review program is the most beneficial to the fee earner, the firm, and the client.

  • Overhead costs comprise a greater percentage of professional service firm operating expenditures than ever before, including investments in information technology, malpractice insurance, marketing, recruiting, and rising first-year associate salaries.
  • Nurture the idea that existing clients are the center of your firm's economic universe.
  • Approximately 10% of all professional service firm clients are ready to leave their existing provider. They are waiting for an attractive overture from a provider who can demonstrate service and/or pricing difference.
  • Client satisfaction is the most visible means of repeat business.
  • Learn to consider personal contacts as primary to business development and use marketing material as secondary support to marketing.
  • By increasing the frequency of face-to-face communications with prospects, more business is generated.
  • Loss of clients can occur without fault at the client level through mergers and change in management.
  • Identify potential clients appearing to have a high level of growth, high profit potential, and low level of competition.
  • Professional service firm facilities are distribution centers to provide services to clients and, therefore, quality control of work product and service delivery needs to be managed firm-wide.
  • Re-emphasize concept that what is good for the Firm is good in the long run for each individual partner.
  • Attitude promoting client-focused mentality and high productivity must be maintained in order to promote new business.
  • Often the most productive billing partner is desirable for committee membership, which may run counter to the firm's business generation interests.
  • Firms engaged in cold-calling are likely calling on someone else's client. Firms need a strategy to protect the work they have with their top clients.
  • Firms lacking an effective business development culture risk losing quality associates and junior fee earners to competing firms. Partners share a responsibility for generating the type of work that will attract and retain quality associates.
  • Build your firm's marketing and client care around an effective client relationship management program.
  • Don't assume that every client partner is an effective manager of client relationships. Ask your clients what they think of the partner in charge of the client relationship.
  • The effectiveness of requests for proposals (RFPs) in communicating the specific needs of the prospective client are only as effective as the ability of the person or persons who developed the written proposal request. Seek opportunities to communicate – preferably in person – with principals of the requesting client to determine underlying reasons for the RFP.
  • Turn client partners into true client relationship managers through skills training.
  • Hold client relationship managers accountable for growing the client relationship wherever possible.
  • Firms lacking an effective client review program are missing significant opportunities to demonstrate that client satisfaction is the number one concern of the firm and to generate new business.
  • When you are unsuccessful in competitive bidding, find out the reasons and correct them. When you are successful in winning new business find out why and build upon those factors.
  • The two most prevalent reasons for client defections: price and fee earner attitude · Invest approximately 90 minutes once a year – every year – with top clients in a face- to-face interview of client satisfaction conducted by someone other than the fee earner who works on that client's matters.
  • The foundation of effective client development remains: skills; achievable strategy; and follow-through. If one of these is missing in the firm's marketing and client care mix, the firm is wasting its time and money in seeking new business.
  • Far too many professional service firms are over managed and under lead.
  • Many service firms talk about cross marketing; few do it well. Strategic client service planning is a proven method for ensuring effective cross marketing of firm services.