You can avoid letting new business slip through your fingers by using our powerful, highly interactive workshops and strategic business road-mapping. As a business development consultant and advisor, these work.
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT WORKSHOPS AND COACHING
Your competitors are asking for the business. Are you?
• Are you bringing in new business from clients and prospects?
• Are you selling, but not seeing the results?
• Where are your opportunities? How do you expand them?
• Do you know how to communicate effectively with your prospects?
During these powerful, highly interactive workshops, you are focused on building lasting relationships, asking for business and customizing your action plan
STRATEGIC BUSINESS ROAD MAPPING
Within 30 days, our RAPID ASSESSMENT will identify what’s missing from your business development program and identify for you:
• Missed opportunities
• Underperforming investments
• Prospect segmentation and targeting
• Issues with internal collaboration and cross marketing
• Underutilized assets
If our STRATEGIC BUSINESS ROADMAP approach sounds straightforward, it is. It serves as the first step toward lead generation, providing a platform from which clients grow, with tools to measure progress and success. Many of the groups we have advised over the past eight years have more than doubled their books of new business.
In offering proposals for new client work, we often need to overcome objections. In a recent conversation with Rick Justus, CEO of 36ixty, he outlined 7 ways to overcome negative reactions to your business development proposals:
* Choose your words carefully;
* Avoid talking about costs and fees too soon;
* Ask if money was not the issue, would we be selected?
* Do you see the value of our solution?
* Sustain a peer relationships;
* Don’t lower the proposed fee without changing the deliverables;
* Be certain you are dealing with the economic decision maker.
Having a client or prospect adapt your values to their needs is one of the best way to build new business.
Almost every day there is an advertisement offering a service or product that is new or improved, such as Will Your Dog Eat the Dog Food? Or Have you tried our new combination of juices? And even Take our test drive for free??? And believe it or not, selling a new service, entering a new market place, or offering reminders of what your firm does so well, are managed and marketed in much the same way. In law firm marketing or business development for consulting services, recognize you are entering a new “beachhead” market.
But We Offer Legal and Professional Services…
“But we are professionals, and not selling hard goods.” Yes you are, but new business development for professional services such as law, accounting, architecture and engineering have the same elements needed for success. To quote Bill Aulet (author of Disciplined Entrepreneurship), “. . . before you invest large amounts of time and money, make sure the dogs will eat the dog food! And, oh yes, make sure the dog’s owners (or friends or primary/secondary clients) will PAY for the dog food.”
Referring back to previous columns, remember you should have already:
Clarified market segmentation
Identified your end user
Developed and quantified your Value Proposition
Know who the competitors will be
Mapped and quantified client acquisition costs
Tested your key assumptions
Measured the results
Testing for Law Firm Marketing or Business Consulting Services
This test marketing for law firm marketing, accounting firm business development, consulting services new business growth is critical. Prior to a full launch, you must determine if prospects and clients will engage your new or refined services and actually pay for them. Are they working as intended? Are clients referring new prospects to you? Is your team consistent in their business development efforts and presenting the same core story? Are you seeing trends to take advantage of or are they leading to unexpected challenges?
The final step will hopefully be following your beachhead success and refinements. The new business development efforts will be successful.
When focusing on how to master closing new business, this post emphasizes work by Rick Justus at 36ixty.com and Bill Aulet’s “Disciplined Entrepreneurship” (Amazon, et.al.). These link directly with making a profit from your service.
Aulet identifies 4 steps to master closing new business:
* Design a business model;
* Set the pricing framework;
* Calculate the lifetime value of a client;
* Calculate the cost of client acquisition.
All too often, we see clients spending too little time in designing a business model. But in the interest of closing new business, building a pipeline future business requires: how and where to establish rapport; qualifying the buyer by finding their need; building your value to meet those needs; creating a desire for your firm and your service; identifying answers to overcoming objections; and methods and tactics to close new business. These 6 elements are known as the DEAL MAKER from Rick Justus’ 36ixty.
In our next column, we will offer action details for setting the pricing framework, calculating the lifetime value of clients and calculating the cost of client acquisition.
Continuing this series on Aulet’s 6 themes in “Disciplined Entrepreneurship” (available at Amazon), this element focuses on how do you win a client? His client development asks you to:
* Determine the client’s decision making unit
* Map the process to acquire a new client
* Map the “sales” process.
In “Own The Zone” (also available at Amazon, etc.) I recommend clients to questions to answer before meeting with a suspect or prospect. For example, do you know what is happening in their market place? What internal pressures might they be under? What do you know about their competitors and their services? And even something as simple as learning how they prefer to be invoiced.
One of the best tools available to know your prospect is social media where you can identify and evaluate businesses. Then a pre-meeting call will also facilitate your mastery of client needs and how to communicate your value proposition to them. For more details available, go to http://allancolman.com/services/
The second theme focusing on new business development in Bill Aulet’s Disciplined Entrepreneurship is “What Can You Do For Your Client?” Once you have taken the first steps outlined in Part I, identifying who your client is, Aulet says you must now identify what you offer of value. These include:
Full life-cycle use
High-level service specifics
Quantify the value proposition
Define your core
Chart your competitive position
Want to Learn How to Tell Clients about YOUR Value Proposition?
To receive more details on creating value in a highly competitive market place, contact us.
In Disciplined Entrepreneurship, Bill Aulet begins his 6 themes with Who Is Your Ideal Customer, focusing on business development. Topics covered include:
Market Segmentation
Selecting a Beachhead Market
End User Profile
Total Addressable Market for the Beachhead Market
Persona for Beachhead Market
Want to Learn More about YOUR Ideal Clients or Customers?
The Closers Group offers a complimentary collection of speed-review questions that are essential to Getting To Know Your Client and determining how to undertake new business development.
One of the most common questions clients ask is where do I find prospects?
Simple Rules to Find Prospects
There are 3 simple rules to follow when attempting to find prospects, critical to undertaking marketing and new business development:
GO where they go
KNOW who they know
READ what they read
Play the Numbers
Business development is a numbers game. The more you go, meet their colleagues and read what they are reading (from Wall Street Journal to National Enquirer), the more relationships you are building for the long run. You will find prospects, more as you continue, along your way.
In the Closers Group experience, lack of attention to client retention is a primary reason clients fire you. When it comes to attorney marketing and business development, the first step is to value and properly serve the clients you’ve worked so hard to get in the first place. It is one of the simplest ways to accelerate business, wouldn’t you agree?
Jay Abraham, in “Getting Everything You Can From Everything You’ve Got”, cites these primary reasons why clients have become dissatisfied and have left relationships.
Lack of Contact — leading to your client forgetting about the relationship
Their Situation Changes — and no longer need what they hired you for, or were unaware of your
other practice areas
Decisions — were made without authorization
Costs — were incurred without authorization
Non-Responsive — to requests for changes or reviews in billing
Failure — to respond to requests for help with additional practice areas
We’ll identify an additional group of reasons clients fire you in the next article.
To really under understand what successful business development is, one must understand what it is not. Here are our top five myths about business development.
Myth #1:
Business Development and Law Firm Marketing are Interchangeable Terms
Law firm marketing is about being found, not chosen. How you get found is through publicity. This includes media outreach, networking, and distribution of collateral materials, conducting and attending workshops. Law firm marketing is the activity that targets the eyes, ears and interests of your potential client.
With ammo in hand, where do you aim? This phase is called “business development”. Perhaps a more appropriate term for business development is “business generation,” which requires (dare I write it) sales training and closing skills. And, exactly what we do here at The Closer’s Group.
Myth #2
Attorneys should step into the business development process only after the marketing department develops a strategy.
Let’s face it; your marketing department isn’t going to magically wave a wand and “poof!” new clients appear in front of you. Ultimately the onus is upon the attorney to bring in (and keep) the business. The role of law firm marketing should support those goals with collaterals media and public relations activities and identifying seminars and workshops that help facilitate network development (Remember “law firm marketing” you just read above…).
Once you have the information and sales training, plan a strategy to pursue the business and hone in on your closing skills.
Myth #3:
When it Comes to Attorney Marketing, “One Size Fits All”
NEWS FLASH…. One size never fits all. Marketing should be tailored according to personality, needs of the firm and those of the client. One tactic that works for one attorney won’t necessarily work for another. One fatal marketing mistake is to use the same tactic over and over without looking closely at each prospect. Tailored business development, sales training and closing skills will land you clients with a much higher closing rate.
Myth #4:
Clients Want Sellers to Do Most of The Talking
Keep your resume to yourself and let the potential client do the talking. Adopt the old IBM 60/40 sales training rule — keep them talking 60% of the time and spend the remaining 40% asking good questions based upon your research. Pay attention to your client’s verbal cues, and refine your pitch accordingly.
Myth #5:
Once You’ve Won The Business, Further Marketing to The Client Isn’t Necessary
A big complaint that I often hear from clients is the lack of communication and the feeling of being “kept out of the loop” in important decisions. Your firm’s client retention depends on identifying their needs regularly.
Client needs are a moving target. The time you spend listening and attending to complaints could be the difference between keeping a client and accelerating new business, to losing them to another, more attentive firm.