Stay In Touch…

Business Development / Featured / Food For Thought / Implementation

I work with a variety of architecture, engineering, and design firms on their business development strategy and implementation. While each client is different, with their own set of strengths, weaknesses, and cultural habits, there are several, reoccurring themes, that seem to present themselves that impact the firm’s business development efforts. One is consistency in staying in touch with key contacts. It baffles me how prevalent not staying in touch is.

I recently started working with a former client, who over the course of the three years of not working together, had lost touch with many of the firms very important prospects and clients. Obviously, when you don’t stay in touch with clients, you lose out on work with them. In a matter of 30 minutes, we reached out to two of the former clients via email and have reconnect meetings set with both. They were happy to hear from us. I anticipate my client will be working with both former clients soon.

I work with a different client who is very good at staying in touch. When clients leave their organization, we reach out to see if we can help them at their new organization. Often, we are delighted to get new work with a new client from a former contact. This client doesn’t have a big budget to be able to use tactics like sponsoring / attending conferences / hosting dinners, so we use phone and email – and it works brilliantly.

I work with yet another client who’s very hit/miss on staying in touch. Within our annual plan, we have a goal to send out 1 eBlast per month. Sometimes 4-5 months go by without any eBlast. The firm’s principals have weekly goals to call specific contacts – again sometimes months go by without any calls made. This up/down approach creates a feast/famine situation, and also indicates to prospects that the firm may be unreliable, inconsistent.

It’s important to put a process in place that helps you stay in touch consistently – maintain a CRM database with accurate phone numbers and email addresses. Send out periodic emails – eBlasts, individual emails, and call your prospects and clients to check in with them. Go visit with your clients over lunch or coffee, or at their office if you don’t have a big budget. Nowadays, clients are happy to have a brief Teams call to catch up. Set reminders to stay in touch.

Staying in touch is such a simple thing to do to maintain new work coming in the door.

Go Grow!

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The Freedom Of Discipline…

Featured / Food For Thought / Implementation

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffective concerning all acts of initiative and creation. There is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now. – Goethe

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Implementing Your New Business Development Plan…

Business Development / Featured / Implementation

Do you have a new business development plan sitting on your desk, collecting dust? Numerous studies prove it is typical for organizations to get stuck during the implementation phase. Five areas to focus on to keep you on track:

  1. Cultivate & Teach Business Development Skills – teach your professionals solid business development skills so they can walk into these situations with confidence rather than anxiety. There are a variety of workshops out there – SMPS is a great resource for architects, engineers or anyone who is in a selling or marketing role within a professional services organization.
  2. Utilize Individual Strengths – Some people are natural-born presenters, others are technical experts, others are solid lead-prospect generators, and others have a personal strength in maintaining and building the client/member relationship. Give each person on your team marketing or business development tasks that are well-matched to their individual strengths.
  3. Create Effective Marketing Resources – Offer a variety of marketing collateral materials, research tools, and prospect information and consistently share best practices with your team.
  4. Cultivate a Growth-Focused Culture – Your professionals will consistently and effectively engage in business development activities if you create a culture that values and places a high priority on business development efforts. Create a growth-focused culture by putting effective processes and structure in place. Dust off your business development plan, figure out where your people would shine, and get them in place doing the activities outlined in your plan.
  5. Incentivize – Reward your people and create positive energy and passion for productive and effective business development pursuits. Get creative and offer a variety of incentives that are well matched to each person’s contribution and personal interests.

Developing a business development plan is one thing, implementing it is another – and it isn’t going to do one bit of good for your organization until you  start implementing, analyzing, course-correcting for better results along the way.

Go Grow!






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Three considerations for your b2b content marketing in 2013…

Featured / Implementation / Marketing / Tactics

According to a survey conducted by the Content Marketing Institute, professional service providers have significantly increased time and dollars spent on content marketing. Marketing teams are now asked to create high volume, high variety, high value and compelling content – on a daily, if not hourly, basis. Three considerations for your content marketing in 2013:

  • Thought Leadership. In recent years, the desire to demonstrate thought leadership has become a goal for professional service providers, but it’s typically random at best. Consider guiding your firm’s thought leadership by instituting a more structured approach for 2013. Think about tying together overarching “client-minded” themes and thought-provoking ideas – across your organization and practice groups, leveraging multiple distribution channels – social media, blogs, presentations, conferences, webinars, etc.
  • Publisher Mentality. Keeping up with content demands takes a mobile casino more organized approach. Consider creating editorial calendars to plan your content creation needs and set up and use tools to help you manage the editorial process. If your budget allows, hire or contract with people who can provide more dedicated attention to content creation – managing the process for you.
  • Repurpose Content. White papers and reports have been the mainstay for content marketing, but nowadays people prefer to consume information in smaller, easily digestible chunks. I don’t recommend moving away from white papers or reports – but consider repurposing this information, pulling out bits and pieces for blogs and emails and social media. Consider creating a content database where topics or ideas can be stored and easily accessed, repurposed into different uses, such as blog posts, social media posts, email campaigns, articles, conferences, interviews, and presentations.






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Six Factors That Make or Break a Rainmaking Culture…

Business Development / Featured / Implementation

A recent study indicates over 75% of professional service organizations find it “somewhat challenging” to “extremely challenging” to implement their own marketing and/or lead generation plans – even when they agree internally on the plans.

THIS GRAPH – inspired from the book: Professional Services Marketing – illustrates six key factors that ALL need to be in place in order to create the “get it done” culture you seek within your firm. At the company leadership level you set the expectations, provide the resources and tools, and set and give incentives. At the individual level, you develop skills and knowledge, pokies online select marketing and business development tactics that mesh with your individual strengths and personality, and build and keep the motivation to execute – aka the right attitude!

You can clearly see what happens when one component is missing – i.e. without expectations, you get inconsistency and without resources you get frustration. Go Grow!






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Challenge Established Marketing & Sales Processes…

Business Development / Featured / Implementation / Marketing
  1. Integrate Your Sales & Marketing Efforts. Remove all silos. Leverage your team’s strengths, skills, time, and resources. Integrate marketing and sales fluidly for the benefit of your organization. Read Acts of Competitive Strategy…
  2. Sales and Business Development Folks – Focus on Closing Sales. I know this personally: business development and sales professionals love relationships, we are eternally optimistic, and we hang on to dead opportunities far too long. Consider building better indicators into your overall sales and marketing process, and if hot prospects die on the Movie: The Great Gatsby, The Notebook & Forrest GumpMusic: Kings of Leon, Coldplay, Mariah Carey & RihannaHobby: Hiking, Beach Cruising & hanging out with my family Other Languages: SpanishTeaching/Mentoring experience: I worked for an after driving school games enrichment program and for the Jewish Community Center for several years. vine or slow to a crawl, give them back to marketing to nurture within your well-built automated marketing programs.
  3. Focus Marketing Efforts On Getting Sales Meetings. Every campaign, every tactic should align with the goal of closing sales (and generating awareness). Read Marketing Strategy and Planning Tips…
  4. Set Up Tracking Systems. Consider tracking every point in the sales cycle to understand which campaign(s) are most effective in generating awareness and closing sales so that you have real knowledge to cancel those campaigns which yield minimal results.
  5. Outsource Marketing. Consider outsourcing your marketing efforts – especially if you are a small or mid-sized company because it simply doesn”t make financial sense to have a full-time person dedicated to a part-time position. Larger firms consider keeping a small internal marketing team and outsourcing production and special projects. This way, large companies can tap into the full array of marketing expertise, social media experts, content generators and writers, web and app developers, strategists, and project managers – if and when they need it.

Go Grow!






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9 Ways to Integrate Email and Social Media Marketing…

Featured / Implementation / Marketing / Social Media / Tactics

This is a must read for anyone integrating social media and email marketing…

by DJ Waldow

Are you wondering how to add social media to your email communications?

Email and social media Also note that if you make under 400% of the Federal Poverty Level in 2014 you will have access to cost assistance through the health affordablehealth.info marketplace. marketing go together like Batman and Robin.

They both can be effective on their own; however, when combined, their (super) powers can save the city and exceed your marketing goals. More here…

 






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Get Unstuck and Implement Your Business/Member Development Plan by Focusing on These Five Areas…

Business Development / Featured / Implementation

Numerous studies have determined it is typical for organizations to get stuck while implementing their marketing plan. Where are you getting stuck? Five areas to focus on to keep you on track:

  1. Individual skills and experience – teach your professionals solid prospect development skills so they can walk into these situations with confidence rather than anxiety.
  2. Individual strengths – Some people are natural-born presenters, others are technical experts, others are solid lead-prospect generators, and others have a personal strength in maintaining and building the client/member relationship. Give each person on your team a task that is well-matched to their individual strengths.
  3. Organizational resources – Offer a variety of marketing collateral materials, research tools, and prospect information and consistently share best practices with your team.
  4. Organizational structure – Your professionals will not do business/member development if they don’t have a budget or time within their schedule to focus on these efforts. Create a growth focused culture by putting effective processes and structure in place.
  5. Incentivize – Reward your people and create positive energy and passion for business/member development. Get creative and offer a variety of incentives that are well matched to each person’s contribution and personal interests.

 






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With a Little Planning & Prioritizing, Building & Nurturing Key Relationships Becomes SIMPLE…

Business Development / Featured / Implementation

I am often asked, “With client and staff commitments and billable work, how can I carve out time to stay in touch with key contacts?” Everyone is pressed for time, but with a little planning and prioritizing, building and nurturing key relationships becomes SIMPLE.

By categorizing your existing contacts, you can clearly identify those most relevant to your overall business goals, and prioritize your time and effort accordingly. Set up a system (hopefully electronic…) where you set reminders to stay in touch with your key contacts. Microsoft or Google Task Lists are super simple electronic reminder tools. Initially, your task list may be short, with a few key contacts – but make it a goal to grow
your list so that you are reaching out to several key contacts every day.

At least annually, review your entire contact database. For each contact, ask yourself:

  • When was our last correspondence?
  • Is this person still with this company, at this location, and within the same role?
  • Is this person relevant to my goals and objectives and am I relevant to theirs?
  • Is this a relationship I need to prioritize?

Go a step further, and encourage each team or sector leader within your organization to print out their entire contact database, and sit down together and connect relationship dots across the whole company. Share knowledge and leverage relationships.

Additionally, continually expand your network by getting involved in diverse projects, teams, and organizations. Proactively seek out new relationships with people who are in different areas of business and offer a different focus and perspective. Share your goals and objectives, share and solicit best practices, and cultivate a value-based relationship.

I’ve developed several concise marketing and business development workshops where I facilitate a discussion/planning session with your team or organization. Reach out if you are interested in learning more.






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Assume you’ve just returned from a strategy/planning retreat…

Featured / Implementation

where everyone participated and agreed to your shiny new marketing or business development plan. On a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being “not challenging at all” and 5 being “extremely challenging,” how challenging is it for you to implement the plan? From a study involving nearly 750 respondents, 76% said they found implementing their own marketing and lead generation plans “somewhat challenging” to “extremely challenging,” even when they agree internally on the plans. Where are you getting stuck and where have you been successful in the implementation process?






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