Marketing Business Services

The big word in marketing Business Services has always been reciprocity. Business Services firms work with intermediaries to put them in touch with work and the reciprocity principle - you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours - has been a major feature of the partner relationships that have developed over time.

Sometimes this was driven by professional ethics, when a particular group of professionals felt that they should not accept commissions for introducing work to another firm or give commissions on work that was introduced to them.

What has kept reciprocity alive is probably something much more Darwinian. Organisations work more positively with a small group of intermediaries where they understand the obligations clearly. Trying to develop similar relationships with all intermediaries would be counter-productive because of the amount of energy that would be required to support all the relationships. Broader partnership marketing has to be financially based. Where reciprocity gains over broader based partner relationships is in the more detailed understanding and trust which can be conveyed to clients.

Back to the benefits

We have been thinking hard for the last few weeks about benefits - what is a buyer really getting after they have had the service delivered. That's a challenging question and how many business services firms ask themselves that kind of question:

• what will this web site deliver to the client? Will it improve visitor retention? Will it improve customer service? Will it increase sales? Will it reduce churn?
  
• what will this advertising campaign deliver to the client? Will it increase reach? Will it increase sales? Will it increase or decrease the cost of sale?
• what will this PR campaign deliver to the client? Will it increase sales? Will it reduce churn?
  
• what will this consultancy assignment deliver? Is this the best consultancy intervention for the client? Will the benefits be maintained?
  
• What will this coaching support deliver? What will be the business benefits? How will those benefits be maintained after the coaching stops?
  

Unless business services firms can answer these kinds of questions then they shouldn't be surprised that clients are reluctant to dive straight to the dotted line to sign. The last of these bullets prompted a furious debate on eCademy when Max Blumberg pointed out that most of the "evidence" about the benefits of coaching were testimonials rather than quantified outputs and that testimonials are notoriously weak at quantifying outcomes. At the time, he challenged the coaches on eCademy to provide evidence of quantified benefits resulting from their coaching. Not only did many coaches find that a foreign concept - most never asked their clients how they had benefited from their support - they just knew intuitively that coaching was "good".

This comes back to testing again. If you don't test the outcomes of your interventions with clients you risk repeating mistakes of which you are unaware. Services have to evolve to become better value, to offer the same benefits but in less time. Services have to be bit like the Olympic motto - faster, higher, stronger. Testing needs to be an important part of your delivery, not just in 2007, but as long as you want to be in business.

Will it work for you?

You are surrounded by new ideas which people are keen to deliver into your business. New information systems, new business processes, new approaches to training, new concepts in brand development. Wherever you look, ideas are being thrust at you to consider.

How do you go about deciding which of these ideas will work for you and how do you go about prioritising them?

When you are looking at the next idea which is guaranteed to deliver huge value to your organisation, it is worth taking a few moments to test how it is going to support the core of your business. My simple test is to start by asking what’s really important to your organisation? Your list might look something like this:

• Mission – what is it that you are trying to do?
• Your competitiveness – what is your edge and how can you improve further?
• Execution – how effective are you at delivering what you want?
• Change – how good are you at adapting to change?

The shiny new idea is important only so far as it is able to support your business improve its performance against these dimensions (or the dimensions that you and your colleagues believe are fundamental to your success). If the idea doesn't contribute to one or more of these areas then file it in the interesting but not not mandatory box in your office (the waste bin) and get on with your life. The ideas which seem to offer the best payback against one or more of these areas need to be considered in more detail.

Change for change's sake is rarely a good idea.

Planning by milestones

Planning by milestones can run into conflict with value for money for your client if you are charging by the hour. A supplier can ethically charge the time spent with the client in helping them to do something, but that invoicing has to be held up to the project milestone mirror periodically to make sure that the client is getting good value for money from the relationship.

Failure to do that means that you are at risk of not having the contract renewed even if all the time spent with the client was at the client's request and all the invoicing was honest. That means that you can't lose sight of the longer-term objective even if the client does. Your client's attention might not be on the longer term today, but eventually they will look at whether the project has delivered what it was supposed to and ask themselves whether they got good value. That can mean adopting a challenging role with your client and asking them whether they are delivering their side of the project as they initially agreed.

If you focus on project milestones and encourage your client to do the same, there can be little room for error. Both sides agree that the milestones are the elements that are key in delivering the overall project and understand who is responsible for the delivery of each of the milestones. That means that your client is less likely to ask you for support which is at best tangential to the work that you should be doing for him / her and the time you spend on the project is more likely to deliver progress against the milestones.

Are we living in the same place?

Phil sent me a copy of an email that had been sent to him by a consultancy group. I went to their site to find out a little more about them. I don't know if what they say on their site is actually what they believe, but if it is, they see a world which is slightly different from the one I live in.

I'm always reluctant to make generalisations about businesses and this site contained a few, including at least one I disagree with quite strongly. This might just be me feeling choleric this morning, but I don't think so. It also possible that the site misrepresents their beliefs - it is surprising how often a piece of copy has to be withdrawn because, on reflection, it fails to get the right message across.

Exploring a client problem

We use workshops when we are getting to know a client. Exploratory workshops give us an opportunity to contribute a range of experiences in a reasonably controlled environment while we are still learning about the client's problem.

Workshops aren't infallible. I used to work for someone who hated their lack of predictability. He wouldn't take part in a workshop unless he could drive the outputs towards the conclusions that he had already developed. I'm less worried by that. Our workshops are more about allowing the client to explore an issue or series of issues and may not even come to a clear decision within the workshop format. We come along with a series of tools which provide an analytical context, but we certainly don't have a pre-conceived idea about 'the right answer'.

Apart from anything else, it exposes the client to the way that we work as a team and the way we think, which is more important than seeing us deliver a canned presentation about what we do.

Tags:

• Consulting
• BusinessDevelopment

High level Project Management

There are two ways to manage a long-running project:

• n hours on activity 137
• delivering milestone C3 irrespective of the resource required
  

There is no question in my mind, in a long running project the milestone approach wins hands down. A milestone is a change of state - something has changed - and the amount of resource required to deliver the change of state is regarded as a subsidiary problem. Over emphasis on individual tasks or activities risks that 100 hours of time is put into an activity without delivering the milestone. Focusing on the milestone makes everyone in the project aware that the milestone is the crucial measure of project success. Make all the milestones and the project is a success.

Tags:

• Consultancy

If I had a £1 ...

... for every client that began their conversation with us by describing how successful that they are and how much they are willing to invest in further success - I'm in no doubt, I would be a rich man.

Very often these conversations are what a good Russian friend of mine would classify as 'bar talk'. The initial conversation is an opportunity for the client to create an impression of themselves and their organisation - it isn't regarded as being factual in the sense of a sworn statement.

That positioning creates a delay in negotiating the final relationship. If you don't understand their situation in detail, it is inevitable that you will propose the wrong solution and an inappropriate sharing of activities. As we all know, a successful project requires very honest communication from an early stage to be successful.

Tags:

• Consultancy
• BusinessDevelopment

The client isn't always right, you know

Sometimes a client undertakes the wrong kind of support. They engage you to help them with a particular problem, but once you start working with them, the nature of the relationship has to change because they have misunderstood the problem that they have.

It's important to use the initial phase of a relationship as a diagnostic opportunity to learn about how the client does business, the symptoms they see in their business and the skills of their team. If you don't invest enough in diagnosis during this phase, you run the risk of being surprised on two counts:

• investing time in the wrong problem
• being slow to detect the right problem

Switching objective in mid-project is a subtle project management problem and one that requires a significant level of management of expectations. That isn't impossible, but it may require you to develop a communications plan to hit the organisation at a number of different levels within a relatively short period of time if you are to get your message across quickly. The key issue though is that very often the client is part of a larger group so that the cost of doing it wrong heavily outweighs the opportunity cost of doing it right. On a fully costed basis, your revised project may not be as profitable as you might wish, but if it retains a relationship with a major account, that reduction in profitability is an allowable investment in your cost of sale.

Tags:

• Consulting
• BusinessDevelopment

Change management

Change is difficult. Human systems resist change. Part of it is that sometimes organisations misunderstand the importance of a change. Here are two very different examples of types of change:

• the implementation of a new ERP or financial system
  
• a change in week-end or late night access to a building
  

A new enterprise system may be strategically important to the business, but for most people it makes little difference to how they do their jobs so most people would not see this as a major personal change. In contrast, access to a building may have real repercussions for the individuals who have got used to working on projects at odd hours so although this may not rank as a strategic decision for the business, it might well class as a significant personal change for the people involved.

Change requires individuals to do something tomorrow that is different from the way they do them today. It requires encouragement, but it also requires a significant focus on communication so that people can understand why the change in behaviour is important. People go through a series of phases in accepting major change and although the primary work was concerned with personal reactions to bereavement, the multi-stage model of apprehension, denial, anger, resentment, depression, cognitive dissonance, compliance, acceptance, and internalization is regarded as valid in understanding how people are likely to respond. That said, it is only a model and individuals can go through the stages at very different speeds - the model simply helps the project manager think through the problem that he or she is likely to face in winning acceptance in the organisation.

There are typically 5 elements for organisational change to be fully cemented:

• Build awareness in the organisation of the background to the change
• Create the desire to support and participate
• Develop individual knowledge of the personal changes required
  
• Foster the ability to implement the required changes in behavior
• Provide encouragement to reinforce and sustain the changes in behaviour
  

Tags:

• Consulting
• Business