1) Should friends become clients? I am often afraid to ask friends for legal work because it might "taint" our friendship and make me feel like a service provider any time I go over to their house and see their kids, etc.

2) Should clients become friends? When this happens I feel I am less able to give objective advice and I sense that the clients feel like they can ask me legal questions at any time of day or night.  For example, if we play squash all they want is free legal advice on the squash courts.  Very frustrating.

***

I would vote 'no" for both cases. For me, there's all the difference between knowing how to be friendly with clients and actually being friends who socialize regularly.

But others, I think, might vote differently.

What do the rest of you lawyers, consultants, accountants, financial planners  and other advisors out there think?

Firms that are well-known in their target markets receive higher fees, see their revenue grow, and earn higher profits than their lesser-known counterparts. Brand leaders were more likely to price their services at a higher level than their competitors in the market (42% of brand leaders were premium-price vs. 28% of lesser-known firms). And, they were more likely to actually get higher fees by up to 35%.

While most consulting firms (and consultants to consulting firms) criticize the use of discounting, 65% of consulting firms report that they do indeed discount their fees. Even the most profitable firms discount - 49% of firms, with 25% or more firm profit, report that they discount. The average discount level: 11.7%.

When it comes to premium-price firms and what sets them apart, it is not their size, the amount of repeat business they are able to get, or the region of the country in which they are located. As a matter of fact, none of these had an effect on a firm’s ability to charge premium fees. The factors that matter most to premium price firms are how valuable their work will be to the client upon completion, and whether or not the firm can deliver superior results versus the other providers – 36% find this “extremely important”

Verbatim Comments From Respondents:

Pricing Strategies:

“We do not compete on price. Ever. If we can't compete on value, ability, talent, and, frankly, if we can't create a better value proposition for the client, we don't want their business anyway.”

“We are aware of the potential need to reduce cost to gain access but also believe that the selling process should effectively focus on value and reference capability to deliver.”

Introductory Service Pricing:

“We've found that the first project creates pricing expectations for future projects, and that the work is valued more when it is priced at full rate.”

“The introductory pricing strategy is not necessarily a lower price, but a smaller or pilot project which makes it easier for the client to accept without prior experience with our work.”

Why Do Use Value-Based Pricing? Respondents Say:

“Our work, approach and value delivered are unique enough that value-based pricing is the ONLY way in which we are compensated fairly. A time-based approach simply makes no sense for us - one intervention/coaching session often causes a change in direction that's worth millions of dollars to the client–how many hours of our billing would that be worth?”

“Part of our approach is to address the business's issues and value of any potential solution to the bottom line of the business or business unit. Our pricing is provided in relation to the benefit. We also use this approach to minimize work in low value areas of the business/org.”

“Provides income far beyond hourly billing availability.”

Standard and Realized Fees:

“Our pricing model almost always ensures that the standard hourly rates are realized, hence the zero difference in the numbers above. Sometimes we will cash in a little more on the senior levels, and provide juniors cheaper, but on average we end on the standard rates (which are not public).”

“Difference between published and realized rates is due to discounting to get the business and/or project taking more hours than estimated to complete. Often this is due to client being unable to supply content or time when needed.”

“I do not even keep track of time, nor is time a factor in establishing value to the client. I simply don't think this way. Managing capacity is about being extremely effective, not about focusing on time.”

Service Guarantees:

“It is a great source of competitive advantage. We offer to solve a specific business problem with a specific technical solution at a specific time and price (price includes expense and travel). No excuses, just deliver. Using this philosophy, we are slowly taking work away from competitors who don't know we exist. We are also charging 2 to 3x more for projects than competitors are bidding on an hourly basis.”

“We find that our consultants rise to the expectations, so the service guarantee has not cost us much but has led to a higher level of personal dedication to meeting client expectations.”

Though plenty of examples of “Enterprise 2.0” show tangible ways that social media can improve business, I have not been able to find many examples of law firms taking advantage of Web 2.0 technologies. In the UK at least, it seems that although some niche blawgs are very popular and have done quite well in establishing the author(s) as authorities in their respective fields, law firms as organizations have yet to take advantage of new platforms in substantive ways (as have eg investment banks with internal use of wikis/social networking).

Am I right in thinking that this is pioneer territory for law firms? If not, could you please point me to some good examples of firms that use social media – internally or externally – to improve productivity/efficiency/client services (ie beyond business development/HR/recruitment functions)?

“David, a thought sparked by April 11's WSJ front page, describing Moody's alleged move to client-friendliness and possible debasing of its ratings process.

“This is a repetitive theme in professional services: the most rigorous firm builds its reputation but is considered client-unfriendly. Then a new management enters, vowing to be more responsive to customers, and the partners learn that yes, their incomes rise and they get better client relationships by bending a little. Then a lot. Examples: Arthur Andersen, KPMG (tax shelters), various law firms, lobbyists (Cassidy & Co.), etc.

“Question One: How do we differentiate client responsiveness from compromising the quality of our work, and what other than moral suasion works? (Tyrannical regulators? In theory, an internal incentive process would be best, but I've never seen it done workably. Despite your advice, I think that firm culture in most cases is simply too weak to rely on.)

“Question Two: How does this affect the economic "gatekeeper" theory? (Firms maintain standards to establish a brand which effectively vouches for the client and thus have sufficient economic incentives to police fee-earners against dropping standards for short-term gain). Is that realistic in an environment where fee-earners are mobile and short-term oriented? Or is the only way to maintain gatekeeper standards the threat of regulatory and criminal action, or ruinous civil lawsuits?”

***

What think you all?

So, I was delighted to be made aware of the Valorem Law Group 

who make this statement on their website:

“If you’re interested in seeing whether we are right for you and your team, try us on a matter. What separates us from our competitors is that you have our value promise on every invoice. If you don’t think we’re worth the amount you agreed to pay, you make whatever adjustment you think is necessary. If your other firms don’t walk that walk, it’s time to try Valorem.”

(Thanks to Gerry Riskin for drawing my attention to this firm)

It's a 100-page large-type (very clever) packaging of some key management lessons, using Einstein's famous equation. In this case, the energy is the organization's output, the m is the mass of the people and the c is the leader's impact on energy.

What caught my attention was this sentence: "To help you facilitate teaching these concepts to your team, a Powerpoint slide presentation is available at www.CornerstoneLeadership.com

What you discover when you click is that the slide presentation sells for $99.95, compared to $14.95 for the booklet. And I bet it generates training and consulting opportunities.

Very clever! Are any of you merchandizing yourself (or your business) this way? What's been your experience?

I wonder what would have happened if, starting 25 years ago, I had been charging for slide presentation versions of my material?

Now he has issued a second edition of RAINMAKING, revised and updated. Here's his chapter list:

1. Writing and Publishing Your article
2. Finding a Podium
3. Marketing by Mail
4. Organizing Seminars and Conferences
5. Getting Publicity
6. A Few words on the Web
7. Eliminating the Dread of Cold-Calling
8. Networking: The alternative to Cold Calling
9. Special Rules for Special Networks: Trade associations, Formal Networking Groups and Internal Newtorks
10. Increasing Network Quality
11. How Markets Structure Networks
12. From Networks to Leads
13. Building Client Relationships that Last
14. The Sales Meeting: The First Five Minutes
15. The Sales Meeting: Questioning and Listening
16. The Sales meeting: Offering Your Solution
17. The Sales meeting; Formal Presentations
18. The Sales meeting: Handling questions and Concerns
19. Team Selling
20. Shortening the Sales Cycle
21. Writing a proposal
22. Quoting a Fee
23. Turning Down Small Work
24. When You Lose a Sale
25. The Logic of a Sales Strategy
26. Simple Strategies that can Help You Now
27. Self-Marketing: Experts Make Themselves
28. Market-Based Strategies
29. Conclusion: Becoming a Rainmaker

****

Even if you know Ford's first edition, this second edition is a must-read!

You've GOT to check this out!

We are conducting our next major RainToday.com and Wellesley Hills Group benchmark study on Pricing and Fees in Professional Service Businesses and we would like your input. Please take 20 minutes to share how your firm approaches pricing its services.

You can access the survey here.

As a thank you for your time and input, upon completing the survey you will receive the complimentary RainToday.com report of your choice from the list of our most popular reports below:

• The Professional Services E-Guide To Online PR (PDF)
• How To Write And Market A White Paper E-Guide (PDF)
• How To Become A Thought Leader E-Guide (PDF)
• How To Set Appointments Through Cold Calling E-Guide (PDF)
• Marketing Strategy, Planning, and Budgeting for Professional Services (Webinar Recording)

And, feel free to pass the survey on...your colleagues can receive a free report as well.

Thank you for helping make this research possible. I appreciate your time and input!

He points out that among some types of professional firm there is often resistance to the concept of marketing in general, and the digital space in particular.

If you were advising a professional firm about web marketing, what would you stress?

I’m not sure how much hard evidence there really is about the benefits of the web in marketing professional services. I suspect that key decision-makers and buyers are not spending much time on the net. Their staff subordinates (HR people, marketing directors, strategy people etc.,) may use it more, and you may be found that way, but I doubt that there is much of a direct executive audience.

I would probably point out that the old adage “demonstrate don’t assert” remains the key to effective use of web technology, and that websites need to have voluminous amounts of easy to search and easy to find content, so that you can you can prove that you have something to offer (and are generous and professional enough to share it.) The ease of use of your digital marketing gives you an opportunity to show your ability to put yourself in the shoes of the client / purchaser and understand things from their perspective, rather than saying “let us tell you about us.”

I’d also stress that you need to be well advised by people who understand search engine optimization, so that if there are buyers who don’t know you, you are found when they begin searching.

It’s still early days for blogging, podcasting and videocasting, but I’d have to guess that, for most professional service firms, these are not high return activities – again, because I’m not sure that the “high-level” buyers are listening and watching.

I’ve had a lot of fun and success with my own activities (which I reported on last year in an article called “Adventures in Modern Marketing”) but it’s very hard to unbundled the incremental marketing benefit that being active on the web has brought. I'm not sure what I would advise a client to do in this area, nor how much of their marketing budget to devote to web activities. 

What do the rest of you think? What advice would you give to a professional firm about digital marketing? What have we learned?

What have been people's experiences with the strategy of targeting only working with one client per industry sector and deliberately broadcasting to the market that that is your "modus operandi"? It's a bit clumsy, but, for example- "We guarantee our clients that we will not work for their competitors, thereby preserving exclusively for our clients, the commercial advantage of partnering with us"

I know the applicability may vary with the type of services one offers, but do others have any thoughts on this approach?

Among the changes that most firms would need to make are:

1. Adopting a culture that no longer allows people to “opt out” on the topic of client service excellence on the grounds that their skills lie elsewhere. A firm can’t get a reputation for something that not everyone does.
2. Finding some way to monitor client feedback in real time (not just once a year) and make it credible to everyone that there will be a follow up for anything less than excellence.
3. Providing training in client counseling skills
4. Providing research support from the marketing department to help service delivery people stay current on client industries
5. Enable sharing of experiences (workshops and workbooks) among practitioners on an ongoing basis to establish a continuous improvement approach to client satisfaction.
6. Implement disciplined project management systems, including mandatory processes for communications strategies with clients mid-process.
7. A systematic program of senior officer visits to clients to "role model" the firm's commitment.

None of these approaches are new or innovative. (I first wrote about them in the 1980s, and I wasn’t the originator then) However, it is still my experience that firms are less than systematic in implementing a client service strategy.

What systems do you think are need to pull this strategy off? What else needs to be in the "change package?"

As I reported, about one-third of a conference of leading management consulting firms felt that these values, attitudes and/or skills are mostly “hired in” rather than developed once people have reached the age and stage of being hired by consulting firms.

Which raises these questions:

1. How can firms screen for and identify relationship values, attitudes and skills?
2. How, in fact, do they screen for them?
3. Do formal testing approaches work?
4. What about “behavioral interviewing” (I’m still not sure what that is!)
5. Do you have to rely on the “take them out for a beer” test?

As we explored the topic, I took a poll on how many people thought relationship skills were “born” and how many thought they could be “made” (i.e. developed.)

(Only) two-thirds of the audience thought they could be developed. However, very few firms said they had formal programs to help their people develop the interpersonal, social, political and emotional skills necessary to be good at relationships. As a rule, they depended either upon people developing these skills for themselves, or (if you were lucky) learning on the job by observing those ahead of you who were good at it.

The challenge was made even more difficult when it was pointed out that – ultimately – relationship skills are about values and attitudes, not personality characteristics and skills. If the discussion is about values, then it really is challenging to address the key questions:

1. Are these born or can firms develop them in their people?
2. If they can be developed by the organization, how?
3. How did you learn to develop your relationship skills? 
4. Were you ever given any formal training that helped? 
5. What would you advise others that wanted to work at developing these skills?

I had a question I wondered whether you or your blog readers had any opinions on.

Many companies have unprofitable customers. This situation may arise for many reaons including:

* Poor pricing controls - offering large and multiple discounts

* Historic overservicing and undercharging long-term customers

* Lack of understanding of the true cost to serve

Nonetheless, whatever the reason, when companies do find unprofitable customers they need to manage them. They can be made profitable or they can be "fired".

Do you have any ideas or strategies for actually firing customers? Does anyone have any examples of how their companies (or others) have done this and what the results were?

Regards. Daryn, Sydney, Australia

***

Well, gang, what say thee?

Last week I spent a couple of days with group within my client's organization.  The group was all male with one female.  I was appalled by the pre-pubescent behavior of the males towards the female.  I'm a former Marine, played football in college, I'm not unfamiliar with male environments.  Their behavior towards their own female staff made me uncomfortable.  My test is that I don't want to put our employees in an environment in whichI would be uncomfortable putting my wife or daughter. 

But, it's a really big client.  And, my desire to back away from this client is being challenged by others. 

Our first, agreed-upon principle is that our employees come first.  Great employees, who are truly experts in their area, are harder to come by I think than clients.  This is an interesting test of our application of our principles.

Any suggestions about how best to handle this would be appreciated.

When the firm gets a contract to train managers of a company X, the firm assigns a trainer (who is, most commonly, an independent contractor) to the company.  If the company likes the results of the training, they would most likely invite the same training firm again and again, most commonly asking for the same trainer.  Over time, the relationship between the trainer and the client company flourishes to the degree that the company starts offering training assignments directly to the trainer, without even notifying the firm. 

How can the training company protect itself from such an unfortunate turn of events?  I realize that there are some "half-baked" solutions like, for instance, try not to send the same trainers to the same company, but there should be something else.

***

There are two dimensions along which this can be examined. There is a triangle formed by the individual consultant (or trainer), the client and the consulting (or training) firm. The question makes clear the strength of the link between the individual and the client. But what strengthens the link between (a) the client and the firm and (b) the individual and the firm?

In both cases, we are asking how the firm “adds value” above and beyond the talents of the individual service provider. Some possibilities:

1. On-going enhancement of the consulting / training product or service
2. Access for both the individual consultant and the client to proprietary tools owned by the firm
3. Access for both the individual consultant and the client to research conducted by the firm
4. Access for both the individual consultant and the client firm to regular “solons”, discussion groups, seminars and other learning opportunities, so that there is Value in belonging to the network.

Does anyone else have other ideas?

But the percentage of firms that have pulled this off is (in my experience) relatively small. I explore this in part in STRATEGY AND THE FAT SMOKER where I explore the fact that while firms say they want romance, too many firms still act in a transactional “let’s win this one” mode.

But there’s more that needs to be said. It’s not enough to argue that relationships are a good thing, or even prove that they are economic. We must understand why they are difficult to pull off.

Here’s a preliminary list of some of the possible barriers:

1. Many clients, in fact, don’t want relationships. They prefer to buy on a transaction-by-transaction basis.
2. Too many providers are not really trying to build a relationship, they’re just trying to sell more product and services – and clients can tell
3. Firms or individuals are too short-term focused, overinvesting in short-term sales opportunities and underinvesting in long-term relationship-building: it's a time allocation problem
4. Senior professionals just don’t have the time to invest in relationships: it's a time problem
5. Senior professionals are actually not that interested in clients: it's an attitude problem
6. Individuals are not skilled in earning clients’ trust: it's a skill problem
7. Internal barriers in firms – for example, excessive “silos” mean no incentive to create opportunities for colleagues to provide additional services to “your” clients: it's a structural problem
8. Lead professionals see it as too risky to introduce their colleagues – they worry that their own PERSONAL relationships would be threatened by any attempt to turn the relationship with a client into an INSTITUTIONAL relationship: it's a quality or cultural problem
9. Firms are not discriminating enough in selecting which client relationships actually have a chance at succeeding: they try to develop relationships with too many clients – they should focus more effort on fewer, carefully selected opportunities: it's a focus problem

What would you add to the list? What do you think is the most common explanation of why most firms’ relationship strategies fail to succeed as often as they hope?

He lists the following as the keys:

1. Be Demanding
2. Be Respectful
3. Be Reliable
4. Be Surprising (eg reward a job well done)
5. Be Engaging. 

You can join John's discussion, or we can start one here.

We've had discussions here before about what we providers seek in an ideal client, but would you agree with John's starting list? Do you agree that these are the keys to eliciting better reactions from providers?

Yesterday, Joseph Dunphy reacted by saying: “On behalf of many, I suspect, I'd just like to say WHAT? Did I really just read that? Unbelievable. That's just terrible.”

I understand Joseph’s initial reaction, but I don’t think Penelope was advocating anything – she was just sharing her real-world experience that appearance matters a great deal more than we like to admit openly.

For example, last week I was conducting a workshop for a global corporation that had concentrated a number of its in-house services into one “shared services” unit. One service line in particular received much higher client satisfaction ratings than the others. We discussed why, and focused on the traditional client service topics.

During one of the coffee breaks, one of the participants came up to me and said, “The real reason that unit does so well is that it explicitly sets out to hire attractive young women. No-one likes to admit it, but that makes a huge difference.” (The unit was in a South American country, if that makes a difference to your reaction to the story.)

Of course it does. I know of more than one top-flight professional firm that takes appearance into account in its hiring of both males and females and gives its young people lessons in how to dress well and how to behave with sophistication.  

Should appearance, youth and manners matter? Maybe not, but they do – a lot. To pretend they do not is just unrealistic.

Yet in many countries this is called discrimination and is legally barred.

All of this raises some interesting questions:

Should more firms continue to include physical appearnace in their hiring, even to the point of preferring some ages and genders?

Are we naive to believe they are not already doing that?

Are discrimination laws fighting a losing battle against human nature?

Should I get back on the treadmill and worry more about my clothing in order to enhance my career prospects?

In this video clip, we explore how you can win business from a non-client who is looking around and talking to many providers. So this is the situation that may be described as a beauty parade or a competitive bid or a request for proposal.
We analyze it by using a direct experience of my own.

In the marketing of professional services, you can come across in one of two ways to the buyer. You are either interested in them, or you are interested in their cash. We will show why the former is the key to successful business marketing.

As others have observed (for example, Pfeffer and Sutton in their book HARD FACTS, DANGEROUS HALF-TRUTHS & TOTAL NONSENSE) we should draw upon what we already know from relationships in our personal lives when it comes to understanding business relationships. People and firms often don’t do this. It sometimes seems as if, when they come to work, people leave behind everything they have learned about interacting effectively with others.

If you have an active social circle and people like being with you, the odds are that you will have a significant advantage in learning the skills and habits of business development. If, on the other hand, you’re a social recluse, you will find it more difficult to convince clients to see you as a trusted advisor they wish to work with.

The way most clients choose professionals is essentially identical to the way people choose their friends. They look for professionals who can (a) put them at ease, (b) make them feel comfortable sharing their fears and concerns, (c) inspire trust in their ability to oversee both the client and his transaction, and (d) prove their dependability.

Creating these feelings in others begins with having the correct attitude – a sincere interest in others. However, the outward signs of this genuine caring are often conversational and interpersonal skills.

If you want to win a client’s business, it’s necessary to give the client the chance to talk to you, person to person, about their needs, wishes, and wants. The key is to make it easy and comfortable for the client to share his or her feelings and secrets. In short, if you really want to win a client’s business, you must know how to have a conversation.

Imagine a dinner party conversation. What makes a good conversationalist in such a setting? He or she:

• Has a fresh point of view, but does not try to thrust it upon everyone else
• Speaks politely and respectfully
• Tells good stories to illustrate key points
• Is good at drawing other people’s views out and drawing them into the conversation
• Speaks intelligently on a variety of subjects, but is not afraid to admit areas of ignorance
• Avoids trotting out well-worn arguments or clichés.
• Listens with genuine interest
• Is light-hearted in style, but always respectful of others’ views

All of these conversational skills also apply to effective marketing and selling. You may remember to behave this way at a dinner party, but do your client meetings really meet these criteria? What about your seminars, speeches, articles, blogs, and websites?

Is the tone of your client interactions friendly, inviting the client to chat, to think about ideas and to encourage both sides to get to know each other as people?

Suppose you want to be good at building romance: getting another person to work with you to build a mutually beneficial, mutually supportive relationship. What characteristics would make you good at this? Most of us have discovered that whether it is love, friendship, or work, people respond best when they believe that you are (among other things) considerate, supportive, understanding, and thoughtful.

It’s worth pausing and asking yourself right now: do people think I am considerate, supportive, understanding and thoughtful? Do my friends and acquaintances? Do those I work with? Do those I manage? Do those I serve? If the answer to any of these questions is “no,” then it’s worth asking yourself, “Why not? What’s the problem?”

The answer is likely to be some variant of the fat smoker syndrome. You know what’s good for you, but it takes attention to a lot of detail today to get the reputation that’s going to benefit you in the future.

A reputation for being supportive, for instance, must be earned through social habits. And to be seen as considerate, you have to be able to remember information that people share about their lives, proving that you listened and paid attention. It also helps to follow up with skillfully phrased questions about what you were told last time you met. The idea is demonstrate concern, not intrusiveness, with a question like, “How did it work out with that guy you met?”

To be viewed by other people as supportive also takes thought and careful attention to language. It is important to remember that friends don’t judge each other. They don’t evaluate. They don’t point out each other’s weaknesses. Suppose that your friend has a child who is badly behaved. You don’t say, “Your kid is a little horror!” or “You’re raising that kid incorrectly,” even though both statements may be true. Instead, a friend could say something like, “Have you ever thought about doing or saying such and such to little Ashley?”

Having the ability to respond with the right phrase in real time takes practice, as do all social skills.

As individuals, or as organizations, it is possible to set out to develop friendship skills. However, like all aspects of the fat smoker syndrome, it requires a concerted effort to invest today in building skills (and relationships) that will pay off tomorrow. Unless they are already naturals, relatively few individuals - and even fewer organizations - have the self-discipline to stick with the program. That’s why it’s a successful strategy for those who do.

Do you know of firms that make a competitive advantage out of all this by selecting for and training these attitudes and skills? Can it be done?

One of the biggest ways that professionals and professional firms can improve their marketing effectiveness is to think through and make sure that they are actually putting their marketing efforts in places which yield the highest return.

This is actually not commonly the case. Most firms say that they believe that marketing to existing clients is the best source of new revenue. But when you add up all of the non-billable hours that are spent on marketing you often get surprised that a very high majority of it is diverted to chasing new clients.

In this clip, we examine all of the places that marketing efforts can go. We make some very clear recommendations about where the priorities are.

For you lawyers out there (and those who consult to them) there is a new resource released today: BlawgWorld 2007—a collection of 77 thought-provoking essays from 77 of the most influential law-related blogs ("blawgs").

Handpicked by each respective blogger (including yours truly), these essays provide a window into their blawgs, making it easy to figure out which ones merit your ongoing attention. 

You can download the 300 page document here.

You can quickly find essays of interest in BlawgWorld 2007 by using an interactive table of contents. From any page, click on the Blawgs navigation tab. From there, two more clicks will take you to any essay.

We all say we want relationships and we want to be good at romance, but we have not all thought through the actions and behaviors that a Necessary to create those things. In this video clip, we begin to explore the necessary skills.

In thinking about business development, there are two basic mindsets that must be distinguished. On the one hand, you could focus on trying to win each transaction, transaction by transaction. Somewhat rudely, I call this the mindset of going for the quick hit, or the one-night stand.

The other way of coming to market is trying to build relationships. Trying to get good at romance, where you're trying to persuade potential clients to enter into a long-term relationship with you.

The key point is that we must understand that whilst either can be made to work, there is a crucial difference between being good at one-night stands and being good at romance.

The key to all marketing, selling, client service, and client relations questions is actually not about how do you market, or how do you sell. The thing that we need to understand is, "How do clients buy?" And what follows is my attempt to explain that perspective at a recent lawyers conference.

But there are only so many hours in a day, and many of us have more than a handful of clients to take care of at once.

So what can you do to earn and deserve trust (and a relationship) if you only have a limited amount of time?

The first point I'd make is to ensure that, in the limited few interactions you can afford the time for, you succeed as coming across as sympathetic and understanding. I don't necessarily want a lot more of my doctor's time when I see him or her, I just want to be treated a certain way when we are together.

Second, Getting in contact before I'm needed. ("I'm going to be away: is there anything I can take care of for youbefore I go?") This is one case where seeking permission (to be unavailable) is better than seeking forgiveness.

I don't know if the metaphor applies, but the situation reminds me of struggling to be a good parent or marriage partner. You can't always give the other person all the time they want from you, but there must be ways to maximize the impact of the time you do have.

I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on good practice, since I think building and sustaining relationships with limited time is a common challenge.

But assume his research is correct: what is the appropriate company response? In most cases, as we know, companies will then get very suspicious of ALL of their customer claims (they can't know which 30 percent are untrustworthy) and you end up with bureaucracy and MUTUAL distrust, which quickly spirals down. 

Insurance companies get a bad rap (Hurricane Katrina, Mike Moore's new film - Sicko) for too often denying claims. But the fault is not just on one side, is it?

Put yourself in the shoes of being an insurance company exceutive. Is there a middle ground between over-trusting a customer base which will exploit your goodwill 30 percent of the time, and acting defensively all the time and coming across to  everyone as non-responsive?

There's clearly a difference bewteen what you wold do as an individual, on-on-one, when you can take it case-by-case. But what do you do if you're a corporation, trying to work across the country or internationally with hundreds of thousands of customers. What policies do you put in place, and how do you train your front-line people?

The key to giving your clients a great client experience is to understand what it feels like to be a client. In the following clip, we explore exactly that, by drawing on our common experience of being the patient of a doctor.

“For the last month or so I have been working well with a client and her staff  helping them develop their brand strategy. My client heads a division of a company. A couple of weeks into the project I’ve become aware that my client has an abysmal relationship with her CEO, whom she reports to. I also quickly learned that the CEO is a tyrant and displays many of the characteristics Bob Sutton described in his book The No Asshole Rule. The CEO makes the lives of her staff miserable. They are both terrified and befuddled by her unpredictable, bullying and overbearing behavior.

“Last week my client went overseas for work and the CEO has decided she wants to run the branding project during my client’s absence. The CEO attended a meeting of the leadership team I’m working with and she proceeded to denigrate her staff telling them that their opinion meant nothing and then proceeded to attack the project. The staff all looked at me to say “sorry” but couldn’t say a word.

“My question for you and your readers is this. How involved should a consultant get in trying to help a group of people who can’t make headway because the way the CEO behaves?”

***

Shawn, others may disagree, but my opinion is that you have virtually no choice. You were not hired to help the group deal with their boss, and it’s neither practical nor “the right thing to do” to try and take on that role. You’re gonna lose!

Maybe, if you really have superior psychological, political, interpersonal, sociological, emotional and intervention process skills, you could pull this off. But the odds are incredibly low. It’s one thing to be explicitly hired as a process consultant to help an organization function, with the CEO’s explicit consent. It’s a whole ‘nother thing to take it on as an extra challenge on a project where you were hired to do something else.

And if that means the project you were hired for is doomed, well, it’s doomed.

***

Anyone else have different advice for Shawn?  

Well, Ed, Rosenzweig’s book is, indeed very stimulating. He doesn’t actually question the conclusion (or belief) that customer focus causes financial performance; he challenges the validity, rigor and logic of the various studies that purport to have proven the link. In the language of the court system in Scotland, it’s a matter of “case not proven.”

Rosenzweig’s main point – the halo effect – is that it is a fatally flawed research approach to identify successful companies and then ask people (internal or external) what attributes these companies or leaders have. He argues that this approach could equally well uncover attributes that are the outcomes of successful financial performance, not the cause of it.

So, he points out, if you ask observers or employees at a financially successful company if the company is customer focused, there will be an “after-the-fact” bias to say “yes,” whether or not the company actually was, in some more solidly measured way, actually more customer focused than others.

Rosenzweig’s targets are books like “In Search of Excellence,” “Built to Last” and “Good to Great.” He doesn’t say their conclusions are wrong; he says their conclusions are not even close to being “proven” (contrary to what the authors say.)

My book, Practice What You Preach, is not covered by Rosenzweig (it wasn’t a best-seller) but I have no doubt he would make a similar critique of my methodology. I surveyed people in 139 businesses on 74 questions and explored the statistical relationships between that opinion data (on what was and wasn’t going on in their office) and the financial performance of those businesses.

I think I would argue two relative strengths of my study: By allowing the statistics to tell me which of the 74 questions had explanatory power, I allowed the data to be discriminating between which aspects of office culture was correlated and which wasn’t.

If you were nit-picking, you COULD argue that all I discovered is which characteristics have a high halo effect (i.e. are given high ratings by employees when things are going well) and those that have a low halo effect. But that’s a pretty complicated argument.

Secondly, I did use a statistical methodology (structured equation modeling) – used by none of the authors Rosenzweig examines – which allows you to test for causality (and the direction of causality) not just correlation. (Which is one of his big concerns.)

So, net, net, net – I think he’s written a terrific book to remind all managers to beware of quick fad conclusions, and to remind all researchers and consultants that many (if not most) relationships in business that we think we know for sure actually don’t have much of a solid research backing to them.

(Which by the way, was also the subject of Pfeffer and Sutton’s book: Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense)

Just think of the many jokes about consultants who act as if they are more concerned about looking for the next follow-on assignment to cross-sell than doing the current one well; lawyers who are suspected of running up the billable hours because they are paid by the hour; and advertising agency people who are more concerned with winning prizes than selling the client’s product or service.

Whatever your profession, you need to be prepared for the fact that, at the beginning of every new relationship, you must avoid confirming other people’s (inevitable) starting suspicions about your motives, and must actively work to demonstrate that you are, in fact, unlike the providers that the client may have experienced before.

These are the opening paragraphs of a new article of mine called Integrity Impugned. The article is based on my seminars and an extensive blog discussion we held here almost a year ago.

First, I was reading in The Economist an article on immigration which pointed out that, throughout history and throughout the world, people like to associate with those with whom they have a lot in common.

That’s why, The Economist argued, immigrants from the same country tend to move (at least initially) to the same cities and regions where previous immigrants from their origin have gone. Just as there are Bangladeshi areas in certain British towns, Irish in Boston and Russians in Brooklyn. 

Nothing wrong with that, right?

Well, no, but in the same week I received an email from someone in an eastern European country who asked: “Do you think the principles of trust that you and your co-authors described in the Trusted Advisor apply in Eastern Europe? Rather than the factors of credibility, reliability intimacy and lack of self-orientation that you write about, trust in my country basically boils down to whether or not you come from the same village as I do. Or at least the same region.”

The third thing that happened is that I was sent an email about a blog by Carmen van Kerkhove, who argued that, essentially, many diversity trainers in business focus on all the wrong things. One of her most telling points is that by trying to teach people how to be “sensitive” to other races, genders and religions, the training actually just trains people how to hide their racism – it doesn’t stop them being racist, just how to not show it!

I’m really not equipped to be a moralist, but there’s some complicated stuff going on here. 

Sometimes, we work hard to be race-, gender, religion- and class-blind. The, at other times, we are all “realists” and recognize that, very often, people like to deal with people who are like them. We call it “comfort”, “chemistry”, “connection.” 

For example, when we strive to create diverse firms in order to appeal to diverse buyers (female partners to go after female clients, people of color to “penetrate” the ethnic community they come from) we are trading on the (apparently universal) tendency of people to prefer dealing with people like themselves.

There seems to be an aspect of how we as humans come to trust that is inherently “racist.” OF COURSE, it’s not just Caucasian males who can be racist in trusting people who are like them. People of all nationalities, genders and religious background do it ALL the time – not just occasionally, but (it would appear) as the default position! Global literature and movies from any age would be only a microscopic fraction of what they are if we eliminated dramas based on star-crossed lovers whose families do not want them to marry because they come from different backgrounds.

If all this makes you uncomfortable (as it does me) there’s still some hope. People like interacting with and TRUST people with whom they have a lot in common, when there’s no other evidence. “Being like us” (ie the class-ist, racist, religious, gender-biased starting default position) can, it seems, be overcome by just being more trustworthy than others. Credibility, reliability, intimacy and lack of self-orientation DO matter.

But let’s not fool ourselves about what a large portion of the world actually uses to base their trust judgments on. We don’t have to like it, but we do have to acknowledge and deal with it.

One thing that needs to get clarified right up-front is the purpose of getting client feedback. If it is a sincere effort at continuous improvement in quality and client satisfaction, then one would do different things than if it is a marketing exercise run by the marketing department (as it still is in some firms.)

As a third purpose, some firms try to design feedback systems to obtain input to the firm’s compensation scheme. The problem with this is that instead of the positive “let’s learn” aura surrounding the scheme, the client feedback can quickly turn into a negative “gotcha” system, perceived by the firm’s people as adverse and something to be suspicious of.

There are lots of alternatives out there on how firms get client feedback. First, when is it done? Mid-engagement, or at the end? Doing it in the middle allows for course-correction, but influences, positively or negatively, the engagement relationship itself.

Second, there’s the question of who obtains the feedback. Is it the lead service provider on the assignment? The marketing director? A third-party research firm? Retired partners/ senior executives?

Third is the question of coverage: do you try to get feedback on all work or just a sample? (The answer to this one depends on your purpose, of course. If you’re trying to use it as input to a compensation scheme, then you probably need broad coverage.)

Finally, there is the question of the medium you use to contact clients and get the feedback. Among the choices are personal visits, phone calls, on-line surveys, e-mails, mailed questionnaires.

My question to all of you out there is: what’s the state of play in 2007? Are firms having success with different kinds of client feedback approaches than they did in previous years?    

I guess it could send the message that when you instruct anyone at PwC etc., you instruct the firm; but when you instruct someone at a law firm, you instruct the individual. Do clients really see a distinction? Or do accountancy firms fear that their staff will be poached by rivals, I wonder?"

Ideas, anyone? Advice?

I think that one of the reasons that interest in the topic doesn’t seem to diminish is that true trusted advisors seem to still be scarce.

As a test of this, I ask my audiences what I ask YOU now: Is there anyone you have hired who serves as your trusted advisor?

If the answer is yes, I’m (eternally) curious about two things. First, what are the specific kinds of things they do (or did) that made you accept them as your trusted advisor? (I know the theory – I’m interested in YOUR real world practical experience.)

Second, I’ll be curious to find out which practitioners (in general) seem to have earned trusted advisor status most frequently. Has it been it your doctor, lawyer, accountant, broker, consultant, PR person or some other?

Maybe I’ll sneak in a third question to solicit your input: as time goes by, are you finding it easier or harder to find professionals you trust?

I have never worked in China before (except Hong Kong, many years ago.)

My assigned topic is how to be "client-centric" (or client-focused.)

Does anyyone have any experience or insight to share?

Are the principles of "client service" different in China?

Are the specific tactics?

I know this is late to be asking, but, when it comes to client service, is China different?

Here’s his list for how he characterizes great clients:

All cards are played face up

• Mutual accountability
• Willing to share whatever is necessary to get the job done
• Constantly probing to find the best solution
• Time is no barrier
• Eager to learn…and to teach
• An ‘always on’ response mechanism
• Keep up the pace
• Express thanks
• Accept value based pricing

For me, I'dd add:

• Wants thorough solutions, not quick fixes
• Is an admirable person of honor, integrity and principles, who it is a privilege to serve
• Wants a true dialogue, not just an agent to implement or advocate their pre-fixed conclusions
• Gives me enough pre-meeting homework so I can come to meetings prepared and give of my best
• , instead of having to react on the fly
• Helps me understand and prpeare inadvance for organizational politics

What would you add as descriptors of great clients?

“A client retained me to help implement a re-branding strategy of their retail stores by coaching store managers in how to make the desired changes. One form of resistance I encountered was people saying words to the effect, "We're doing fine right now" and "We're already doing it," which I interpreted as complacency. I was disappointed in the outcome of influencing those managers to change their approach. Most of them eventually left the company, voluntarily or otherwise. After re-reading your book, I'm wondering whether, had I "named and claimed" their resistance, we may have enjoyed more success and retained their experience. Or perhaps they lacked the flexibility needed for a changing environment.

“I celebrated the small wins in making the changes that I saw their employees adopt - usually despite the managers' indifference. I put most of my efforts toward asking the managers how I could help them remove the barriers they felt prevented them from embracing the new strategy. Neither of those approaches accomplished much and they usually told me they were too busy to give me and the new strategy their attention.

“After reading your book, I wonder what you think might have happened had I said to them words such as, "With so many satisfied customers and your positive financial results I guess it's hard to understand why the company is investing in this strategy. Please tell me if I'm out of line here, but I get the feeling that because you've been doing a good job that you don't share the company's concern about how quickly and how much the marketplace can change from shifts in customers' tastes and from new competition. Could you help me understand why I'm feeling that way?”

****

I hope other readers of this blog will join in, because this is a classic consulting situation. The core of the problem is that that you get hired by people at one level (top management) and are asked to work with their subordinates (in this case, the store managers.)

In such (completely normal) situations, it’s not surprising that you are not treated as the subordinates’ trusted advisor, because you are not. You are management’s agent, and automatically treated (at least initially) with skepticism and suspicion.

What you were trying to get the store managers to do may indeed have been a wise move for the company, but you must not believe, for a moment, that, from that fact alone, the store managers would want to go along with it.  You can’t assume people will want to do the right thing for the company, even if (or especially even if) they hold middle management positions. Like all human beings, they will first filter any proposed changes through questions about what’s good for them personally. They may never say it out loud, but that’s what they are thinking – always.

There’s even an acronym for it: WIIFM? (What’s in it for me?)

You describe the store managers’ attitudes as “complacency” and “indifference” but I’ll bet dollars to donuts that what was really going through their heads wasn’t that neutral.

So, what’s a trusted advisor to do? Well, obviously, one of the first things you have to figure out is whether or not the proposed changes your (top-level) client wants to make actually are in the personal best interests of the subordinates you are working with.

If the answer to that is “yes”, then your counseling job is to earn the trust of the subordinates and work with them to help them see why the change is (potentially) good for them. (You had better not be faking it, either. If you really want me to buy into your program, you’ve got to convince me you’re trying to help me as well as the company, not just the company.) I would try to get the individual talking about his or her job and what the changes would mean to them personally. I’d stop talking about “how much the marketplace can change from shifts in customers' tastes and from new competition.”

If the answer is “no”, the proposed changes are not in the subordinate’s interests, then (as might be the case with the example you gave) maybe your job is to help the subordinate understand that, the change is going to come anyway, whether they like it or not, and you want to help them adapt to it. (It sounds like some the store managers could not, or did not.) Let’s hope you can do it in a way that sounds like support, and not a threat!

Yes, this is all tough to do, but it’s absolutely typical in consulting. Management always wants consultants to “go persuade my people to do X.” That’s what being a change agent is all about. And doing it well means being able to be an honest broker, understanding changes from the perspective of all the parties involved. 

OK, folks. Time to pitch in. A lot of you who read this blog are consultants. How do you handle situations like this? What do you say?

The theory is that (a) if someone asks a question, I can say "Yes, l've got something on that, let's look at page 26" and (b) handing out more pages than I actually plan to cover gives people "takeaway" value - extra material that they can review after the meeting.

In recent years, I've noticed something interesting - this approach is becoming MORE effective. In the old days, when I handed out the paper copies to everyone, they rarely got used. With the best intentions in the world, people stuffed paper into their briefcase and never looked at it again. or they abandoned it so they don't have to carry it home.

Many meeting organizers responded to that by handing out CDs of the handout material, but even that is now old-hat. What's really working well is to post the slides and handout material on the web. Obvious, but incredibly effective. 

I am now finding that people are REALLY following up and using the material, and apart from the "noble" cause of providing more value, it's helping to introduce my work to new people as those who met / heard me forward the material on to their friends.

I use two approaches at the moment. My standard set of handouts is on my website and I place the customized ones in a private area ("landing page") for each client. It might be interesting to note that I still hand out the paper copies. If there are none, and I just say "Go to the private landing page for more," fewer people go, because tey don't know what's there and they don't bother. However, if I hand out the paper and say "If you see anything here that interests you, you can find it on the landing page," then the follow-up percentage is much higher.

I have two questions for you to react to, if you wish to join in:

(a) Who else has an interesting set of handouts available for download? Tom Peters posts his slides, but maybe we can make a list here, so that everyone who reads this blog can be made aware of other interesting resources out there. Any nominations?

(b) Has anyone evolved to different strategies on using and disseminating their slides / handouts? What are you doing?

For those of you who don't know his work, Tufte is the world's expert on the visual display of quantitative information. His books are works of art. Look for them!

There's a spectrum of presentation styles, between planners and peformers.

I'm the latter.

Personally, I have difficulty sometimes working with and through human resource and training departments who, when we're working on putting together seminars or speeches, want to:

• Specify learning objectives
• Develop a teaching plan
• Identify in advance every slide that is going to be used, in which order
• Know which questions are going to be asked of the group at which point
• Otherwise establish a fixed methodology or flow for the session

I know these people are doing their job, and that many of them are highly trained in "adult learning." I also clearly see the need to capture the content, the process and the flow when a company or firm is trying to roll out a program which is going to be delivered many times in different locations.

I just find it hard to slot my delivery style into such a structured, planned approach.

I'm prepared to be accountable for achieving goals when making presentations: I just hate being locked in specifying in advance exactly what's going to be said, in what order. I never know that until the (interactive) performance begins.

I can also work with "planners" to help THEM develop programs that can be given (by others) multiple times.

But when the stage lights go up and the curtain rises, it's a performance!  With all the strengths and uncertainties that are implied by that word.

By the way, this doesn't only apply to formal seminars. For me, it applies to all client meetings: I prepare, but I stop way short of preparing a fixed, formal presentation. Even there, I take the performing approach, rather than the (structured - 'who's going to say what when?') planned approach.

Does anyone have experience or insight as to how to capture the benefits of both approaches?

No matter how much you want to convey, you should always give your audience the chance to react and ask questions as soon as you have covered your first main point - no later than 15 minutes into your talk.

You should ask something like "Does that fit your world?" "Do you all agree with that?" "Is that what you are doing now?"

By asking for immediate response, you can ensure that you are both relevant and that you are bringing your audience along in your chain of reasoning. If you wait until you have given 4 or 5 steps in your reasoning, you could suddenly get a question about your first point and have to retrace all your steps - you'll be scrambling to catch up.

And if you get a question that's about something other than where you are going, either use it to bring you back to your theme, or ask permission to come back to it later.

Some speakers to do not follow the 15-minute rule, but I think that's what makes them "speakers" rather than EDUCATORS. If you want the focus to be on you - give a speech. If you want to serve your audience - take questions - frequently and early.

To this day, in all my presentations, I ask for the overhead projector as a matter of choice, because it is the best technology I know to minimize the barrier between me and the audience.

By writing on blank plastic sheets with the projector, I can create “lists” in front of people, drawing the answers out from them, even if I already know what I want the list to contain. The session thus becomes more Socratic and interactive.

Even if I am not being so interactive, and am making my own points, the act of writing them down in front of people lends some drama and “theater” to the proceedings, allowing me to keep the presentation lively.

Contrast this with the all-too-common approach of having prepared slides, in a fixed order, and rigidly walking the audience through what you have decided they should listen to. That’s no way to “connect.”

A wise mentor once told me that, in making a presentation (or in teaching) you can focus on one of three things: your material (let’s get through this), yourself (ain’t I great?), or the audience (what do you want to ask about?)

Guess which is most valuable?

Which leads to the final virtue of the old-fashioned OHP: If someone in the audience asks “But what about this other perspective?”, you can quickly throw on to the OHP any prepared slides you have on the topic. You don’t need to scroll through tens (or hundreds) of computer based-Powerpoint slides to find the one you need.

An OHP and a collection of prepared plastic sheets allow you “random access” to your material, thereby enabling you to truly customize your remarks (and your performance) to the specific people in front of you.

Which, of course, raises the question of how these marketing consultants go about marketing themselves.

As an author or blogger, I receive a large number of requests to endorse or review books being published by these marketing consultants, and it’s very hard to be selective. Most of them are eminently sensible, but I have to confess that few make me sit up and say “Wow, I never thought of that!”

But then again, perhaps I’m not really the target audience for these books. Many of the authors are trying to serve people NEW to thinking about marketing, not observers, practitioners and consultants like me who, for better or for worse, have been trying to make sense of it for a long time.

So, I’m actually not in a position to evaluate how effectively these books serve their marketplace – what may strike ME as simplistic and familiar may actually be a very useful way of presenting really useful ideas and suggestions. It’s just that I’m too jaded to tell.

As a result, if I don’t review your book or give you an endorsement, it may be a GOOD sign that you have written your manuscript well, for a completely different audience.

One of the problems of being around for a while is that an idea needs to be really new or counter-conventional to stand out, while the truth is that the need out there is not for new ideas, but for old wisdom communicated in better ways that can command attention in ways as the old ways lose their effectiveness due to familiarity (or from the simple fact of being old.)

But then, that’s probably what all consultants have been doing from time immemorial.   

This problem comes up again and again. In last week’s blogpost about How Not to Manage People, Mark D. observed: “My experience tells me that all things being equal most people want to or are at least willing to embrace your teachings but all things are not equal.  As soon as your teachings conflict with short term financial gain, people begin to throw out the teachings which they view as costing them money.  I know I am skeptical and somewhat jaded but there is no stomach for anything that risks immediate profits.”

As I tried to point out, this is not about just MY teachings, but is a much broader point. As I argued in Strategy and the Fat Smoker, it is part of the human condition that we can know what to do, why we should do it, and even how to do things for which we fervently desire the benefits. None of that actually predicts that we actually are going to do what we absolutely know is good for us.

Note that it’s not about a lack of incentives: live longer is a pretty good incentive!

I continue to be professionally frustrated by all of this. If we can’t help people start doing what even they say would be best for them, how can we be really helpful?

So here’s my question: how DO you help people actually get on the program for what is their best interests? The question is relevant if you are a manager trying to coach your subordinates, or if you a consultant or other trusted advisor trying to get a client on the path that is best for him or her.

So what actually works to get people to take the long-term view with their work, their business and their lives?

Rational discourse (logic) doesn’t seem to work consistently well, and providing statistically reliable data doesn’t seem to be persuasive (so much for the Surgeon General’s reports!)

In descending order of effectiveness, here’s my experience in what gets someone (us as well – don’t make this all about THEM) to change from acting in a short-term way to doing what they (already) know is best for them in the long-term:   

• Talk up or create the “glamour” of the future state (“Think of how fabulous it’s going to be when you’re there!)
• Make it a moral principal (Isn’t it consistent with our/your values to act this way?)
• Get us/them to commit themselves to more public disclosure on actions, to keep them/us on track (embarrassment rather than guilt.)

What experiences do the rest of you have? Have you helped a short-term actor become a long-term actor? What REALLY helped / worked to bring about this transition? What gets people on "the diet?"

However, once you've written the articles, nothing stops you from going for the double benefit of compiling the articles into a book and issuing it as such. That's the strategy that worked so well for me in launching my career with MANAGING THE PROFESSIONAL SERVICE FIRM and TRUE PROFESSIONALISM. Both of those books were compilations of previously published articles, and people really like having them between hard covers.

I think I'm now ready to put together my next book, based upon the articles I have been writing over the past 18 months (and which are all available for download on my website.) With a little rewriting, I think I can bring out my common themes and major messages. (Strategy as determination and courage, management as the willingness to be accountable for the managerial role, going behind the facade of peoplle who claim to want long-term relationships, etc. )  

The challenge I face - and the topic on which I'd like your input - is thinking about marketing the book. 

Book marketing has always been a complete mystery to me. I long ago learned that traditional publishers are useless, so I'll be self-publishing (as modern technology allows me to do) with both on-line versions (pdf) available for sale and "dead tree" versions (hard- and soft-  cover) sold through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.

My past history also taught me that it's incredibly expensive and completely uncertain to hire specialist book publicists. Over the course of 5 books in the past 14 years, I spent an average of $200K per book on publicists and publicity, and never came anywhere near getting much attention from the audiences I was targeting. All publicists SAY they will get you interviews and reviews in key media, but it never really worked out that way for me. There are over 50 business books published in the US each week, and breaking through the clutter is very hard.

So, here's my latets thoughts:

Self publish and send out free copies to CEOS and managing partners of key firms

Send out free copies to every business blogger I can think of

Send out free copies to every traditional journalist I can think of

Send out free copies to every university professor in a professional school

Develop a new series of "you-Tube" style videos, 3-minutes long or less

****   

So, as I get ready to think about marketing my new book, what activities do you think I should be doing or preparing for?

But this blogpost is not about the content of that story. It’s about talking with reporters.

I’m a great believer in doing it out of courtesy, but unlike many of my professional firm clients, I don’t believe getting quoted is a particularly powerful marketing tactic. Yes, it was nice that my name appeared in print, and also that it was mentioned in passing that I was the co-author of The Trusted Advisor.

But experience has taught me that being quoted like this doesn’t really help promote my business or affect the likelihood of me getting hired.

Yet many financial service firms, consulting firms, accounting firms, law firms and so on spend quite a bit of time trying to get press coverage in places like the WSJ. Why? Is it really worth the effort and the money?

I’ll grant that a story ABOUT me might be powerful, but I have been lucky to have had my share of those, but it would be very hard to identify even a single enquiry hat came from press coverage. My family like to keep track of my clippings, and, embarrassing but true,  I (still) get personal gratification from seeing my name in print.

But I think the marketing benefits of talking to journalists, and press coverage in general, are way over-rated for professional businesses.

Do you agree or disagree? Is there any hard evidence one way or the other?

I am thinking of writing an article myself about how clients of consultants can create the right relationship with their consultant so that they get more bang for the buck (i.e. more insight from an objective viewpoint then they would normally get via the usually limited "statement of work"). 

If my company gets called in to help out (with anything from strategy through technical implementations), we end up learning so much about their organization, how they build processes, how things really work and I feel that in some situations, the client puts barriers up that prevent effective communication. 

If clients knew how to approach their consultants and their relationship with them, they could glean a lot of "insider" information that they would not normally get.  We find out SO much about the inadequacies of client organizational structures, communication breakdowns, lack of effective change management etc. that I think the client management might benefit from if only they knew.  Some know how to get this out of us and some don't. 

I understand some of the barriers: they might consider their consultants just money grubbing stiffs, may not trust them, are politically boxed in, etc.). Obviously, a bigpiece of a partnering relationship is the responsibility of the consultant lead. However, it does take two to tango, doesn't it?

***

I think it’s a great idea for an article, Eric. But you haven’t really got us started.

Why don’t we all try and complete the following sentence:

“To get the most out of us, our clients should…..”

(Self-serving actions like hire us some more are not allowed! The spirit of this is to avoid reinforcing the perceptions that Eric so readily identified – that if we are not careful, clients will see additional activities by us as the work of untrustworthy, money-grubbing people. Anything we suggest has to avoid reinforcing that, right?)

So, to get the most out of us/me, clients should:

1. Help me/us understand, before we get in too deep, the real politics of what’s going on in their organization
2. Tell us/me the truth, up-front, about what they’re really willing to change and what they are not
3. Meet with us/me one-on-one informally, so that we/I can pass on “off the record” and informally some of the things we think we have learned.
4. Allow for informal “what’s going well and what are you learning?” conversations on a regular basis during the work, not just at the end.
5. Keep us/me informed if their priorities and goals have shifted, so that we/ can adapt along with them.

Anyone else want to join in? What could clients be doing (specifically) to get the most out of you and your firm?

There is an excellent 20+ page free summary available and you should check it out. It offers the 6 key insights that come from the study:

1. Brand Matters. Firms that said they were very well known in their target market were also more likely to say they were good or excellent at generating leads.
2. It helps (a lot) to know the names of the key decision makers in the organizations you are targeting (and many firms do not.)
3. Cold calling can work – if you use it to set a meeting to introduce yourself and to learn about the prospect, not to go into a detailed sales pitch.
4. The most effective mix of tactics reported were ‘warm’ phone calls to existing contacts, speaking at conferences, running the firm’s own in-person events, becoming members of an industry association and (most surprising to me) connecting with the press to gain PR.
5. Firms reported that 25% of their leads were considered “sales-ready’, 50% required further nurturing and 25% of their leads were disqualified.
6. Actually, as you’ll see when you look at the free summary, insight number 6 is a well-designed ‘teaser’ entitled “Indicators of the Future of Lead generation” which does a good job of making you want to buy the full report.

Apart from offering substance, Rain Today.com does a superb job of marketing itself. They targeted me as a blogger to mention this report, and kept in touch (politely, but insistently) with helpful reminders until I responded with this blog. They can (and DO) give lessons in how to be effective marketers!

In light of some things you teach, ideas from Rob Nixon, and the VeraSage institute; it seems a very bad idea to bill by the hour, especially if you are a new consultant just beginning your practice. Yet, most smaller clients one would probably start with would think in terms of hours. Ultimately, you would want to find some way for them to pay you according to value added, right?  But how is this done?

The best I can come up with is offer a free consultation (a few hours or whatever) just long enough to show them you are worth your fees and long enough to find out if you want to work with them).  Have in mind what your time is worth to you.  Estimate with them the length of the project.  Come up with a (fixed price) estimate.  If they feel like the price is worth it to them, then you are essentially measuring the value added (maybe lower than value added).  Then if it takes longer or shorter, it was based on their value and not your hours. And in the future, as you get more efficient, you still bill the same for the project.

Is this the right approach for a beginning consultant?

*** 

So, what does everyone think? This seems to be toay's conventional wisdom on pricing, but would anyone else provide different advice?

Once a year is, of course, too infrequent. Saying I’ll accomplish something in the next twelve months is like setting New Years’ Resolutions – the pressure for accountability is too little at the beginning of the year, and too intense at the end. Examining whether I did what I promised only after 12 months of effort is unlikely to ensure that I stay on the diligent execution path.

On the other hand, meeting with me and reviewing plans and activities once every month is micromanaging and doesn’t allow for unforeseen circumstances. I can’t ABSOLUTELY promise I’ll get something done in the next 30 days. Who knows what existing client demands will change, what new client opportunities will arise, what staff emergencies and ill-health will affect output? Or (to be honest) how the ups and downs of personal intensity will flow – as my clients keep telling me, you can’t be a dynamo, learning new skills, every month.

But three months is ideal. It’s long enough to work around the world’s unpredictabilities both at work and in people’s personal lives. It’s a long enough leash to make me feel that I have a lot of autonomy in allocating my time, while still keeping me accountable in a period of time that won’t let me go off the rails.

On the other hand, to make it work, the three month-review system mustn’t slip. It must be scheduled, planned for, actionable commitments made and the review actually held. If you want to treat me like a true professional, hold really thorough reviews with strict accountability for action promises made every 3 months – and get off my back in the intervening time period.

Ban monthly budgets!

Abolish annual performance appraisals.

Manage to a 3-month cycle!

(By the way, this rule works on client relationships , too.)

***

Agree, disagree?

I was reminded of this insight as I reflected on my experience as a juror. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had been put into a strange situation for me. For the 5 days of the trial, I was forced to be an OBSERVER, not a participant.

Until the time came to deliberate on the verdict, I could not ask questions, I could not intervene, I could not discuss things. I was forced to be a WATCHER as well as a listener. 

It taught me a lot. I earn my living through words, but I am increasingly coming to believe that we don’t best reveal ourselves (or judge others) through words, but through other means.

I’ve never been trained to “observe”, I’ve never read a book on it, and I don’t have a natural proclivity for it. My wife can be with people at a party or family gathering and tell you things about what they are feeling that were never said out loud. She just “notices.”

Try this exercise: Just watch people in a meeting and see if you can answer these questions about them:

• How self-confident is this person?
• How would you describe their level of optimism or pessimism?
• What emotional needs do they have?
• What type of role would they function best in?
• Is this someone you would trust?
• Would other people want to work with this person?

Even if you’ve never been trained in psychology and never read a book on body language, I’ll bet you’ll get very close to the truth.

Which raises a series of interesting questions:

1. How good a watcher are you?
2. What makes someone a good observer?
3. Can YOU figure someone out by observing them?
4. What do YOU look for?

They often do this even in mid-performance, not just at the end of their act.

What's going on here?

It often comes across a phony and false modesty. After all, it's the performer's job to entertain US.

Do they really think the audience is being "wonderful" or are they just flattering us into liking them (the old reciprocity trick)?

Should those of us in business be copying the approach?

In the middle of an assignment should we say "I want to thank you for being a wonderful client / boss / subordinate?"

The point about dentists is that while we may need them, we never WANT them. While they do very honorable, helpful caring things for us, their patients, we patients would rather avoid them if we can.

I believe the same is true of my profession – consulting. I doubt that anyone ever said “Oh, goody, the consultants are coming in.” Or "Oh, joy! I get to woork with the HR department today."

Similarly, I doubt that anyone said “It’s my lucky day, I need to bring the lawyers in!” (or the accountants)

And, of course, the same is true of IT technicians, PR people, and a whole host of other professionals, (internal and external.)

As providers, we see what we do in a positive light (solving problems and bringing about improvements.)   However, from the users’ perspective our presence signals pain, disruption, inconvenience, expense. Ultimately, we may benefit from the provider’s activities, but I’d rather not HAVE to deal with them at all.

We need to remember our place. We’re not glorious “saviors” of clients with problems: we are an unfortunate necessity.

***

Does anyone have stories to tell and when they learned this truth, and what changes in behavior they had to make as a consequence?

We are moving to a new area, and my wife wants to start a preschool out of our home (which we have yet to purchase). Our question is how to price and promote such a business.

Most preschools in the area are more like “day-cares” (more like a baby-sitter than a private school education). The businesses may or may not be licensed (from what we hear), and the teachers are not certified. The highest end “institutional” preschools in our area charge as much as $100/month. My wife knows of someone who has run a high-end “home-based” preschool for years and charges $240+ per month, has 40 students per month and has a waiting list. Like my wife, this teacher is state certified.

My wife would like to have 20 students, all signed and committed by August 1. As we will purchase a larger home than we would normally need (to accommodate the preschool), the earlier we can receive cash flows the better. It would help if we could commit families to “terms” of about 4 to 5 months, but we feel like we probably would have to charge them monthly rather than up front (like a traditional school).

Extreme versions of your principles (“Earn a relationship by giving something free first”) would tell us to give everyone a month for free and then charge a steep premium after they fall in love with my wife’s teaching of their kids. Yet we feel we might get a bunch of free-loaders that way.

In addition, if we did start out at a discount to “earn and deserve the relationship” how would we then raise the price if people are willing to pay for a premium? Should we wait until we have a waiting list? We could also try the variation mentioned in one of your books of charging a minimum payment of (say) 80% of target fees, subject to parents agreeing to paying us a satisfaction payment at the end of term.

How should we think of marketing and pricing this business in an area that will be new to us?

It sounds to me to be very ambitious to aim for a “full-house” within 6 months in a new business in a new area where you are not known. And I don’t think you can solve it with creative pricing schemes.

I suspect that your big challenge is not pricing but establishing a marketing presence; i.e., being accepted as a credible supplier — particularly if people have to trust their kids to you. Is there any way of doing a deal with one or more of the current high-end teachers who have a waiting list? Paying them a commission or going into partnership with them? Since you’re new and they’re established, teaming with them for the first few years might make the most sense.

Since prices are set by supply and demand, I have lots of questions about both. Why aren’t there more high-end certified preschool teachers? Is the fact that the one you know about has a waiting list evidence that there is a shortage of supply? Or is it just one anecdote? Are people unhappy with "institutional" preschool, thereby creating a pent-up demand? And what are the rule in your state — can parents qualify for programs that get the state to pay (some of) the fees? State bodies might also be a good "partner" to get you launched in the new area. They certainly would be a good source of 'market intelligence.'

If it is a shortage of good teachers is the issue, where are the kids that you hope to attract going now? Will you be “stealing them” from the institutional preschools ($100 per month), from other high-end teachers, or from situations where the parents keep the kids at home? Which is the most likely source?

As to pricing structure, I don’t know if “freebies” would work here — they may be viewed with suspicion and a sign of low quality. Instead, I suspect you want and need to create an image of being “special”, so a high fee with a money back guarantee might work better than agreeing to a discount up front.

Anybody else got some initial views about how to launch and price a business like this?

As a former Wall Street Journal staff reporter, I'm not big on self-promotion, but I thought you might be interested in knowing about a new book just published by Wiley about the future of energy. . . Title is: Future Energy: How the New Oil Industry Will Change People, Politics and Portfolios. Sorry again about the self-promotion.

The second email was from Keith Ferrazzi, the author of the best-selling Never Eat Lunch Alone, one of the most successful recent guides to networking and self-promotion. Here's (part of) Keith's email:

I really wanted to maximize the opportunity for readers to actually start using the advice (in LifeCoachTool 1.0) in their own lives, I also had my team put together a simple online quiz/survey/tool that doesn't cost anything and only takes a couple minutes to complete.

If you visit this link

You can:

• Watch a brief video of me explaining what it is

• Try it for yourself

• Even enter a contest we're running that rewards you for helping make others more successful — prizes include personalized coaching calls with me, signed books, and DVDs. Should be fun.

What struck me about these two emails is not just the extra thought and investment that has gone into promoting Ferrazzi’s new venture, but (no surprise here) his utter self-confidence in putting himself forward.

By way of contrast, Bill Paul, (in common with many people including myself, ) actually feels so bad about letting me know about his new book that he apologizes - twice – for doing nothing more than politely informing me of the availability of something I might be interested in.

But here’s the interesting thing. While it’s clear that Ferrazzi’s approach is going to get more response, I’m not sure I could do it on behalf of myself. Like Bill Paul, there is something in me that holds me back from the more explicit forms of self-promotion.

Like many other professionals, I’m comfortable with showing my material and saying “Let the work speak for itself” but I’ve been around long enough to know that more than that is required. I’m just not comfortable doing it.

Those who are in marketing often laugh at the people who don’t want to “get out and network,” but the reluctance to self-promote is something many of us were brought up with. We can read and be impressed by Ferrazzi’s book about networking, but find it hard to do personally. (Maybe that’s why we try to hire other people as our marketers for doing it for us – which rarely works out too well.)

These are the things I am reflecting on:

1. Where does the reluctance to self-promote come from? Is it a “social graces” thing that we were taught by our parents? A psychological characteristic we are born with? Is it a class-based thing?
2. How many of you out there are like Bill Paul and me – fundamentally uncomfortable with self-promotion?
3. Can non-self promoters be taught to get psychologically comfortable with it? (I know I can be taught to DO it, but can I be taught to get comfortable with it?)
4. Are the Keith Ferrazzi’s of this world – stellar, skilled, unabashed networkers and self-promoters - born or made?
5. Can, or should, I be doing more of what Ferrazzi advocates (eg., Never Eat Lunch Alone)?

Things seemed to have shifted since you wrote Managing the Professional Service Firm.

In that book, you described a world where it was the partner who was tasked with developing business. Today, in many professional firms, including the Big-4 accounting firms, it is dedicated Business Development Managers(BDM) who work hand-in-hand with the partners. I am curious to better understand how such a relationship works.

I currently work at a large IT manufacturer which, over the years, developed a services arm. Dedicated business development people (and even departments) are a lot more common in my industry, but over the years, a lot of people who came up through our services area have found their way into this type of positions at the Big 4 (and seem to have succeeded well.)

My current role at the IT firm services group involves developing and maintaining key relationships with six major accounts and setting the strategy or direction in how we work with them. While there are various sales representatives and specialists across the country working with various contacts, it my responsibility to see we all march in one direction and that we are providing solutions to these customers in a uniform or consistent fashion. The interesting, and sometimes challenging, aspect is that none of these folks report to me, but instead to the local company operations.

Are things now similar in Big-4 accounting firms?

In most professions, things have changed significantly since I wrote my 1993 book. Many professions (not just large accounting firms) have made significant transitions in getting organized for marketing, selling and business development, with marketing departments being established with significant roles, responsibilities and budgets. The teaming you describe is now a lot more common than it was in 1993.

However, I must report that it really is firm-specific, and can easily wax and wane. When the Big-4 accounting firms had large consulting practices, they successfully made a big transition to hiring dedicated salespeople who worked, as you say, hand-in-hand with the partners. In addition to people hired for sales activities, there was a sensible investment in marketing support, so that the firm could efficiently keep the partners informed (in real time) on industry trends affecting their clients. This teaming made it easier for partners to research their clients, prepare sensible proposals when needed, keep up to date, and allowed for wise allocation of tasks between specialists.

This teaming could and did work in some firms. However, when the regulatory environment changed (post Enron) and many firms sold off their consulting businesses, their commitment to marketing and sales teaming between the remaining audit and tax professionals and the marketing professionals sometimes was weakened. Some firms cut back their commitment to marketing and the use of marketing professionals.

The situation has also been “muddied” in the current climate. Many large accounting firms in the post-Sarbanes-Oxley environment have more demand for their services than they can handle. Marketing is now less about looking for new clients than it is about ensuring that key major clients are happy. This is EXACTLY the role you say you are now performing in your IT firm: co-ordinating activities for major accounts without having “formal” powers.

By the way, the same should be true in other professions like law firms, although there is still the common mistake that marketing professionals are more often used to hunt for new clients, rather than help in nurturing existing relationships. What you say you do in your current It firm is very sensible and important, but it is less common in some other professions.

You will obviously know that the role you currently play can be either very fulfilling or a nightmare: it depends on whether the firm you join is serious about (a) cross boundary coordination; (b) investing in client relationships and (c) teaming between partners and marketing professionals. As always, culture and seriousness of intent is crucial.

My advice is to tread cautiously. Some firms are serious about all three of these things (cross-boundary coordination, investing in relationships and teaming with marketing professionals.) When they are serious, it’s working very well. However, some other firms are only pretending. And guess who wins when the firm is only pretending? It isn’t the marketing professional.

In many, if not most consulting assignments (even many speaking assignments) it is apparent that, as a person who has an extensive written history, it is known that I already have many views on common issues. This means I am a threat to at least one group within my client firm, possibly to all sides. Since I'm already "on the record" on many issues, it's hard for me to come off as impartial.

It used to surprise me, but I now accept that all business problems have “sides” or “positions.” Each department (marketing, operations, procurement) wants you to adopt their point of view and help them prevail. It works vertically, too. Management wants you to explain to “them” (the workforce) why they should go along with the corporate policies, while the juniors want you to help management understand why they (the juniors) are close to burnout.

The polarization doesn’t have to be between formal groups. In a majority of my consulting assignments, the battle is between individuals who just have different operating philosophies (hunters and farmers, for example) and who want my help in figuring out a way for them to coexist. (Sometimes they can and should, sometimes they cannot and shouldn't)

All this real-world complexity must be addressed. I suspect that there is no such thing as a politically-insulated position for a consultant to be in. It’s ALWAYS about politics, and like it or not, you’re involved. (This is just as true for internal staff like HR and marketing. We like to think what we offer is our intellect, but really we’re all marriage guidance counselors – helping people live together.)

Even though I have decades of exposure to the realities of corporate politics and gamesmanship, I find it astoundingly hard to navigate my way through it. It requires muscles and skills in which I was not schooled. I never had a course in mediating, politicking, bargaining, shuttle diplomacy, representing people to each other. And I’m not sure I want the job of arbitrating other people’s lives together.

I’m not saying this is avoidable. It isn’t. It’s the normal human interplay of egos, diffrences in preferences and turf. It’s not often about logic, rationality, analytics, experience, frameworks and all the other things that consultants like to think are their stock in trade.

As I think Ben Franklin once said, you don’t persuade by appealing to people’s sense of reason, but to their interests.

As an advisor, I really have to ask myself what am I bringing to the table if I am working with smart people who are divided not by a lack of understanding (they are not missing facts, logic or conceptual frameworks.) What they are missing is agreement about how to run their joint (firm) affairs. And that disagreement is not driven by a lack of clarity, but a real difference of vested interests.

Take, as a relatively pure example, a fight over the design of a compensation system in a professional firm. Everyone can PRETEND it’s about it’s about the logic of which systems best promote the long-run health of the firm. However, the truth, 99 times out of 100, is that when a firm goes outside to get an advisor, they are looking either for a diplomatic mediator who can bring opposing sides to agreement, or (on occasion) one side is trying to hire a consultant who already agrees with them so that the internal battle can be fought.

All this raises some very interesting question for those of us who earn our living as advisors.

Do you HAVE to be a skilled mediator to be a good advisor?

What do you do if you’re not?

Is it OK to accept an engagement when you know you are being used as political weapon?

Is it ethical to accept an assignment if you think your work will lead to the break-up of that firm by proving to people that they shouldn’t be living together?

Is there ever a way to not be politically involved?

Is there ever a way to not have a political impact?

Update: this discussion is continued in a new post entitled Politics Part II.

David, One of my clients' has become accustomed to operating in crisis mode. They are constantly in reactive mode vs. proactive. I have not been asked to help fix this, my firm is involved in other projects. I feel like I am watching a train crash about to happen. How can I get them to see that reactive mode and crisis is not a normal way of conducting business, when they have not asked for help? Thanks.

Here’s my (modified) reply:

One of my rules is: don't give your opinion until it's asked for - it will just be resented. First, you must build a relationship and earn the right to comment. Second, there's no point commenting to someone who isn't empowered to change things. So, you must ask "If they were to change this mode of operating, who would have to lead that change? Who is the key decision-maker here?"

By the way, I don't completely accept your premise that a "reactive mode and crisis is not a normal way of conducting business." It may not be a good idea, but it's remarkably common. Mentally, imagine this: you observe that this person in your social circle that you've met (not a close friend) is overweight and unfit. You think it's not healthy to live that way. They haven't asked your opinion. But you want them to understand that there's a better way. How would you approach THAT???

You'll probably have to guess that you are not the first person to point out to them that their are fat and unfit. They've heard it before, in all probability. So what's going to be different about your approach?

(By the way, you wouldn’t tell someone they were ugly and had terrible dress sense, would you? So why would you point out to them they were fat and unfit? Aren’t both equally unkind? Maybe there’s a business equivalent. Some things you just SHOULDN’T point out.)

The first thing I'd observe is that it won't be the logic of your argument that will prevail. Whatever the process is will mostly be about emotions: creating the desire for the benefits that fitness can bring, helping boost their confidence and courage that, yes, they CAN change, quelling their fears about dropping their past habits, and understanding the group psychodynamics that led to why they operate this way now. You'll need to be a skilled counselor, psychotherapist and corporate politician to pull it off.

So, to do this well, you have to scheme (at least) WHO, WHEN, WHERE, HOW and WHY.

WHO do you approach? Your current contact? The person causing the problem? The person with the power to solve the problem? The person who’s bearing the brunt of the problem?

WHEN do you approach that person? At the end of you current project (when you have earned some credibility) or as soon as possible?

WHERE do you do it? Ask for a private meeting? Take them out for a beer or a meal to get them away from the office?

HOW do you phrase the words?

And, of course, you have to ask yourself WHY you are doing it. Are you really doing it to help, or do you just want to cross-sell something or develop a follow-on assignment?

Anyone got any advice to offer? What DO you do if you’re working with a client and see things that urgently need change but which they don’t seem to want to tackle? For all of you out there whose firms want you to grow business (or grow "relationships") this should be an important topic. And, of course, those in the business of giving out marketing advice should join in!

I think the best way to test what good manners are would be to identify what think we should do, not just what we want others to do to us.

So, think about this: In which of these circumstances do you return the phone call?

a) You have used someone’s services, and it was OK – not great, not disastrous, OK. They want to telephone you to discuss their performance. Do you take (or make) the call?

b) You have used someone’s services and you were disappointed. They want to telephone you to discuss their performance. Do you take (or make) the call?

c) You have asked someone for some detail about their services, with a view to considering hiring them. You decide that they are not someone you want to proceed with. Do you call them to tell them why, or just not respond to emails, letters and telephone calls?

d) You receive an enquiry by email about your services from someone who doesn’t fall within your “strategic screen.” (ie, they’re too small a company, too low level, the wrong type of topic.) They want you to call them to discuss hiring you. Do you place the call and tell them why you don’t want to work for them, or do you just not bother?

e) Someone wants to work for/with you as an employee and places a call. Do you return the call to explain why you don't want to consider hiring them? Do you send a brush-off email? Do you just not reply?

f) Someone is interested in exploring a joint venture or alliance with you, something you have never wanted to do. Do you return the call either on the grounds of being open to new ideas, or on the grounds of being polite?

What are your policies?

He notes that effective financial salespeople feign friendship, asking you all about yourself, pretending you have things in common.

He observes that “Popularity is a pretty good guide when picking things like movies and restaurants, so it’s comforting to hear that an investment is popular.” And hence we get suckered in to going with inappropriate things.

He makes reference to another ancient sales tactics: Giving a free lunch or offering supposedly inside information to create the sense of obligation that makes people more susceptible to buying.

He reports that one can obtain a free AARP book “Weapons of Fraud’ which outlines the tactics used by unscrupulous salespeople by emailing your name and address to weaponsoffraud@aarp.org.

Presumably, the theory behind the book is that, by being aware of the manipulative techniques that salespeople use, we will have better defenses.

I’m not so sure.

Note that these “tactics” are incredibly similar, if not completely identical, to how someone would behave if they really were trying to be helpful to you. Here’s someone showing an interest in me, giving ideas away first to earn my trust, from an institution that I’ve heard of (the popularity or brand effect). That’s what a REAL trusted advisor would do isn’t it?

I recently (skim-) read a book by Kevin Hogan called “The Psychology of Persuasion: How to Persuade Others to Your Way of Thinking.”

Aimed primarily at salespeople, it is one of the most effective and terrifying books I have ever read. It summarizes and communicates clearly all the manipulation techniques most likely to work when selling a product or service.

What’s so terrifying about it all is, that as today’s WSJ article points out, these tactics WORK. And yes, they work on you and me.

The difference, presumably, is that the salesperson is using all the techniques as “tricks” but without real sincerity behind them. The Trusted Advisor that my coauthors and I wrote about is likely to be doing all the same things but with a true desire to help.

So, the effectiveness of my defenses turn on the following question: if someone is doing and saying all the right (manipulative) things, how well do I think I can discriminate between those who are doing it to be truly helpful, and those who are doing the same things just to get my business? How good am I at spotting insincerity?

I’d like to think I’m terrific at it, but I have my doubts.

What do you think? How susceptible are we to the person with high skills and low motives?

For example, this is a terrible confession, but you’ve almost always got me to complete those silly questionnaire’s that come in the mail if you include a dollar bill with the questionnaire. It’s an old direct marketing technique, but just as Robert Cialdini analyzes in his justifiably famous book Influence , the “sense of obligation” that putting that dollar in my wallet creates is enough to make me complete and return the darn questionnaire. And there’s no way I’m going to avoid the problem by throwing the dollar away, am I? And it will cost me more in time to send back than it’s worth! I'm trapped with no way out!

Similarly, I hate it that I’m a sucker for the freebies that exhibitors give away at conferences. I know, if I had more courage, I could just go and help myself to the freebie (pens, computer flash memory, free software) without getting into a conversation with the people staffing the booth, but it just feels rude not to enquire politely about their product or service. I’m not saying I always end up buying, but a high percentage of the time they get my business card, and they follow up. The darned approach works on me and I wish it didn’t.

I’ll confess that I’m also a sucker for “extra features.” If you show me a plain vanilla option and an “extra special option,” I’m going to listen hard for what the latter can do for me. I hate that I fall for it – but I do. I hate it that I buy the “extra insurance” when renting a car, even though my statistical training tells me it’s a stupid purchase. They play on my insecurities, and they win.

Have any of you got confessions to make about marketing or selling tactics that worked on you that you really didn’t think were going to? I don’t just mean at the supermarket or the car showroom, but perhaps in hiring a professional provider to assist you.

Have you ever spent more than you planned to on a service provider? What did they do that “worked” on you? I don't mean the honorable, trust-earning things that truly make you want to work with an honorable provider. I mean the things that make you say (as the title of this blogpost says): I can't believe this worked on me!

Suzanne Lowe (Expertise Marketing) recently wrote

I have spent a career helping professional service firms market their experts and their collective expertise. But I have yet to hear a single person refer to their MARKETERS as experts. Do we marketers have any idea what makes one marketer more expert than the other? It's intriguing to imagine that we could do better at identifying our hoped-for marketing team members if we thought more critically about what it takes to be a professional services marketing expert (especially since we often end up scrambling for just the right marketing talent, and we often end up settling for someone who has simply got the right number of notches on his or her marketing belt).

The amazing Seth Godin had a related post about this on October 17. He said:

Marketers and designers will be quick to tell you that marketing and design are critical to the success of any venture. That's why it's so sad/disturbing/surprising/wonderful to discover that so many successful ventures were created by amateurs. Yes, they were professionals at something …but the marketing and design was not created by a 'professional'. The list is long, and runs from the Boy Scouts to Google, from Nike to the New York Yankees. One possible lesson is that marketing is easy. The other, more likely lesson is that marketing is way too important to be left to professionals.).

It doesn’t impugn the good intentions (or talents) of marketing directors in professional businesses to point out that, in fact, we probably KNOW very little about what works in professional firm marketing that we didn’t know 20 years ago. There’s a little bit more accumulated experience and wisdom, but not much.

Most of the advice given today (publicly and inside firms) is the same (sensible) advice that was flying around back then. If you want to check that, go back and look at the trade magazine articles in each profession concerning marketing. You’ll see the same recommendations then as you still do. Or read the old books and the new books.

My own tentative hypothesis is that professional business marketers (and consultants) probably know quite a bit about the processes of marketing (listen to your clients, get feedback, build relationships, form client teams, manage media relations, etc.) But I suspect we actually know very little about marketing itself, ie major breakthroughs in positioning, actually achieving differentiation and branding (as opposed to claiming it.)

Thinking back, I don’t know what I would point to as a major MARKETING achievements in the professional world. Just as Seth Godin has pointed, I can think of many professional businesses built by the professionals themselves (i.e. the marketing amateurs), but it’s very unclear (at least from the outside) what the marketing professionals contributed.

I’m not sure what I would offer as evidence of marketing experts at work. For example, I know a lot of firms have worked at improving client service and a lot of copies of my TRUSTED ADVISOR book have been bought and circulated, but I don’t know which firms if any to nominate as having pulled off a distinctive client service strategy. I know a lot who have tried, but few to nominate as successes and evidence of a real expert at work.

It’s clear internal marketers have helped with various marketing processes (client feedback, media relations, sales training.) But I don’t think these would qualify for Suzanne, Seth (or me) as examples of “innovative, creative experts” at work.

At the other end of marketing, what are we to make of advertising? It is astounding the commitment and dollars that Accenture is showing to its Tiger Woods ads and they are VERY creative and appealing, but is there any evidence that they are working? How come none of their IT or BPO competitors are copying them? Does that prove Accenture are marketing geniuses or marketing idiots?

In other professional businesses, others are beginning to dabble with advetising. For example, two nights ago I was surprised to see a TV ad for accounting firm Grant Thornton during the evening news. Courageous and innovative? Probably. It hasn’t been tried often, and the precedents are unfortunate. Brobeck, the aggressive Californian law firm did the same thing just before the tech bubble burst and the firm imploded out of existence.

One way that we could begin the discussion here is to ask the questions in a slightly different way. If we (please) exclude boasting about our own firms, our own accomplishments (or our own writing and consulting advice),

a) what would you point to as EVIDENCE that an expert, creative marketing advisor has made a real difference in a professional business?

b) what would you point to as the MARKETING successes in professional businesses over the past 20 years?

It's an old trick, and it works. I know that in my hobby of collecting music, I am a sucker for completeness (all known recordings on the XX label) or multivolume presentation. If there are available "The hits of 1995, volumes 1,2 and 3" and I want something on volume 2, there's a vey high chance I'm going to buy volumess 1 and 3, just to make my collection complete. Book publishers use this phenomenon with their look and the (sometimes) artificial creation of series.

I get suckered in in extra ways. Record companies keep discovering "bonus tracks" (sometimes only studio demos of tracks already on the album) and then re-issuing the whole album at a premium price, justified by the inclusion of the one extra track. Who's the mug who re-buys the whole thing, even though he has the original album already, just to get that one extra track? Me, of course.

I was always this obsessive. I think it common among little boys to collect stamps and coins, and I did both, but I was a bookish, nerdy kid, and I started applying the same "gotta have the set" thinking to my reading. In my teens, I read everything (and I mean everything) written by James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, Henrik Ibsen, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and Ayn Rand. (Yes, I've got wierd tastes.) I wouldn't start with an author unless I was prepared to 'complete the set.' (Is this the same as being brand loyal? Not quite, but it might be related.)

So, here's the point of this blog post: is the impulse to collect "sets" - the urge for completeness - a general phenomenon? If so, can it be applied beyond retail things to professional businesses? If you were a consultng firm, a law firm, an engineering firm, an ad agency, an accounting firm, etc., how would you take advantage of people's propensity to want to complete "sets" or have things presented as "sets"?

Among my messages was the fact that, as consultants, many of us give advice on things we were not trained in, and do not actually have ‘proof’ that what we advise is correct. We know less than people think we know. I used my (now) familiar metaphor that most business problems are like losing weight: things the client already knows that he or she should do, but just isn’t doing. As consultants, we don’t have any magic pills – we just help clients exercise more and eat less.

That doesn’t mean we’re faking it, or that we are useless. Just that we mustn’t get carried away with believing our own publicity. We like to think we have answers, but we often don’t. In fact we usually don’t. We have opinions. Sometimes, we have ways of thinking which help other people’s ways of thinking.

When we help, we help not with our knowledge, but with our ability to guide the client’s own reasoning. What counts is not our knowledge, but our interactive, human skills in helping clients – as individuals and as organizations. Sometimes it’s gentle, sometimes you need to be challenging. But it’s all about helping the clients make decisions and act

On my return to the US, I received the following e-mail (presented here in a slightly edited form):

I think my unusual consultant story confirms many of your findings. I believe I have one of the most awkward backgrounds as a consultant, but still I can very much relate to your experiences. I have spent the first 10 years of my weird and fun career on operational level in transportation, followed by 6 years in different management positions. I had an adventure in between as franchisee for 7-Eleven, then more than 3 years in consulting.

I faked myself into the consulting business. I don’t have a master’s degree and I don’t read many books on management consulting. Actually, I am open and honest about who and what I am. My knowledge is not really very impressive – it is wide but not deep. But I believe I have many healthy principles, I act with passion and I share with everybody - and that's basically it. To my own big surprise, I have from the first day in consulting generated revenue above average and only ever received good customer feedback.

I have often asked and struggled myself with the tough question: what am I good at? Not much really, but I have a general view, that life is simple and business is simple. I don't see myself outstanding in specific disciplines, but, as a consultant, I make things happen at the right time and ensure that things are well communicated. In consulting, the right decisions and the way to consensus is often written in neon.

The magic pill surely is integrity - but for those who didn't have it in the cradle, the pill is probably too big to swallow. Like many clients (and consultants) I had an illusion at the beginning of my consulting path about the big answer book and higher truth - but now I know, that it is only an illusion. I think you framed that very well.

Best regards,

Henrik Nielsen,
Senior Consultant, Denmark

Thanks, Henrik!

Reactions, anybody?

It can happen with a client, a boss, a subordinate, a peer, a romantic partner, a friend or a family member.

Of course, you acknowledge that you were guilty, too, but you feel that your sins are less because:

(a) you were RIGHT

(b) you had a good reason for what YOU did

(c) the other person was unfair

(d) they started it

(e) you’re going to be the one who has the final word, come hell or high water

Now what?

The temptation is always to dwell on the hurtful things the other person said, or the ways they let you down. The temptation is to burn your bridges, or engage in extensive discussions to prove you were in the right.

Bad idea. The thing that set the other person off may not have been the thing they’re complaining about. Often, it’s not. Frequently, resentments accumulate and the final topic that causes the explosion is, more often than not, only the excuse for the bad temper, not the real cause.

One of the hardest things in the world is to stand aside from all this, and ask “Do I want to end the relationship right now, or try to restore it over time?” It’s hard to ask ‘What’s in my best interests here?’ It’s hard, but necessary, to put aside – at least temporarily- the issue of who was right and who was wrong.

One of the most elusive – and valuable – talents, is the ability to mend broken fences. Some people are terrific at it, others don’t have the personality for it. But my rule is that I don’t believe in half-relationships. We’re either in this fully together or I don’t want to play.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t realize that sometimes the relationship is on probation. When trying to mend fences, note that you will need to discuss whatever set you both off, but not right when it happened. The more you try to “explain” your side, the more self-justifying (and annoying) you will become. Remember the goal is to heal, not to have the argument yet one more time.

Just move on together. Weeks, months or years from now you can discuss who did what to whom, but until time has performed its magic, you’ll get nowhere trying to heal hurt feelings with logic. Just acknowledge that the underlying mutual respect is there – the commitment to make it work – and get back to work.

Relationships are more important than blame.

What are YOUR tips for getting through these terrible times?

The timing of this post is almost perfect for me. Unfortunately, almost in this case is three days too late!

Over the last year, I've been working on-and-off with a trade association to do some work to solve a problem (entailing calculating a price index in a particular way based on historical data). This has all been in the "proposal stage" where we were all deciding whether what I could offer could work. (Not that my solution is particularly exceptional, but it is the best solution to their specific problem in this case and I know of very few others in South Africa who can provide all the aspects of this work - you're gonna have to trust me on this part!). When they agree they want the work I done, I prepare a quote based on hourly billings for the team to be involved on the project. I don't include any amount for the time already spent (amounting to about 40% again on top of the quote) because I felt that was part of the process leading up to getting the work. It was during this proposal phase where I did signficant research, both about their problem/situation and about the best solution for them.

If the results are positive (they will be based on historical data, so neither party can know this yet), the impact on the regulation of this industry is likely to mean that the member companies of the trade association will see a return on their investment in the project of several thousand percent (based on retaining pricing power and thus profitability from several large, listed businesses.

In a meeting this week that basically demanded a massive discount. Their argument for why the cost is too high? "The trade association is a non-profit company with limited funds."

Also, based on the work done to date and the documents I prepared for them, it is possible that someone could "reverse engineer" the required calcs and do a decent job at performing the work (although if they messed up they probably wouldn't even know it, let alone what to do about it) at a lower cost because their billing rate doesn't reflect the expertise required to understand what calcs and formulae were needed in the first place.

So, my questions:

1. What to do about the trade association claiming no money when the real beneficiaries have plenty, and how does this tie into value pricing?
2. How do I get around the problem of having given away so much "free consulting"?
3. How should I have approached this situation from the start, since it's clear my actual strategy failed miserably?
4. Does this sound like the sort of client that we should all avoid like the plague?

We are all familiar with the perverse incentives that hourly or daily pricing systems create: if the provider gets more efficient and finds a way to do the work with less time, then the provider gets paid less for the job.

This is an ancient problem. There’s an old, traditional song in my music collection, sung by Paul Robeson, called “The Cobbler’s Song”. One verse goes like this:

The stouter I cobble, the less I earn

For the soles ne’er crack , not the uppers turn.

The stouter I cobble, the less my pay.

But work can only be done one way.

The best source on value pricing is Ron Baker’s book The Professionals Guide to Value Pricing.

However, I think many people who analyze this situation get it completely wrong. They want to call it value pricing because they think that if they create more value for the client, they should be paid more.

Wrong! We like in a capitalist, free exchange society. In such an economy price is not set by what things cost to make, nor the scale of the benefits delivered to the client.

Instead, prices are set by scarcity – the relative supply and demand for the service provided. Water has more inherent benefit than diamonds, but diamonds cost more because of an artificially managed supply and demand imbalance.

If you save your client a million dollars through your tax advice (for example), that doesn’t mean you deserve a high percent of those savings – IF MANY OTHER TAX ADVISORS WOULD ALSO HAVE ACHIEVED THAT BENEFIT.

You get paid a lot when your client believes you deliver a level of value that cannot be (or is not being) delivered by other possible providers.

For each of thus, then, whether we are individuals or large firms, our challenge is “How do I make myself special, in ways that clients value?” It’s not primarily a pricing problem, but a combination of ensuring that I DO become more valuable in my clients’ eyes, and then have a method of pricing which captures that.

For over ten years, I have practiced a particularly “clean” form of this. I set my fee by the number of days I work for the client (at particularly high daily rate) but I give every  client an unconditional satisfaction guarantee.

Every bill I send out, without exception, has these precise words: “If you are anything less than completely satisfied, then pay me only what you think the work was worth.”

Note that it doesn’t say “call me to discuss payment.” It says “Pay me what you think I was worth.” The obligation is now on me to serve the client in such as a way that he or she can really see the value provided.

The amount they pay is now based not on my cost to deliver, not the amount of the benefit they received, but whether or not THEY believe I was sufficiently special to deserve a premium fee.

There’s no secret trick to value billing – just figure out a way to be more valuable. If you are, you’ll get paid more.

My message is one of the economic benefits of optimism, professionalism and high standards, but it is met most often with a dejected, beaten-down cynicism.

Many times during my latest trip I was told things like: “David. It would be very nice to have your ideals: to believe that the managers with the highest integrity get the best work and the highest profits out of the group they manage. But don’t task-masters and slave-drivers also get results?”

“It would be nice to believe that the way you get the best out of employees and clients is to try - at least try – and understand them as human beings, and get better, if necessary at meeting their human needs. But don’t such idealistic people get rejected in companies – can you really get promoted as a manager if you care about your people – or your customers – too much?"

I keep meeting people who have given up their ability to believe in the power of standards and ideals (or to believe that anyone else in business has them).

Some Examples

A consultant (age 50 or so), who worked for one of the most famous ‘brand names’ in consulting:

“I was as simple boy who grew up in the country. When I came to the city, they taught me that to get on in business you have to lie. You exaggerate and misrepresent in proposals in order to win the work, you claim to have done things you have not done. That’s the way the game is played, you are taught.”

A 30-year-old middle-level supervisor at a European-wide training program:

“The firm pretends that it wants to inspire us, but the truth is that we do boring work, and so do those more senior than us. We cannot imagine that there are people who do work they are still excited about. That’s a luxury we cannot dream about. They just want us to work harder and get the people who report to us to work harder.”

A partner in a tax firm:

“We know many ways to save our clients money, but that just would mean we would bill them less and take home less pay, so we don’t work at getting efficient. That would be the 'right' thing to do, and may even get us a good repuation in the long run, but no-one would seriously suggest changing to that way."

A senior national-level director of a professional business, in charge of 6,000 people:

“It’s OK talking about all this quality and employee motivation stuff, David, but we just want to make money – lot’s of it. What’s wrong with that?”

So here’s my question to you: How did we / you end up here? Clearly, something was missing from my education and upbringing - the world forgot to "beat out of me" my ideals, but seems to have done a good job of beating them out of most other people.

I'm really interested: What (specifically) happened to you that made you lose your innocence about how business (or academia) was run? (Stories please.)

Beloved Client: You have ambitious goals, which will generate significant returns if you can achieve them. However, you have told us that your goals will not be achieved by ‘business as usual.’ You recognize that you will need to re-examine and redesign a number of your processes to capitalize upon the opportunities you have.

In turn, redesigning some of your processes will inevitably involve re-allocations of responsibilities, duties and accountabilities.

It can be anticipated that achieving consensus on these re-allocations will not be easy, and must be accomplished through a process of consultation, participation and involvement if you are to ensure the buy-in necessary for diligent implementation and execution of your plans.

In assisting you, we will play the role of objective outsiders, using our accumulated expertise and proprietary methodologies to support you in the following stages of your decision-making and implementation:

• Suggesting information collection from employees and customers
• Assisting in analyzing and interpreting responses from these sources
• Conducting discussions with those you consider peers in your business, collecting best practice guidelines
• Preparing for, conducting and analyzing one-on-one and small-group consultation sessions with your key decision-makers to identify issues, raise concerns, test emerging consensus on possible action areas
• Re-analyze your financials and other numeric data to shed fresh insight on operational and financial results over time, geography, industry, product-line and other operating groups.
• Facilitating top-management review of this information by design of meetings and conferences, where necessary acting to challenge assumptions and generate alternatives not previously considered.

Once management decisions have been arrived at, we will help in the design and execution of communication and consensus-building activities to educate the organization in the new methods of operating, helping to communicate the vision, clarify new roles and responsibilities, and design new metrics to monitor the organization’s performance (and that of each operating unit) in the new behaviors. Where necessary we will integrate these new metrics into a balanced scorecard and assist with a redesign of your performance appraisal and compensation schemes to reflect the new strategies, processes and responsibilities.

We recommend that you invest $XXX in our services to ensure the arraignment of your goals.

What do you think? Would this earn any business? Are proposals like this all con jobs?

What would you put into a generic proposal or pitch document?

If the client’s reaction were to be “Wow, that’s going to be really helpful to me” then you’re going to get a lot of positive reactions and you know you’re on to a money-making idea.

But if the thought of having the clients listen in to your planning has you worried, then , indeed you should be worried. Your nervousness at having them hear you means that you’re trying to mislead, misdirect, con them or fool them in some way. Otherwise, why don’t you want them to hear you?  

And the odds are you’re not going to pull it off. Customers and clients aren’t that dumb (although we often make our plans as if they were.) And when we make that mistake, we’re the ones being dumb.

If we want to succeed, we’ve got to start marketing and selling as if we were dealing with smart, adult intelligent people. We've got to stop acting as if we have something to hide.

I have hundreds of these examples, but a few will make the point. They can be very dramatic.

Once, I was (as instructed) explaining to a group of middle-level people what professionalism meant, and how they might handle themselves in dealing with clients and with others. We were using the anonymous voting machines that I like to use.

“The question I’d like to pose to the group” one person said, “is how many people here think that those who are senior to us role model these behaviors?”

I was young and dumb enough to let the vote proceed. Barely 15% of the audience thought that those ahead of them in the organization “lived the values.”

To prove how REALLY young and dumb I was, I thought I would be praised and congratulated with gratitude for having uncovered a barrier to improvement. Instead, I was accused of agitating the troops against the interests of the people who hired me. I never got hired by them again.

Although I did make the mistake again – many times. (I’m a slow learner)

I remember, years later, being with the senior partners of a major consulting firm, talking about investing in current client relationships (This was just after The Trusted Advisor had been published.). Again, someone interrupted to say “This is all fine, but there’s no incentive for us to do that – all our incentives around new clients.”

The top management was in the room. I waited for them to jump in and reconcile the contradiction. After all, these were the same people who had hired me and assigned my topic.

I waited. They stayed silent. I waited a little bit more.

The eyes of the audience were not on them, but on me. Everyone wanted to know what the outsider would say about the contradiction between the assigned topic and the incentive scheme.

And you know what? I said it was a contradiction. The audience agreed. Management scowled. We talked about what changes would be necessary to get everyone in the room willingly participating in the behaviors management wanted to see.

I was never re-hired. I had not stuck to the assigned topics. I even got a call from the secretary of one off the bosses to ask “How do we get more of this Trusted Advisor stuff without having to have you?”  

Come to think of it, it’s amazing that over the years I have managed to earn a living!

So, what are the lessons? Well, I’d love to hear some advice about how to handle these situations better. They happen ALL the time – to this day. In fact, I’m coming to believe that the very reason top management hires speakers is to talk about things that they can’t get their people to do, and hope the speaker will convince the crowd for them.

So, it’s gonna happen. It’s probably gonna happen to you. Someone’s going to say to you “It ain’t our fault, it’s THEIRS – meaning management.” How are you going to handle it , then and there, in front of , say, 50 to 300 people?   

Advice?

Since I am not a lawyer, and this blog site is meant to appeal to a broad international audience working in a wide variety of professions and industries, I have (as previously announced) restricted my choices to the themes of work and professional life, firm management, marketing, strategy and careers (rather than legal topics per se).

1. Competition v. Collaboration in Firms

Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan has the blog post of the week in my view.

Of Sailors and Mountaineers: The Inherent Dangers of Internal Competition is a compelling piece of analysis, which nevertheless still leaves us wrestling with the mysteries of why our organizations run as they do. Are we all too competitive for our own good? If so, how has civilization thrived? Don't miss it.

2. Throttling Clients

Ed Wesemann has a terrific blog for law firms called Creating Dominance, and his latest post is about “throttling” clients (no, it doesn't mean what you think it means). It’s not glamorous stuff, but it’s important.

He discusses how he went about analyzing low-profitability clients, and then engaging actions which induced the clients to change their behavior (or leave). A clear exposition of some basic that all firms should be doing – and don't!

3. Work-Life Balance

Stephanie West Allen at idealawg introduces us to Hot Worms and Workaholics: Let the Workers Be! She tells us that some worms live in water so hot that it would kill other worms:

“I have met many hot worm lawyers and I suspect there may be whole firms composed primarily of hot worms. These lawyers thrive on conditions that might prove injurious or even fatal to other lawyers. I am concerned for the hot worm lawyers and the damage that might be done to them if someone decided that these torrid wigglers needed to swim in cooler waters, to achieve life balance as defined by some other worm. In many cases, a cool, balanced worm may be an unhappy or dead worm. Lawyers come in a wide variety of temperaments, each with a unique, individual, ideal allocation of what and how much goes on each scale of life. That uniqueness is best respected for the sake of the lawyer, the firm, and the client.”

Fascinating – a wonderful counter-conventional blog post.

4. Advice for Young Professionals

Bruce MacEwan at Adam Smith, Esq. has a review of "The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law” (ABA, 2006), a wonderful book from Mark Hermann (of Jones Day). With great humor and deadly accuracy, Mr. Hermann cuts through the cant and provides tough love advice for those on their way up (and a few who have stopped rising).

I have read the book, and “Adam” is right. Managing partners in law firms should buy copies for all their junior lawyers. In addition, I would estimate that at least one-half of the book applies to all young professionals, in any industry.

5. Leadership, Emotions and Performance

Arnie Herz at legal sanity, reporting on a Harvard Working Knowledge forum, explores the role of positive leadership in creating the motivation, creativity, and performance of the knowledge workers.

Arnie reports that, according to the piece, a key discovery the researchers made is that workers’ performance is tied to their “emotions, motivations, and perceptions about their work environment". There are lots of other good links in the blog to research in the field of “Positive Organizational Scholarship.”

6. Must BigClients have BigFirms?

JD Hull at What About Clients? estimates that ‘bet the company work’ is perhaps 10% of legal corporate work out there, if that. So what about the other 90% of available corporate legal work? Is there any reason why firms ranging in size from 5 to 150 lawyers with the right talent and specialties can't do that work for BigClients?”

The questions is raised: when firms large and small can serve your needs, where do you go? Think carefully, and on the back of examination booklet explain why friendly neighborhood grocery stores no longer exist.

6. Future Earning Potential of Firms

Gerry Riskin of Amazing Firms, Amazing Practices provides a link to an article by his EDGE International colleague, Friedrich Blase, on assessing a firm’s future earning potential by examining its human capital, its structural capital, its relational capital and its investment capacity.

It will start your thinking processes – there’s a lot to be done exploring these topics.

7. Advice on the road to L

F/k/a [formerly known as] links to a number of law professors offering advice to first-year law students, and offers the observation that “much of that “lost” feeling never does go away — because far too many law school applicants, law students and practicing lawyers never took the time to assess who they really are and what they actually do want from life and from a career.”

Like the rest of us.

8. Client Satisfaction

Mark Beese at Leadership for Lawyers continues the (re)announcement of survey company BTI’s results that clients’ satisfaction with lawyers is going down dramatically, but provides link to other surveys and sources with confirming data.

BTI’s findings (which have been extensively reported for a while now) should be the springboard for deeper discussion of the sources and cures of low client satisfaction in the law, but so far the analysis hasn't progressed – at least in the blogosphere. Let’s hope the firms themselves are taking the hint.

9. Recruiting Interviews

Eric Muller at Is That Legal? contributes a memory about being “conned” at an interview by one law firm partner into commenting on someone at another law firm who turned out to be her husband.

Ethical or good recruiting tactic? You be the judge!

10. Spotting the Winners Early

Carolyn Elefant at Law.com Legal Blog Watch reports in A Future Billing Machine is Born about a Washington Post story on a young man, Dravidian, who:

“whipped through college in one year, relying on a combination of 72 AP credits that he collected in high school, followed by 23 credits his first semester in college (instead of the usual 15), a whopping 37 credits the next (he'd complained that he had too much time on his hands the first semester), with the last three, needed for a double major, completed during the summer. The article reports that after finishing up a master’s in math, Banh will forego the doctorate and head to law school to become a patent attorney."

As Elefant puts it: law firms, start your recruiting engines.

11. A Harvard Business School Case Study

Nathan Koppel, guest blogging at Larry Bodine’s Professional Services Marketing blog, informs us that Harvard Business School has written a 40-page case study on Philadelphia’s Duane Morris.

Based on my memory of how MBA students treated the companies offered up to them for dissection, this may not be the privilege that some at Duane Morris think it could be.

12. Diagnosis in Law and Medicine

Jim Belshaw at Managing the Professional Service Firm (what a catchy name!) picks up on a contribution by Prem Chandavarkar to begin an analysis of how diagnosis is performed in law versus medicine.

It doesn't go deep, but it’s a useful beginning on an important topic.

13. Branding a Fruit

Dilanchian Lawyers and Consultants caught my attention by telling the history of transforming the humble Kiwi fruit, through wise use of Intellectual Property tactics, into a branded product.

A bit of a diversion from our theme here, but a fun blawg tale.

Next, let’s turn to some interesting blogs about blogging.

14. Marketing Yourself and Your Practice

Kevin O'Keefe at Real Lawyers Have Blogs reports on “Blonde attorney gets new clients at MySpace.”

No comment. Decide for yourself what you think about it.

15. Profile of a Prominent Blogger

Dennis Kennedy provides a useful link to an interview with (and about) him on the JD Bliss site, entitled Success Story: Dennis Kennedy: "TechnoLawyer of the Year" Bridges the Gap Between Law and Technology.

For the few who don't know his background, it’s a good place to start getting to know the well-known lawyer, consultant, speaker and writer who is considered among the most influential experts on the application of technology in the practice of law.

Dennis was very kind and generous with his time when I was trying to understand what a blog was. If you don't know him and his work, you should.

16. Blogging by Trainees

Scott Vine at Information Overlord picks up on a UK Legal week report that Watson Farley & Williams is getting its trainees to write a weekly blog on the firm’s web site. Each of the firm’s 12 trainees will take it in turns to write the weekly blog, describing the work they have been involved in and the firm’s training and social activities. Neat!

17. Blogging During a Court Case

Justin Patten at Human Law has a brief piece speculating on how blogging might influence the practice of law: “I envisage scenarios where lawyers in conjunction with PR Professionals and blogosphere monitoring tools, assess how a case is being seen on the web. Thereafter an assessment will be made whether a legal remedy is the right solution.”

18. Regulatory Restrictions on Blogging

Walter Olson at Point of Law collects some links pointing to the emerging concern that new Bar regulations in New York “might make it nearly impossible for attorneys in the state to publish or contribute to blogs about the law. (Each individual post would trigger elaborate compliance obligations of its own.)”

19. Blogging as a Substitute for Law Reviews

Ian Best at 3Lepiphany speculates that blogging by law students and others could create a much more powerful substitute for law review articles.

Seems persuasive, important and powerful to me.

That’s it!

Blawg Review has information about next week's host, and instructions how to submit your blawg posts for review in upcoming issues.

Make sure you address the audience's needs, concerns, wants – not yours. They will give you back what you want if you serve them first.

Nothing is more guaranteed to lose an audience than forcing them to sit in a darkened room watching someone go through a fixed, invariant set of slides, no matter how insightful or attractive. Turn the house lights full up so you can see everyone. Hand out copies of all your slides in advance. Work to EARN your audience's attention. Don't try to control their attention - they will just resent it.

If you get through all your material, the presentation is a failure. If you cover your all of your material, you obviously did not engage and were not interrupted enough by the audience's questions.

Clear exposition is rare and immensely valuable; get all the help you can get. Rehearse with an audience who have been given permission to critique.

When giving a presentation, write down in advance (just for your own benefit) the major points you want your audience to walk away with. If it doesn’t fit on one small card, your presentation is too unfocused.

Don't underestimate the value of a nicely turned phase: Make it memorable! Try to find the phrase that summarizes the paragraph, the slogan that summarizes the key thought, the restatement that reminds them of your theme. Open with it. End with it.

Agreements? Disagreements? Other thoughts?

There are too damned many of you. (He gets more than 100 calls involving law firm pitches per day. Do the math.)

It’s getting nearly impossible to tell your pitches apart. There is no trend you can imagine that I have heard several times today.

You don’t listen (or keep promises about when you’re going to get back with a quote or supporting evidence for a story.)

You treat reporters like your social worker (“you’ve got to help me out of this situation”.) I am not here to help you. I am not your social case worker. I am not here to protect your job, make you feel good or help your clients. The sooner you accept that reality, the better of you’ll be.

You treat reporters like a social trophy (Come to lunch and meet our top execeutives and discuss the latest developments in document flow management software.” “What do you mean you don’t want to spend three hours with our management committee to educate us on ….)

Your clients are dumbasses and you don’t tell us: “Is that really the right question to be asking? Is this really the right story to be writing? I’ll tell you a story you should be working on, although it won’t really be a story until the winter, but that’s beyond your deadline, isn’t it?”

Reporters hate you (PR) becaude you act like used car salesmen. 'A study in nausea' he calls it. -Drop your fantasy. There is no spiel, no gimmick you can use to compel me to abandon my common sense.  The attitude of reaching (PR) goals is actually one of the easiest ways you can shoot yourself in the foot.

There’s more, lot’s more, but you get the idea. Not surprisingly, this was Mr. Fernandez’ farewell speech – he’s moving on to cover other journalistic beats.

You don’t have to be in PR or the law to get a lot out of Mr. Fernadez’ rant. 

The real lesson is that all of us get so wrapped up in what we want FROM the other person that we fail to understand what would make them want to give it to us.

It’s beneficial, if painful, to have the other side tell us, in uncertain terms, what it has been like working with us!

Across the spectrum of industries, there is a wide variety of client needs, ranging from repetitive and regular advice through to one-off projects. In the latter case, some of these clients you may never serve again. How do you market yourself if you are in a “one-off” industry?

I'm not arguing that word of mouth referrals are not useful, and that’s still where you start to build a reputation and a lead flow. But does the emphasis need to change if you are mainly or mostly working on one-off jobs? Are there other activities that would be useful in this situation that would not be that useful in the case of "repeat business clients"?

I would be interested to see what kind of responses you get from the rapidly growing community that is participating in the discussion on this blog.

OK, Tim. You clearly want the views of others as well as me, so I’ll try and keep my views concise.

I still believe that the best tactics for attracting new clients (even or especially) in a one-off industry are those I wrote about in Managing the Professional Service Firm:

b) Keep up a regular stream of little articles
c) Put on seminars (on-line) and
d) Do surveys and other data-gathering research that can position you as the source of “Facts no one else has got” – even if those facts are just opinion surveys among your target audience asking them about current trends.

Those were my opinions, 20 years ago, and so we have to add in everything we’ve learned about online marketing (see my recent article Adventures in Modern Marketing), so you probably especailly need, in a one-off business, a website - with lots of content - where people you don’t know (or who don't know you) can find you easily and be easily impressed with what you have to offer. (The second part is harder)

****

So, that’s my contribution to get us started. Others? How do you market in a one-off business? What do you do DIFFERENTLY than you do in a "repeat transaction" or"ongoing relationship" world?

I had been hired to assist the executive committee of a major consulting firm to discuss their strategy. There were 8 or ten senior officers of the firm around the table, including the CEO, who was due to retire in 12 months.

As I was generating various options for them to consider, the CEO suddenly said to me (in front of everyone else): “You just want to see us change so you can get consulting fees.”

I had no idea what to say, and said nothing. I was hugely offended. It’s one thing to dislike my ideas, but to question my ethics? Impugn my integrity?

On the other hand, don’t all clients and customers distrust the motives of all professional provides (and all other businesspeople?)

The air hung heavy and silent until one of the other executives picked up the conversation and moved on. 

I carried on working with that firm, through the term of my contract, and no-one ever referred to the CEO’s remarks again.

I have often thought about what I SHOULD have done or said.

What would you have done?

What are you going to say or do when someone accuses you of only being in it for yourself?

To use an analogy I picked up from you, it seems to me that the trusted adviser is the local doctor – the person you first turn to for assistance.

The Brain Surgeon gets the most challenging and difficult work. However, they are too expensive to call all the time. You want them on your team when there is something really important, but you don’t need them all the time. So, is it actually possible for the brain surgeon to be anyone’s trusted advisor? The business model for the trusted advisor is clearly very different. (You have previously discussed hourly rate and lower leverage etc.)

It also affects things such as conflicts of interest policies. A true trusted advisor will work for fewer clients, because he or she is busy looking after each one more fully. He or she will also see conflicts where other advisors may not – simply to be genuinely looking after his or her client’s best interests. The brain surgeon can not afford such a tight conflict policy.  He or she has a larger pool of clients who call for help less frequently, but when it is REALLY needed.

David, can you please shed some light how it is possible to stay a trusted advisor and a brain surgeon at the same time?

Duncan, let me both agree and disagree with your propositions. Your analysis seems to be position the “Trusted Advisor” as a particular role or “positioning”, rather than as a set of behaviors and skills.

I made the same distinction in a chapter called “What kind of Provider Are You?” in my book TRUE PROFESSIONALISM where, like you, I pointed out that the two roles are quite different. In that book, among many other contrasts, I pointed out that the “family doctor role” (I sometimes call it “psychotherapist”) is primarily about the skill of diagnosis – helping the client understand and unbundle the complex symptoms in a situation and decide what needs to be done.

As you say, it is to other people that I may turn (almost always WILL turn) to execute the highly specialist tasks that emerge from the diagnosis. I don’t want a surgeon deciding what needs to be done (they will always say ‘operate’) and I don’t want my family doctor or ‘trusted guide’ always saying “yes, I can do that, too, let me just get my knife!”

So, I end up concluding that you do have to decide what you want your market positioning to be. The tough part is that we’re all capable enough to do it all, but it would be a poor personal or firm strategy to actually do a little of everything and go to market shouting “You wan’t it we got it!” That’s no way to build a reputation. (Even though many large firms try to do exactly that.)

If ther's a solution for a large firm (not an individual) I could see successfully pulling it off by having clearly organziaaed different teams, staffed with different people (just as a hospital does.) "Here's our diagnosis doctors, and when the time comes, we have specialist surgeons to hand you over to, if you ever need them." It won't be credible if the same doctors keep working in all wards of the hospital!

Of course, even a brain surgeon, who focuses on highly technical tasks, needs to learn interactive skills such as those described in THE TRUSTED ADVISOR book. Brain surgeon’s don’t have to be strong, brooding, sullen, abrupt types. They can and should learn how to interact with clients for the times when they have to. But that’s not their role. It’s not their positioning.

You had it right first time, Duncan.

There’s probably been a lot of research on this topic about which I am not aware, but I’m fascinated with how much this approach to buying has grown and spread. It happens in corporate purchases of :

• Advertising
• Public relations
• Asset management
• Outsourcing
• Large management consulting projects
• Law firm selection and monitoring
• and many other services.

My curiosity is aroused in trying to explain why this is expanding so much. Why don’t corporate officers select and choose their own outside providers? Why do they need the consultants to advise them?

I can see why you would need an advisor if you were a one-time buyer, buying only periodically, or buying something particularly big. Then, you would want to tap into the specialists’ expertise and greater knowledge of what’s out there, and who’s good. It would save you search time. We’ve all used people to perform that role for us at one time or another.

But what if you buy the product or service all the time? What if it’s your JOB? If you are, say, the investment officer for a state pension fund, wouldn’t it be your job to know who’s out there? Or if you’re a marketing manager who’s been in place for 5 or 6 years, shouldn’t you know who the possible agencies are and what their reputation is?

My guess is that these buyers DO know, and are employing “consultants to the process” to achieve other goals. If we are to successfully “penetrate” this layer between ultimate client and vendor, then we must understand what the buyer is hoping to achieve by putting it in place.

There are a number of possible purposes, including:

1. By using third-party consultants, buyers can make the buying process appear more formal and detached, and give the appearance to their corporate masters (or Wall street Observers) that they are being diligent and responsible in their buying. They are buying affirmation, reassurance and cloud-cover against attacks that they were “soft” or relied too much on things like “relationships.”

2. Putting the third part y in place allows all sorts of buying games including “Good Cop / Bad Cop” (Client/consultant) The hired-gun gatekeeper plays tough guy, while the client (who has to work with the service provider afterwards) can remain above the negotiating fray and preserve the bases for a good working relationship.

3. Some consultants could offer a lot more than just a “gatekeeper” function. The client may have only an unfocused understanding of his or her own needs, and what the consultant is doing is providing a “strategic navigator” service, so that the client can understand which outside service (a pill, a nurse, a brain surgeon) he or she really needs to buy. By separating the diagnosis from the execution, the client benefits by not having biased people (the vendors) always selling what they have, rather than what the client needs.

I have some additional thoughts, but let me find out if this is a topic of interest to anybody out there. The questions for you (all) are:

1. Are there other reasons companies hire consultants to advise them on their buying?

2. How well do the vendors understand the real reasons?

3. What are the implications for the DIFFERENT rationales for how a vendor should respond. Does the vendor do different things if the client is using consultants for different purposes?

Bob discusses this, and agrees that, the more consequential the outcome, the more power, greed, stress and irrationality come into play in influencing how people react and how individual and collective decisions are made.

I think there is something very important here. I have always been fascinated by the fact that (in spite of what they teach us in school) logic, reason, rationality and sensible analysis seem to play so little part in human affairs – at the office, in our home lives, and elsewhere.

It sometimes seems as if, for all of us, nearly all the time, rhetoric triumphs over reason, personality over substance, politics over merits, neuroses over facts.

I’m not saying this as a complaint. I’m saying that it’s a more accurate critique of human affairs than the misleading interpretation we sometimes fool ourselves with – that our smarts (logic, reason and rationality) are what drive the world.

Tom Davenport (author of Thinking for a Living) recently published an article in the Harvard Business Review arguing that there is a huge competitive advantage to be gained by companies if they were to develop a more analytical approach to business, using advanced analytical abilities. It’s a great article, but its truth and its power comes from the fact that so few of us, as individuals or as institutions, in our work lives or in our personal lives, actually do make our decisions primarily through logic and analysis.

That’s why it can be a competitive advantage for anyone who can escape Lovaglia’s Law.

The word itself comes from the Latin (or is it Greek?) meaning three groups, but along the way a scheme was evolved which put people into four groups:

(a)    the sick (who really need you but can be hard to help),

(b)   the early sick (who you can usually help),

(c)    the worried well, (who don't really need you but want to hire you) and

(d)   the well (who don't need you). 

This is a very handy scheme to use in other environments. For example, if you are a manager in charge of a group of people, the scheme can help you decide how much personal time to allocate to each of the individuals in your group.

It can also apply to customer groups. In some businesses, including consulting, the economics of these different groups vary wildly. The sick, since they cannot really be cured, are often unprofitable. The early sick are reasonably profitable.

As long as they'll pay for your time, the "worried well" can be a source of very high profits - there's nothing really wrong with them, but they keep coming back for one more reassuring examination or study.

Of course, this is not all good news. There's an ethical issue here - do you really want to make your income from people who don't really need or benefit from your services ?  

In addition, unless you have the pricing right, the worried well can choke up your delivery capacity, making you unavailable to those who really need you.

Who are the worried well in your business life? How do you deal with them?

"(outside) CPAs are apparently under the impression that company owners are the Dudes of Decision....Only seven percent thought the CFO, controller or internal auditor makes the decision. Just five percent said it's the CEO, and only two percent thought the board of directors decides."

"But when we asked corporate accountants who makes the decision, we got a whole 'nother point of view. CFOs seem to think that they, the CFOs themselves, make the decision. At least 56 percent of them think so. Only 26 percent said it's the owner."

It's been my experience that everybody makes the mistake of thinking that THEIR project is so important to the client enterprise that it must be the client CEO who not only makes the buying decision, but wants to meet all the possible providers (i.e. them.)

Even for a relatively small company, this becomes a ludicrous proposition once you start looking at how many different service providers are competing for the CEO's attention. A typical company might, on a regular basis, need to buy:

1. Legal advice from more than a few law firms (different firms for different issues and jurisdictions)
2. Advertising advice from an ad agency
3. Public relations and public affairs advice from one or more PR firms
4. Accounting services (audit plus) from one or more accounting firms
5. IT services from a technology firm
6. Executive Training from an HR consulting firm
7. Executive search for a new top officer from a headhunter firm
8. Financial or merger, acquisition advice from an investment bank
9. Asset reallocation in pension plan restructuring from either a money management firm.
10. Real estate strategy for office, manufacturing, distribution, retail operations from a real estate firm
11. Supply channel (logistics) advice from either a possible partner or third-party advisor.

What's amusing to me about this list is that examples of ever single one of these firms has asked me to conduct seminars for their people about how they can become their clients' key TRUSTED ADVISOR , focusing on the CEO. But they can't all be, simultaneously!

It seems that everybody wants (to use the American terminology) to date the prom queen and the star quarterback, and, as a result, is probably negelecting or treating badly someone else who might really want a relationship!

The problem is, of course, that most CEOs don't want this number of close personal advisors, so, they delegate the details, the relationship and hold their subordinates accountable.

The neglected, less glamorous people around the beauty queen and the captain of the team may actually be the very people who can give you what you want!

Providers who are still trying to meet (and sell to) the CEO probably overestimate their own importance and misunderstand the priorities of a CEO.

(Thanks to Dennis Howlett for directing me to Rick's post.)

I totally agree with the content of this article. However if we as trainers insisted on only proceeding with courses where the appropriate senior commitment was given we would find ourselves a lot poorer and very shortly out of a job.

I was genuinely impressed by the candid comments. It's refreshing to know that someone in the business does have the courage of his convictions and insists on delivering only effective training. Well done and keep up the good work. It's good to hear that somebody out there is baulking at the wastage.

And I am. If a client comes to me asking for a pill, I'm going to ask to discuss the symptoms, the ailment and the best means of recovery before I agree to dispense the pill. And, yes, that often means that (some) clients walk away and go to the person who'll provide the pill.

I have a hard time selling colored water and patent medicines, even if my clients have faith in the efficacy of those things. I may not know completely how to cure them, but I don't want to treat them with things that we know don't work. When you're younger and less established, it's tempting to just do what the client asks for. I've reached the stage of my life when I want to help my clients more than that.

Many of us need to address this issue in our work lives. Brendan is telling nothing but the truth (and he speaks for a lot of people) when he points out that if we refuse to participate in meaninglessness things (or fight to make them otherwise) we would likely be poorer or out of a job.

But how cynical can we allow ourselves to get? How much are we continuing to participate in things that we (ourselves) believe have no impact, that (in our own estimation) contribute no value and accomplish little?

I do have more of a shot at having the "courage of my convictions" than most people do. I'm 59, I have an established business and reputation, and I'm not at the "have to put kids through school and pay off the mortgage" stage of life.

But I hope I'm not alone in struggling to engage in meaningful things, even if it means I lose work (and I do.) I just want my work life to have meaning.

How about you?

The article contains both the lessons I have learned in my own online marketing, as well as the generous and helpful advice I was given by those who participated in my blog discussion of this topic in June .

 Among the topics I discuss are:

• Helping busy people search
• Online tracking systems
• Nurturing the core community
• Helping people help you
• Gathering input
• Becoming a more valuable resource
• Word of mouth
• Website navigation
• Serving multiple constituencies
• Participating in the broader marketplace
• The role of traditional off-line marketing 

I'm delighted to report that, since renewing and committing to my web presence in January 2006, site traffic and downloads have been growing and the results have been quite exciting. For example, by the end of July 2006 (i.e. in six months) visitors will have downloaded a terabyte (1000 gigabytes) of resources from my site.

In plain, non-jargon English, that's the equivalent of 42,000 videos , or 74,898 podcast episodes , or 6,168,094 PDF articles (although, realistically, it's actually a mix of each of those).

I really appreciate the contribution of my blog readers and their generous advice to this success.

You might view a project as small; perhaps a fee at the lower end of what you are used to, or not as exciting as other projects. However, the project could be the largest and most important thing the individual at the client company has handled in his/her career. 

It can be difficult to accept the "server" mentality. Dale Carnegie once wrote that "You'll have more fun and success by helping other people achieve their goals than you will by focusing on your own goals."

When I first read that, as a college student in England, I was shocked. It sounded like communism, or at a minimum, a self-sacrificing religious principle. However, as I progressed through the real world, I realized Carnegie was right. His principle is actually the vary core of exchange capitalism: I will give you what you want if you give me what I want.

To make this work, you must be sincere in trying to help the other party. It's not just a bargaining process ("You give me this, and I'll give you that, and then we'll go our separate ways.") Human beings don't work like that. We look for relationships, even in minor transactions.

If I hire somebody to do something for me (clean my house, handle my divorce, do my taxes, diagnose and cure my ailments), I don't want them to focus only on the bare minimum of fulfilling the contractual terms. If they do, I'm going to focus on paying them the bare minimum - and no-one's going to be happy.

What I'm looking for is someone who wants to help me, and will deal with whatever arises. Such a person will get paid well, hired again, and promoted, and referred to others. If I hire you, never forget you're there to serve me. If you're not willing to do that, I don't want you.

Another key attitude is commitment. Commitment is not numbers of hours you work, the sales you generate or the rates you charge. It means placing other people - the client and your colleagues - first in your professional life. Commitment means attention to details, not because you might get caught, but because you want to provide the best product or service available and you relish the opportunity to step up and take on responsibility. 

It's the paradox of professionalism: the more you put yourself first, the less people want to work with you and the less of life's rewards you get. The more you focus on serving others, the more they want to be with you and give you what you want. People (bosses, colleagues, clients, subordinates) can spot immediately those who bring a truly professional attitude to work, and reward those who do. 

b) Why is there such a dichotomy between "hip" and "professional?" McCartney was always clearly the most talented musically, but he could never approach the reverence that Lennon achieved thorough his "attitude" and "persona."

c) On a related point, most of the (I think) truly talented pop music artists I like  - Abba, Beach Boys, Bee Gees, etc,  -  are viewed as terminally unhip, no matter how well they sell. I know that says a lot about me, but beyond that, what does it say about the role of "hipness" in marketing?

d) I like the Eagles, I really do - but how does one explain the fact that their Greatest Hits volume 1 is the best selling album of all-time (rivaled only by Thriller.)? Does that teach us more about marketing and management or more about musical tastes?

e) So much of pop music success seems to be about "catching the cultural wave" - which is what a lot of businesses would like to know more about (and which ‘The Tipping Point' only just touched on.) Has anyone developed any general lessons? Anyone want to co-author the book?    

Apologizing for her rephrasing, Shaula says

In short, much of the advice to (published and aspiring) authors in the digital age boils down to: "Don't worry about monitizing books. Give books away, and make money through collateral revenue streams."

To which Updike responds that authors are writers, not performers, and not likely to succeed as entertainers.

Of course, you (David) have already addressed in your post the reality that those of us who are not already John Updike are not likely to make money through the conventional book publishing and promotion model, either.

It makes me wonder if the middlemen (Amazon, speaker's bureaus, promoters) are the only ones making money here...

Shaula, I would also relate your comments to the recent stories (New York Times July 17, 2006) about film director M. Night Shyamalan's superior ability at self-promotion. Do film makers need to turn themselves into a "brand" to get their films into blockbuster status? Should we all be taking lessons from Madonna on how to create and market (constantly evolving) personas in order to draw attention to ourselves?

Do these challenges apply also to those of us trying to practice so-called "professions?" Do we consultants, lawyers, accountants, engineers and others have to take note of all this?

I do believe that there is such a thing as marketing with greater or lesser taste, but as much as I want to sympathize with Updike, I think we live increasingly in a pop-culture world where performing and entertaining ARE indeed where the money lies.

And, Shaula, if the writer doesn't want to take control of the marketing, the performing, the persona creation, then, as has always been true in the music business, the intermediaries will write the contracts and make the most money.

For a number of years I was a partner in a mid-sized accounting practice but I have recently relocated to another state and city for family reasons and have made the decision to commence practice as a sole practitioner and start again.

I have found that seminars (as you recommend) are the most successful method of initially attracting new clients. I am however interested on your views of how such seminars should be marketed when I do not have an existing base of clients. To date I have advertised in the press (this is however expensive). What have start up firms done in your experience that works?

The cheapest and most effective way to get people to a start-up seminar is to partner with some other organization. Meeting and conference planners are often looking for interesting speakers, and if you could offer a free seminar which can be offered as an optional choice in their program, there is virtually no downside for them. Your chamber of commerce (or local hotels and conference centers) should be able to tell you what meetings are coming to town.

You can also apply the same approach with local groups. Every town has various "semi-business / semi-social" interest groups that meet regularly, and they often would welcome an after-dinner speaker who could provide something informative without a hard sell.

Anyone else got any suggestions?

Once a staff person gets assigned to a client, we have always tried to keep them on that client for as long as they are with the firm. This certainly has advantages in reduced learning time, and clients don't complain about "training" someone new.

But I'm wondering if there is also benefits to looking upon clients as learning opportunities and moving staff members into new client assignments to help them advance. Continuity of staff can be important to clients, and can be one reason that they use a small firm. But I'm also thinking that we need to make more of an effort to put people into the assignments that they need to grow.

Jim, I first analyzed this issue in a chapter called "On the Importance of Scheduling" in Managing the Professional Service Firm.

I argued there that scheduling and staffing of work determines darn near everything a professional business needs to accomplish. Tell me which people get to work on which jobs, and I'll tell you with 95% certainty the following things:

a) Client Satisfaction Levels: (as your firm knows, continuity is important to clients for quality, efficiency and service reasons)

b) Skill Development and Learning (as you and your partners know, the pattern of work someone gets, and the degree of responsibility within the job, affects whether or not they are continuing become a more skilled professional.

This is JUST AS TRUE for senior people as it for juniors. If anyone (in any profession) does the same work for the same client repeatedly every year, that person will exposed to only limited developmental opportunities. More and more they will become a higher-priced person living off past skills, ie increasingly obsolescent.

c) Profitability. Over time profitability is only ever achieved by continually looking for ways to get the same quality job done at a lower cost than before. If you were to measure (on a fully-costed basis, as you should) the difference between revenues for a job and what it cost you to do the job, you will probably find that a policy of automatically reassigning the same people as last year is economically wasteful and not profit maximizing.

d) Motivation and morale. The single biggest determinant of excitement and enthusiasm (at ALL levels) in a professional business is the pattern of work people have to do. If they always do similar things, they will lapse into being good citizens, but will not be throwing themselves eagerly into the pursuit of excellence. Why should they, if they are going to end up (according to your firm's shorthand rules)with the same mix of clients and business next year, no matter what they do?

The key lesson here is that decisions on scheduling are inherently strategic, with lots of consequences and should not be dealt with as matters of administrative convenience ("If you were on the job last year, you're on it this year") or considering only a subset of consequences: "Clients like it, so that's the end of the discussion."

You say that you are a small firm. Actually, that should make it easier, not harder, for you to take a more thoughtful, managerial approach to this set of decisions. You have the chance to have regular discussions with everyone (top to bottom) about what they should be working on and how, COLLECTIVELY, you're going to handle the trade-offs. Large firms often suffer the disadvantage of having to deal with things like this through bureaucratic policies.

Ultimately, clients care about quality, efficency and service - continuity is just a short-hand rule-of-thumb to try to get to these things. If you can be more thoughtful about how you achieve these things, they will give you more leeway in pursuing your other goals and won't insist on always seeing the same faces. And, with more thoughtful staffing, you'll be able to improve leverage, profits, learning and morale. Go for it!

There are a thousand things I wish somebody had told me early on in my professional (and personal) life, that I needed to work at improving and never knew about because I didn't know how I was coming across, or what the other person's expectations were. All too frequently, I only found out the hard way.

People very rarely tell you the truth about yourself, which makes it even more important that you develop ways to get feedback on how you REALLY come across to the rest of the world. (In many ways, I still don't know the real truth about this.)

Even when they do try to get feedback, some people tend to wait until the end of things (a year, a project, an affair) to solicit feedback about what they COULD HAVE done better (or differently) This is all way too late.

The real key to success is being able to ask for feedback on a relationship, and act on it, while it is still going on.

Remember that people NEVER tell you the truth on formal occasions. It's a rare boss that's going to be completely candid during a formal appraisal, and a rare client that reveals something dramatically new or surprising in a formal feedback system. And you're certainly not going to say "OK, darling, let's sit down and make a list of what we don't like about each other!"

If you're ever going to develop the skill of getting feedback (and it is a skill) then you need to find ways to make it informal. Get out of the office to have this conversation. (Or if it's a personal relationship, break the routine and do something like going out for walk together!)

As marketers have discovered with formal focus groups, if you really want to get at something useful, then you need to find out is not what people have to say when they are in a logical, analytical mode, but what they FEEL about you. Scary stuff, but absolutely essential to know this if you are to get on in life!

Try subtle, gentle language: "If I had to change one thing about how we interact, what would you recommend we work on?" Find a friend or colleague, at work or in your social crowd, who you think will tell you the truth about yourself. Some clients, over a drink, will give you an honest and helpful answer to that question. So will some subordinates.

Good or bad, you need to take time to think about what people say, avoid reacting in real time (REALLY tough!) and internalize it. You can neither ignore it nor overreact to it.

Most importantly, if you're going to ask, be ready to change.  

Anyone else got some tips about how you get good at what the Scots poet Robert Burns called "the power to see ourselves as others see us"? (Many people know that line, but how many know the rest of the poem? It's about seeing an insect crawl out of the wig of a fine lady all dressed up!)

We all know we SHOULD be good at getting feedback. But how, exactly, DO you really get good at this?

I think there has been some recent research proving all this - I'm sure each generation of students rediscovers the principle at exam time.

So what's the lesson for the rest of us? Keep a journal! Keep a diary! Sit at your computer late at night or early in the morning and transcribe what people said you to that previous day.

Transcribing and recollecting the day's events will help you understand your experiences better - just like it used to help me understand my math or english studies. It forces you to slow down the mental processs and reflect on what you are writing or typing, not just pretend you understand it.

And people - clients, subordinates, colleagues, spouses - will be very flattered that you later remembered (and thought about) what they said.  They won't mind if referring to notes is what helped you do it - they will just be grateful and impressed that you can do it at all.

I have used Trusted Advisor in my work for several years. The Reliability and Credibility factors you talk about there have always seemed like "table stakes" to me. The third component, A Low Self-interest, is sometimes less obvious, but once considered is equally non-controversial. The fourth factor, Intimacy, is always the one that gets people hung up. "Why intimacy?" they ask, "Why do we need that?"

What things would you recommend that companies of any size can do to be more intimate with their customers, employees and community? If you are a company who needs scale to survive, is it a given that you have to leave intimacy and trust behind?

For me, the secret to the ‘intimacy' aspect of trust, whether dealing inside or outside an organization, is the simple act of getting out of role-to-role interactions, and making them encounters between real people. In other words, treat me like a person, not an ‘employee' or a ‘customer.'

Viewed this way, the issue of creating intimacy is less one of systems, procedures and processes, than it is one of attitude and style. The famous examples are the cabin attendants and pilots of Southwest Airlines, who (according to their reputation) can make announcements conveying serious information but with humor, personality and individualism, proving that you don't have to be robotic, bureaucratic or rule-driven to get something done. And Southwest is one of the largest airlines out there. It's all about attitudes, mentality, empowerment, self image, and keeping things in proportion.

As I've written many times (and never tire of preaching) it's the RULES that grind us all down, and they tend to accumulate and take over when organizations grow. If managers only focused on WHAT needs to be done (superbly), and WHY it needs to be done (superbly), then they could empower and trust the front-line staff to figure out for themselves HOW to do it. And if, as a staff memeber, I can then do it MY way, I'm going to make it more real, more human and more intimate for both the customers and for myself.

What about the effects of scale? In my book Practice What You Preach, I studied 139 businesses analyzing the relationship between attitudes and financial results. While there were examples of great intimacy (‘human scale') the overall trends were a clear decline with scale. In larger offices in general, people did, indeed, give lower scores to such things as:

• Management valuing input
• Management listening to people
• Management being trusted
• Management practicing what they preached
• Management being successful in fostering communication and loyalty

These all declined with larger offices, even though I was able to prove that doing well on these things was a significant predictor of better financial results.

In addition to my statistics, the book contains portraits of nine of the highest-performing businesses I could find in my database. I interviewed not only the managers, but many other people who worked in these nine office.

One of the absolutely fascinating outcomes was that, in line with your question, everyone was worried that they could only achieve their level of excellence because they were ‘small' and had a strong sense of community and purpose - or, if you prefer, intimacy. But this reaction was expressed by offices that had over 300 people!

This convinced me that creating a sense of intimacy is a managerial phenomenon, not one simply determined by scale. It can be achieved by managers who know how to manage.

So what did the ‘great' managers do to overcome the effect of size? None of it was very dramatic. Most of the (hundreds) of specific messages are contained at the end of the book could be summed up as "Be human and never forget that we are, too."

Some specific advice to managers in the book?

• Do your own photocopying occasionally. Wash your own cup
• Don't hesitate to jump in and help and prove you've still got it
• Keep a level emotional keel, don't over-react to either triumphs or disasters
• Take work seriously but don't take yourself seriously
• Treat people as adults
• Let people know you as a human being, not just as their manager
• Believe in, and keep the faith with what we are doing

At the risk of repetitiousness, I must stress that these lessons from the book are NOT that these are ‘nice-to-have' behaviors, but that they are EXACTLY what the managers of the financially highest performing businesses in my database do.

Last week I attended a local professional networking event here in Kansas City. The speakers kept talking about how they focus on relationship management ('the romance'). The real estate guy has built a $40 million business of 8 agents mainly on referrals. He said he sends out postcards twice a month, then letters at day 52 and 75, etc. and continues to follow up, and up, and up relentlessly. It seems to work for him. (Personally I'd be quite annoyed to get all that stuff when I didn't need it.)

The financial services guy boasted that he 'focuses on the relationship' and then turns the account over to the 'technical staff.' He says he has a staff of 3 and can focus more on his own networking goals --for example, aiming to get on at least 3 non-profit boards this year--mainly to expand his client base. He challenged the rest of us to leverage our own value this way - the old 'delegate everything you can'.

But why on earth would I think I have a 'relationship' with a financial services professional who defers the technical expertise to someone else? To me, this isn't a relationship, this is sales. I want to think that I am getting the value directly from the person I interact with--my lawyer, accountant share their expertise with me.

So why does this approach seem to work so well for those in real estate and financial services who are so sales-driven? Do you think people feel the 'relationship' they provide (the face time, if you will) is as good as actual expertise?

Eileen, I think both sides are correct. The speakers are correct in saying that their approach can be made to "work" to build a business. You are correct in saying that what they describe can hardly be described as 'relationship-building.'

There's nothing morally wrong with "sales" and nothing morally wrong with making money through generating and serving a large number of transactions. As I was at pains to argue in my article, many clients are looking for transactions and are not shopping for a professional with whom they can build a long-term relationship. For such clients, the old, familiar "sales by volume of activity" approach works remarkably well, as your speakers illustrated and claimed - you get turned down often, but the numbers work out.

What IS misleading is to call this relationship building and romance. And, it is dangerous to take this approach if you want to have a repuation for being nurturing, caring, focused, customized and in it for the long haul.

As you reported, anyone who tried that approach on you would leave a distinct impression of a KIND of professional provider. Maybe one you want, maybe not. But the core message is this: none of us can have it both ways: we can't credibly expect to obtain a reputation of being interested in romance if we visibly engage in 'love em and leave em' tactics.

Either approach can be made to work. The hypocricy of the middle path will be exposed.

I'm planning a lecture to my staff and selected clients on the issue of e-mail versus personal contact (phone or face to face). Clearly the generations - boomers, xers and y's relate quite differently to e-mail. Are we hiding behind our e-mails both internally and externally? I advocate we are increasingly.

I love being paradoxical, controversial and counter-intuitive, so even though it's traditional to bemoan the increasing use of email, let me (just for the heck of it) take the other side and try to make the case (my points are serious here) why using email is INCREASING our abilities to connect:

a)      You can type, re-type and re-re-type an email until it says what you want, the way you want it.  Done right, there are none of the ambiguities of human speech ( "What I meant to say was..") Email can promote clarity

b)      You can ask a friend or a spouse or anyone else to help you say it right. Try doing THAT in the real world. Email can promote collaboration and friendship

c)      You can keep five or six (or more) conversations going at once without anyone feeling slighted that you do not have all your focus on them alone. Email means you can make everyone feel special.

d)      You can keep track of what people said and hold them to their promises. Email can promote honesty.

e)      Email removes the visual, body-language, verbal-accent cues that we over-rely on when reacting to other people: email can promote the importance of reason and logic, and reduces bias due to gender, racial or national background or appearance. It is profoundly democratic and politically important.

f)        Email allows us to think before we react, thereby promoting less stress, thoughtless comments  and knee-jerk reactions. It allows people who are not naturally quick at interpreting other people's remarks to reflect and respond with greater emotional intelligence. Email can facilitate good relationship interactions and language.

Seriously, folks, beyond the clichés that we have all heard, what do you think the strengths and weaknesses of email have been. How is it really changing us for the better AND for the worse?

Details are given here 

Why should you put your money on romance in a one night stand world? I read you loud and clear when you say in your article Do You Really Want Relationships? that one can tap into the riches by caring and sharing and by nurturing long term relationships

But most of the projects I do (I do communication consulting in the context of strategic change initiatives) are of a milestone character. I get to do work for a client maybe just once in a lifetime. A private company only goes public once. Corporations don't discontinue a unit every day. My clients don't make a living just by acquiring and merging entities a hundred times a year (unless they're GE).

Consultants like me live in a disruptive project world characterized by constant discontinuity. Context, scope, people - the times they are'a changing.

Could you share some good reasons why one should believe in romance?

Reason 1: The first thing any new prospect is going to do when he or she has a new need is to ask the people he or she knows who they have use and whether they would recommend them. That's when you win or lose your next client. Word of mouth reputation wins the gold, silver and bronze for the best marketing techniques to get new clients.

Reason 2. Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, if someone does recommend you it will be because of the experience you provided in working with them, rather than the results you obtained for them. (No-one says "He was a great electrician, look at the quality of the wiring!")

Reason 3: Even if they don't have another job for you immediately, your current clients might need you again some day.

Reason 4: Even if reasons 1 through 3 don't apply, romance the client anyway. We can all use the practice in interpersonal relations so that we are good at it when we do need it!

Coert Visser, a Dutchman who has built one of the most useful websites about consulting , interviewed me first aout my experiences in blogging .

Then, he asked me to review some of the management and marketing principles I have advocated over my career, summarized as The Only Competitive Advantage in Professional Services.

For those who would like an overview of my philosophies and conclusions, the two new articles are a very good place to start.

However, I suspect that other people, as well as me, are rapidly beginning to realize the intertwined complexity of marketing. It's not just complicated, it's truly complex .Everything influences everything else, and it's completely unclear where to start.

When I wanted to promote my consultancy, everyone said "write a book". So I did that, and then asked - but how do I promote a book?

I treasure the responses that came back from publishers and publicists alike: "Well, there are no guarantees. There are some things we can try. Every book is different. We'll give it our best efforts, act with good faith and good intentions. It's really up to what you do. Maybe you should start a website."

So, I did that. But then I asked, how do I make my website popular? Start a blog, they said.

Then, when I said how to I promote my blog, good friends said "People will get driven to your blogs if they hear about you in their trade press - get quoted or print your articles in print media. Do more seminars and invite the press. But how do I entice the press? Write more articles."

Whoops! Back where we started!

If you read the commenters on the last blogpost (and you should - it's GREAT stuff!) you'll see things like "use your podcasts to promote your blog". Well, yes, but forgive me being petulant if I ask "But how the heck do I promote my podcats?"

I"ve been just as guilty over the years of trying to make things linear. In my first book, Managing the Professional Service Firm I argued that among the top tactics to create awareness in a professional business were speeches and seminars, and I was dismissive of things like direct mail. "But how," people would write in for years to come, "do we get people to come into our seminars? Don't we need direct mail to get them to attend?" Ouch! Good point!

The same topic came up when I was discussing the possibility of building a "Wikipedia" about professional businesses. "The key" he said "Is that it's easier to pull that off if - like you David (he's a charmer) - you have a strong existing brand to build it on."

This was flattering, but ultimately frustrating. He's saying that I can make the new things (and the new marketing media) work better if I've already succeeded (and am plugged in.) Actually, that's not bad for me because I'm 58 years old, I've published numerous books, I've built the website, so I'm ahead of the game - I have something to build on.

But, boy, that must be immensely annoying for those just starting out, trying to get their market's attention. "Get famous, kid, and all the tactics for getting famous will be available to you!"

It's like the pop music that's my hobby. If you're already famous, you get press coverage, invited to interviews, they review your latest album in the music magazines and they display your latest release at the front of the store. If you're a band just starting out, none of these things are accomplished easily - if at all!

And in some small way, I have that challenge. Part of what I'm trying to do is to reach NEW audiences (outside the traditional professions where I have spent most of my time.) In that situation, my marketing challenge is as tough as any new "band": we've got this killer record recorded, but no one will stock it, play it, display it. And the advice on where to START is all over the map! (And yes, I have read the books on Buzzmarketing!)

I'm luckier than most - I've got something to build on, and I have a little money to invest in this (hard-to-understand, incomprehensibly complex) process. I feel bad for others just starting out trying to think their way through this minefield.

That's why I hope everyone out there will keep contributing to this blogpost (and the last one ). I'm determined to write an article (or some articles) shedding a little more light on all this. I see pieces of an answer, but at the moment they are only tantalizing glimpses!

Everyone knows advertising is becoming a shrinking percentage of marketing, and was never ALL of it to begin with. As the holding conglomerate movement showed (WPP, Ominom, IPG, Paribas) the game for years has been to try and convince clients that a full, cross-disciplinary approach to marketing communications could be achieved.

There has been only one problem with this: the promise has never has been delivered. From as long ago as Y&R's infamous "Whole Egg" approach through many other slogans, all the marketing conglomerates have proved is that they are incapable of designing and executing fully integrated marketing plans to their clients.

Apart from the problems of cross-boundary co-ordinations (each of these agencies within the comglomerates tend to be separate firms and profit centers) the larger problem has been that while the mega-agencies or agency networks have occasionally (VERY occasionally) been able to deliver a sensible, comprehensive package of marketing communications tools and approaches, they still lack a critical missing ingredient - an ability to understand the full picture of what is involved in marketing a product or a service. Marketing communications is not all of marketing.

The networks have tried to rectify this over the past decade with experiments in hiring MBAs from prestigious schools, and giving them fast-track positions to take on managerial and client relationship roles. Most of these experiments have failed, not least because the MBAs culture, attitudes and salary expectations have been hard to integrate into an agency culture.

For decades, there has been a huge hole in the advisory market. No major consulting firm built its reputation and the bulk of its practice on giving marketing advice. The likes of McKinsey, BCG and Bain did Strategy; the accounting-based firms did IT, the actuarially-based firms did Human Resources, and many Wall-Street firms built major institutions out of giving financial advice. Even the lowly topic of Operations was used to build major institutions like AT Kearney and other firms that focused on productivity, quality and supply chain management.

But where were the marketers? Who was giving corporations, anywhere in the world, their top marketing advice? Basically, no-one - except for a few small if respected firms.

The move of IBM, McKinsey and Accenture is dangerous not because they are going to know more about advertising than the advertisers. What they represent (in very different ways) is the theory that having tired of paying for unexecuted strategy and 30-second ads that accomplish little, corporations might be ready for a totally new approach to service - a group of people who hold themselves out as knowing something about how you actually market and sell products and services.

It's not clear where the people who know those things are housed today, and whether or not the big-3 consulting firms can hire them.

But battle has been joined, and I don't think things are ever going to be the same.

Along with every enterprise, I face the challenge of creating awareness of my activities. I often describe my reputation as being like the measles - spots of great inflammation, surrounded by vast areas of untouched territory.

I don't have much difficulty meeting the financial targets of my business. That's not where my challenge lies.

Rather, I am trying to think through how to bring my website and blog to the attention of a broader audience in order to serve them - make my free materials (articles, podcasts, videos, blog, etc.) available to more people who might find them useful.

Since I'm not selling anything, and I'm supposed to be some kind of consultant who gives marketing advice anyway, it should all be obvious and easy, right?

Not necessarily.

As my experience in past years with published books proved, you can know a lot about how to get hired as a consultant for many thousands of dollars, and still know absolutely zero about how to get people to part with $20 for a hardbound book. Being good at one doesn't automatically make you good at the other.

Even though I've had some big sellers, I still don't know how to market books. Only one of my books ever hit the weekly best-seller lists, and it went on to sell the least number of total books compared to those that grew solely by word of mouth. 

I used to be frustrated that people who could have derived benefit from them didn't read my books, until it dawned on me that most businesspeople don't read books. Even though content is king, effective marketing is unavoidable. The trouble is, no-one really knows what effective marketing IS! No-one knows what works (reliably.)

I'm finding the same is true in hyperspace. I have put a lot of effort into creating the content of my website and must now I have to learn how to "market" a free website!

I have spent the past six months trying to build a resource-rich, helpful (I hope) website with lots of accessible, free resources. The next task is to "drive traffic to the site" (as they say.)

Many of you reading this "discovered" my work somehow. The question now is how to make it easier for others (many, many others?) to do so.

My primary goal is to get people to register their email addresses on my site, and I do offer a free subscription to my future articles to people who do this.

However, I am VERY reluctant to engage in anything that gives even the appearance of a hard sell ("Register now and receive these special gifts.") I also don't want to spam anyone.

I do already participate in blog carnivals and I'm reasonably active in the blogosphere. I give lots of interviews.

I'm thinking of doing a broad range of things. Should I do any "click-through advertising?" Should I attempt to get e-mailing lists from somewhere? Are there things I can do to encourage people - and make it easier - to tell more of their (your?) friends about my materials?

Advice, please. What's an effective, but classy, way to do this?

A)    With clients

B)     With subordinates

C)    With colleagues

D)    With those you report to

E)     With your close family

F)     With your extended family

G)    With friends

Use the following scale:

1. I'm as good at this as anyone I know
2. I'm better than the average person at this
3. I'm OK at this, no better, no worse than anyone else
4. I'm a little weak at this
5. I'm really not very good in this area at all

What do your answers say about you? Are you happy with the situation? What could you do about it?

Also, it's time to offer my very sincere thanks to those who participated in People, Passion and Principles during the month of May. They are:

Commentors

Scott Allen , Stephanie West Allen , Annette , David B , Mark Baker , Martin Bamford , Uri Baruchin , Ben , Bill, Barend Blondé , Eric Boehme , Jerry Bogart, Ed Boulton, Gary Bourgeault , Kevin Brennan , Duncan Bucknell , James Bullock, Shawn Callahan , Geoff Considine , David , Norman Dragt , Francis Egenias , Eric , Anna Farmery , Brad Farris , Kathy Fish, Gareth Garvey, Phil Gott , Clive Griffiths , Dennis Howlett , Hunter, Jol Hunter, Lee Iwan , Patrick Jacques, Joan , Stuart Jones , Jose , Kok Van Der Weijden, David Koopmans , Bruce Lewin , Karen Love , Tim MMF , Bruce MacEwen , Greg Magnus , Lisa Mather, Hugo Matislaw , Ed Mays, Mike , Matt Moore, Steven Pearce , Bill Peper, John Eric Pollabauer, Manoj Ranaweera , Suzanne Rose , Bill Sherman, Carl Singer, David A. Smith , Brian Sommer , Ava C. Thorin, Stefan Topfer , Coert Visser , Ian Welsh, Jay Wynn, John Zapolski

Trackbacks

Adam Smith, Esq.
Anecdote (also: here)
Bruce's Blog (also: here)
BusinessMatters
Career Intensity Blog - David V. Lorenzo
Common Ground
Creating a Better Life
Debt Hater
Escape from Cubicle Nation
Expertise Marketplace - Professional Service Firm Marketing Blog
Golden Practices (also: here)
In Search of Perfect Client Service
legal sanity
Marketing - Communications - Greg Magnus at eoecho
Math class for poets
Oplossingsgerichtmanagement (also: here)
PR Studies
Slacker Manager
The Bell Curve Scar
The Small Business Blog
Working Solo

Come on in, everyone else - the water's fine and we don't bite in this pool!

The more you disagree with them, taking the other side in an argument, the more vehemently they push their original point of view. However, if you don't disagree, but restate their point in an exaggerated form, they often back down, or at least tone down their original statement.

This works so well, I'm thinking of copyrighting the idea and calling it "Maister's Exaggeration Ploy."

(I know, I know, there's little new in this world and someone else probably thought of it before me, but I don't think I stole this from anyone. And if I did, I can't remember from whom.)

To see how my principle works, imagine a family member, say, a brother, who is upset at how he has been treated by a cousin. Your brother says: "I'm really upset with Jimmy. He had no right to speak to me that way!"

Because you want you brother to calm down and get over it, you might say: "Don't let it bother you. Perhaps he really didn't mean to be unkind."

As valid as your point may be, you can bet your remarks will only serve to annoy your brother. After all, you appear to be defending cousin Jimmy by downplaying his intentions. This will set your brother off on another tirade, and also, probably, cause him to get annoyed with you, too.

But what if you had said: "You're right! Jimmy's a louse. He always has been! I think we should have nothing to do with him, ever again! Let's leave him off the invitation list for all family gatherings from now on!"

Nothing with people is a certainty, but I would bet that your brother's next remarks will be something like: "Well, maybe it wasn't that bad. I'm upset, but there's no point over-reacting." You have calmed him down by agreeing with him and exaggerating his own point!

The same principle of exaggeration applies in the workplace. If your boss (or client) berates you because you were late in delivering something, don't fight back, saying it was his or her fault (especially if it was!)

Instead, say: "I realize what a problem this has created for you. I'm really sorry that I caused you such turmoil. Can you help me figure out a way to prevent this in the future?" The boss (or client) will, with high probability, calm down and you'll survive! Or at least the odds will be more in your favor!

Try my approach out. Let me know if it works for you!

So, for today, I thought I'd dig into my past files and see what was there that might still be current and of interest to all you kind folks who are tuning in.

Here's a question that was posed to me (on my website) in May 2003:

David, one of my clients' has become accustomed to operating in crisis mode. They are constantly in reactive mode vs. proactive. I have not been asked to help fix this, my firm is involved in other projects. However, I feel like I am watching a train crash about to happen. How can I get them to see that reactive mode and crisis is not a normal way of conducting business, when they have not asked for help? Thanks.

Here's the reply (slightly modified) that I gave three years ago:

I don't completely accept your premise that a "reactive mode and crisis is not a normal way of conducting business." It may not be a good idea, but it IS remarkably common.

But let's address your question: One of my rules is that you shouldn't give your opinion until it's asked for - it will just be resented (spouses and best friends, take note!) First, you must build a relationship and earn the right to comment.

Next, remember that there's no point commenting to someone who isn't empowered to change things. So, you must ask "If they were to change this mode of operating, who would have to lead that change? Who is the key decision-maker here?"

Even when you figure out who that person is, you must tread carefully. Imagine this: you observe that this person in your social circle that you've met (not a close friend) is overweight and unfit. You think it's not healthy to live that way. They haven't asked your opinion. But you want them to understand that there's a better way. How would you approach THAT???

I'd almost certainly try to find an INFORMAL occasion (out of the office, over a drink?) to do this. If it's going to work, it's only going to do so when it's human-to-human, not when it's "consultant" to "client."

You'll probably have to guess that you are not the first person to point out to them that they are fat and unfit (and ugly, as well!) They've heard it before, in all probability.

So what's going to be different about your approach? It's important to remember that it won't be the logic of your argument that will prevail. (Let me really PROVE to you that you are fat, unfit and ugly!)

Whatever the process is will mostly be about learning to influence people's emotions: creating the DESIRE for the benefits that fitness can bring, helping boost their confidence and courage that, the self-belief that, yes, they CAN change. You must be skilled in quelling their fears about dropping their past habits.

Since you will be dealing with an organization and not just an individual, you must also be very astute in understanding the group psychodynamics that led them to operate the way they do now. There's probably a reason - not a good one, I grant you, but a reason nevertheless. There's always a history that you need to take the time to figure out if you are going to help them break free from it.

You'll need to be a skilled counselor, psychotherapist and corporate politician to pull all this off. I don't claim to be immensely skilled at it myself. In part, I (co)wrote the book Trusted Advisor so that I could force myself to think all this through. And understanding whta you shuld do doesn't always mean you have the rescence of mind or the self-control to do it and say it the way you know you should.

Helping others ain't easy.

Good luck! Let me know how it goes!

One of the key messages I passed on was that the elements of good management often sound like “moral” points – you “should” care about clients and customers and you “should” act as if you cared about whether your employees are engaged and enthused. In the past, I used to apologize for this and say “it’s not a moral point, it just works in business!”

But then I made an interesting discovery. If you think something is a moral point, you'll just implement and execute it better – and thereby get the business benefits faster and more extensively.

It turns out that there is nothing so powerful in business as actually having some principles that you actually hold on to passionately and require those around you to believe.

I further explore the ideas Eric and I discussed in these articles:

• Strategy and the Fat Smoker
• Do You Really Want Relationships
• Are You Abusive, Cynical, or Exciting?
• It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Much You Want It

(You can receive all of my future articles directly by subscribing to my free article newsletter.)

Thanks to Eric for the enjoyable interview. Best wishes to him on the remaining 968 interviews in his 1000 podcast series.

By the way, folks – does your experience match mine?

Do people who actually believe things and have a personal morality about how business should be conducted actually attract like-minded people and build more successful institutions?

What about the opposite? Can you be a “pragmatic skeptic” and still build a thriving, financially successful business?

Frequently, someone will say "Compromise" and I think this is dead wrong. Compromise means neither party gets what they want, and both sides end up unhappy.

Instead, the secret is "Take Turns!"

Some of the time, the focus is on one person, fulfilling their needs, and some of the time the focus is on the other person. This way, both sides experience the other party wholeheartedly paying attention to them, and doing things that they want.

The principle applies to business. Employees know that most of the time, the organization is going to be run for the benefit of the owners and the bosses. But if occasionally, just occasionally, the employees needs become front and center and receive true attention, the commitment to the relationship is strengthened.

Don't pretend that my interests are always taken into account in your decisions - I know they are not. Don't attempt to make small token gestures, giving me unsatisfying, tiny pieces of what I want.

Periodically, make me the focus and give me a major part of your attention - and I'll hang in there through the rough spots of our relationship.

Taking turns doesn't have to be an even-handed 50-50 proposition. I just need to know that you can be fair, equitable and just, and recognize that we both have to contribute to make this relationship work. And you do that when *I* get to be front-and-center. It's not ALWAYS about what you want.

Your triumphs are often forgotten by the marketplace - your disasters rarely are.

You'll spend a long time recovering from one job done badly, or one client (or boss) disappointed in you.

People talk, and they criticize and gossip more than they praise.

It can take years to build trust, moments to lose it.

I'm not sure what you can do about this, except try, desperately try, not to mess anything up, and if you still do, try to mend fences (and your reputation) before you move on.

This is the first part of an interview, so watch Coert's site (which is in both Dutch and English and contains much of interest) for more to come.

I have also placed a copy of Coert's interview, along with many other interviews with me, on the "About David " part of my website. 

The problem derives from the fact that, in choosing when and where to get involved, I try to select engagements where I have a chance - at the very least, a chance - at doing something meaningful and purposeful, and making a difference through my presentations.

However, I am constantly astonished by what a small percentage of people organizing conferences and meetings actually want this, or have even thought about it.

Most of the time, they want a speech that is entertaining, informative, stimulating and motivating. What they don't seem to want is anything that specifically addresses the way they run their firm or the real-world changes they are really trying to make.

They don't, it seems, want anything that appears challenging, provocative, controversial or potentially divisive. They don't REALLY want to address the topics they ask their speakers to talk about.

For example, I recently received an enquiry asking me to speak about the topic of a book of mine, True Professionalism, and convey to the audience the importance of living up to the organization's "sacred values." They wanted me to be inspiring.

However, when I asked if I could take votes at the meeting as to how well everyone thought the organization was currently living it's values, the organizers were terrified - "No, that would stir up things too much!" they said.

I also discovered the problem in the few months that I experimented with working through a speakers' bureau. I met with their agents to explain the type of work I was willing to take on. I was astonished to discover that this was a relatively unusual request for them - most speakers and most clients operated on the principle that if the date was available and the date was free, then a booking was made.

The idea that a discussion should take place, to see if the speaker could be used to further the organization's goals, and fit into other changes that management wanted to bring about, seemed to be an uncommon desire.

Of course, the clients' experience with speakers could have contributed a lot to this situation. Many speakers have only their "fixed" presentation, and make no attempt to custom-tailor it to the specific situation.

Whoever is at fault, the fact is that, most frequently, meetings and conferences are organized as "stand-alone" events, with a life of their own, disconnected to the firm's progress.

This is also evidenced by the fact that, most frequently, it is not someone in management who calls me, but a "conference planner" or someone in "administration" - people who are not in a position to discuss what changes the organization is really ready to tackle.

Most meetings, and most keynote speakers, have agenda topics, but no clear goals. Twelve years ago, I wrote an article called Meeting Goals, available on my website, on the possible goals of a meeting- but to this day, most of the calls I receive are from people who haven't begun to think that through.

I think it's perfectly valid to want an entertaining speaker, and I've tried throughout my career to be both entertaining and inspiring in my style. But the thought of being JUST an entertainer no longer excites me - there's so much more that could be achieved with a conference presentation or seminar, if companies only had the courage to plan that version.

As a brief summary (read his post in full for explanation) his top 12 are

1. Anecdotal evidence:

2. Best practices:

3. Sweeping generalizations:

4. Sweeping negatives:

5. 100% evangelism (or "I'm converted, let me go"):

6. More bulk for your buck:

7. New marketing is old marketing and vice versa:

8. Rebranding of jargon:

9. Fundamentalism:

10. Evoking the geeks:

11. Cliches:

12. Round numbers:

I hope I don't make too many of these mistakes in my writing, but I'd like to offer some defense of some of these practices.

First, the reason that so many authors and consultants use anecdotes, best practices, sweeping generalizations and sweeping negatives in their work is that clients, readers and other audiences want exactly that.

As someone who has written both anecdotal and "present-the-evidence" books, I can report that no-one wants to spend the time to follow a refined chain of logic, and no-one wants to be forced to wade through the accumulated evidence just to have the conclusion justified.

Instead, clients and readers are always asking for the key message, something they can absorb quickly and turn into a corporate mantra. Clients keep telling me they have a new strategy, when all they have is a new slogan, slightly adapted from the latest fad management book.

Yes, consultants (including me) make all the mistakes that Uri identifies so well, but I think that this is one time when the blame must be shared.

It's not just consultants who are responsible for creating management fads and inventing new jargon and "pushing" them onto a reluctant audience. Just as frequently, if not more often, the clients and the readers (again including me) are "pulling" the fad approach by implicitly asking authors "What have you got that's new, exciting and can be conveyed in a keynote speech?"

I'm changing that, so that from now on there will be only one global feed available. Since the vast majority of people signed up for that, the sub-feeds didn't seem to serve much purpose.

You don't have to do anything. It's just that if you only subscribed before to one of my sub-category feeds, you are going to start receiving posts on the other subjects, too. Sorry!

I'm currently working on the definition of a body of knowledge that will ultimately be submitted to the International Standards Office as a global standard. As part of the process, it's necessary for me to approach a number of experts in the field and persuade them to join an advisory body. What is the best way to approach those experts? How would you recommend that we best persuade them to contribute their time and support to what will inevitably have to be a compromise document (which may not entirely agree with their particular beliefs and methods)?

As a frequently published author with some reputation as a consultant in my field, I know what it's like to be on the receiving end of (many, many) requests like these, so I'll answer from that perspective.

It's always amazing to me how many people contact me, suggesting we meet immediately ("You don't know me. How's Friday?") or telling me precisely what a significant benefit it will be to them if I were to give them my time and attention. ("I'm contacting you because you can be really helpful to me.")

It strikes me as odd that people don't think they have to give me a reason to help them, other than what's in it for them. Even if the person you're contacting is immensely charitable, isn't it likely that a person in a position to do a favor for you probably has had other requests for assistance? Shouldn't it therefore be obvious that you have to make a (credible) case as to why they should help you?

Notice, this isn't about finding the right pick-up line. ("I've heard of you, you've never heard of me, but I know we have mutual interests and can be of assistance to each other if we can meet to get to know each other better.") (Yes, all these quotes are real experiences I've had)

Instead, before you make contact, you need to think about and come up with a substantively valid reason, why it would be in that person's interest to help you (among others) out. That reason has to have emotional meaning for the person from whom you want the favor.

It sounds a bit blunt, but every human being, when asked for something, is always going to ask themselves "What's in it for me?" This doesn't mean that they are always venal and selfish - it might just mean that it furthers a cause they believe in. But if they are going to respond to you, it's going to be because helping you is going to make them feel good in some way, not because it's going to make you feel good.

So, what are the possibilities? Well, I won't be able to list them all, but here are some of the appeals (some noble, some not so noble) that have worked on me at various stages of my career. (Disclaimer: I give no guarantee that they will ever work again! Don't take this blogpost as an open invitation to call me and ask for a favor!)

a)      It will advance a cause you believe in

b)      It will give you a chance to work with people you respect

c)      You will meet interesting people who you might not otherwise have a chance to interact with

d)      It will help spread your name and fame

e)      You'll be helping the next generation avoid the mistakes you made

f)        You don't want to be left out and let other people set the agenda

g)      You'll learn a lot by participating

h)      Your friends are involved

i)        You're enemy / chief rival is involved

j)        This is your chance to leave a legacy that will live on after you

k)       It's a way to get feedback on your ideas before you have to commit yourself publicly

l)        You'll be publicly thanked and recognized as a prime contributor

m)    It will introduce your ideas to a whole new group of people

n)      The people seeking your help are especially deserving because they are neglected or disadvantaged

There are more, but that should be enough for you to be going on.

Hey, everyone! What appeals have worked on you?

The answer is that while the business issues tend to be very similar, the style with which you respond to them must chnage a great deal.

It is always true that to have a successful company, you must energize, excite and enthuse your people. However, it turns out that the way that you excite a Brit is not the same way you enthuse an American. (They even show their enthusiasm in different ways.) In fact, it can vary regionally: the best way to get through to a New Yorker doesn't always work best in the rest of the US.

The same lesson applies in client relations. When I sent my article Marketing is a Conversation to a prominent UK lawyer, she observed that aggressive attempts to get to know the clients (at least in the fashion I described) would be considered very counter-cultural in the UK and Europe. The intentions and the motivations might be the same, but you would need to have a very sensitive ear to pick up what was being received well.

None of this says one cannot work well in foreign countries. It does say that a key to success is the need to pick up social clues quickly and integrate them into your style (a form of emotional intelligence). But then, that's true domestically anyway!

Charles Green, my coauthor on Trusted Advisor has a wonderful analogy. He points out that many companies have the client focus of a vulture - they pay close attention to what the clients are up to, but only in order to figure out the right time to pounce and tear at their flesh!

This is a very apt description of many company's "client relationship plans" or client relationship management (CRM) systems. They are not really plans to build a relationship at all - they are just a list of activities trying to tell the clients about the wonderful things we can do for them. A sales plan is not a relationship-building plan.

But what could client centricity really mean if we were to take the term seriously?

I suspect that there are levels of client-centricity or client focus.

What follows is my attempt to describe increasing levels of client focus (and possibly of marketplace effectiveness.)

Level 1: We do a better job than our competitors at listening to customers and work hard at finding out what they like and don't like about dealing with us.

Level 2: We have a better understanding (than competitors) of what the experience is like of being a client

Level 3: In designing our operations and activities, we focus on what the client wants to buy, rather than what we want to sell

Level 4: We have ongoing tracking methods (quantitative and judgmental) to assess the quality of the clients' experience, as judged by the client.

Level 5: We treat those client satisfaction / quality metrics as equally important (if not more so) than financial scorecards in evaluating groups and people.

Level 6: We have provided experiential training to everyone who deals with clients on how to be a better counselor, helping them develop their interpersonal, psychological, social and emotional skills and ability to interact with others.

Level 7: We continually use our better understanding of the experience of being a client in order to enhance the quality of the experience for the client in dealing with us.

Level 8: We are able (and do) treat customers as unique, adapting and responding to each with a customized approach, rather than adopt standard methods of dealing with all clients.

Level 9: We have thoughtful, well-executed plans to invest (without fee) our own time and money in growing the relationship with key clients, earning and deserving their trust and future business

Level 10: We place a greater emphasis in our measure and reward systems on growing existing client relationships rather than pursuing new accounts. Relationships are more important then volume around here.

Level 11: Clients believe that if it is ever a trade-off, we will put the clients' interests ahead of our own.

******

OK, reality time!

How well would you rate your company's client focus on these criteria?

What have I left out or got in the wrong order?

The argument (and the discussion) could be extended.

Why don't the branding agencies have branding campaigns?

Which PR firm trying to break into the blogging / social media services marketplace got a lot of bad publicity because it didn't have a blog of its own, yet held itself out as ready to advise others?

We have already discussed paradoxes like these on this blog under the title of The Shoemakers' Children.

I remember wasting a lot of my adolescence and my 20s trying to answer the question "What do women want?"

Eventually, I grew up and realized it was pretty silly trying to make a generalization about a half of the world's population. What I needed was not a theory about what women (in general) wanted, but an ability to detect, as quickly as possible, what the human being I was with wanted.

The very act of generalizing was what was getting in the way of me paying attention, getting close, and forming a bond with the other person.

People (even women, it turns out) do not want to be treated as a member of a group, or class, or market segment, or subset. They want to be treated as individuals.

The same, of course, is true in all aspects of human life, business as well as personal.

Any sentence that begins "What clients want is....." is bound to be wrong. The essential lesson is that there is no one thing that all clients want.

The business challenge is this: how quickly can you or your organization find out what the specific client wants and adapt to that clients' individuality? How well do you truly listen, adapt and respond?

Really great client service doesn't mean figuring out a bunch of neat things that most people like and then doing those things to everyone. Client focus means being good at figuring out, in real time, what each client would prefer, and adapting as much as you can to those preferences.

Notice that we do not, in personal life or business life, have to adapt completely. People understand that there are constraints and limitations (after all, I'm just a male and there are limits to how flexible I can be.)

However, people really respond well in business and personal life when they see we are TRYING to treat them as specific human beings, not just as a category member. It's so rare that they repay us with their commitment and loyalty.  

It was 1977 and my friend Todd had saved for six months until he finally had what every 11-year-old wanted - a CB radio! For a year after he got it, we would tune in and roam the frequencies only to find...airy nothingness.

I was reminded of this recently while trawling the blogosphere which is increasingly taken up with blogs that appear to be dead, dying from neglect or stillborn, with one or two initial entries, now years old.

As with CBs, what thrilled people with blogs was "the ecstasy of communication", the pure fact of being out there in the wide cyberworld - in other words, the form rather than the content.

What most realise is that blogging is the illusion of connection, publishing into a void and thus doubly isolating. Those blogs that survive will and are evolv(ing) into multi-person sites, some with collective and decentred ways of uploading, others with hierarchies essentially identical to paper editing.

This repeats the birth of newspapers out of the "pamphlet wars" of the 17th century - the latter a product of the creation of a cheap, single operator platen press. This may be the necessary stage of development required to create a media sphere which genuinely overturns the mass media model - one in which a range of well-edited moderate circulation outlets can charge and get subscriptions. Whether they could turn into full newsgathering organisations remains to be seen.

Andrew then asks: Is blogging already dead?

Andrew, I don't think blogging is dead. What's rapidly disappearing is the illusion that being successful with blogging is quick, cheap and easy. That all you have to do is "build it and they will come." That's never been true with any other business issue, and it's not true here.

The simple fact is that creating an interesting blog that entices people to want to come back and enter into conversations with you is a slow, time-intensive and hard process. It's no less hard work than writing a book, a series of well thought out articles, or (to switch analogies) building a network of close friends who want to have a committed relationship with you.

If you are looking for instant gratification (and many, many people are) then the fad of blogging is going to fade quickly.

The same is true for those who wish to participate in blogging mostly by reading, rather than creating their own blog. As we have all discovered, it's not that easy to find the "soul-mate" blogs that make you want to come back again and again and continue discussions.

There are two reasons for this. First, and foremost it has always been true that you have to go out on a lot of first dates to meet someone you really want to have a relationship with. It's hard work, isn't it, to search for sites that consistently contain interesting commentary and match your interests.

To continue Guy Rundle's analogy of the CB Radio, it turns out not to be that helpful if you have to scan the frequency every time you want to find something interesting. You and I want shortcuts, and that's why we lapsed back into listening to broadcast radios with stations at pre-set locations and frequencies. The time cost of searching gets too big for the low-probability of a beneficial payback.

The second, related reason is that the technological tools to help us with our search for "simpatico, interesting" people (such as blogrolls, trackbacks, del.icio.us, carnivals) are still undergoing evolution. They reduce the search time, but do not really make it manageable.

Blogrolls are filled with indiscriminatory "friend of a friend" listings that are no guarantee that you'll find the new blog (or person) interesting, and because someone made one interesting comment doesn't mean you want to listen to everything that person has to say.

The lessons? Well, just like your parents told you, it is worth making new friends, and it involves a lot of false starts - you have to go to a lot of boring parties, hang out in places you don't really like on the chance that you will meet someone, talk to a lot of strangers. It's a pain, but if you want a social life, you've got to do it.

Unless, as Guy Rundle suggests, someone comes up with a way for each of us to decide where to go that maximizes the chance that we find like-minded people. That may be a "new" approach, or it may be, as he argues, just a modern equivalent of a preset radio station or print media magazine that targets a market segment and serves both the readers and the advertisers by establishing a clear market position.

(By the way, everybody, I suffer from this problem as much as anyone else. Let me ask all of you out there a question: based on what you tell of my interests by reading my blog, what other blogs should I be reading regularly? It's like those reviews in music magazines - if you like this CD then you'll probably like that one. Help me out here, folks!)

Finally, for those interesting in writing blogs, more parental advice you probably received - find something you are passionately interested in, stay true to your vision and keep at it! If you want people to seek you out for ongoing conversations, then you can't just occasionally say something inetresting or fun. You have to try your best to make it worth people's time to come back to you again and again. Even here in the blogosphere, this is about relationships, people, not a frenzied search for quick hits!

The time will come - you will find yourself in the wrong job (or working for the wrong client, or even employing the wrong person) and will need to break off the relationship. How you do it matters.

Maybe you are not the one who is initiating the separation, but you can see it coming. In such a case, remember the old slogan "If they are going to run you out of town, dash to the front and lead the parade."

If you suspect the other person is wondering whether or not they want to stay in the relationship with you, you don't want to be caught holding on desperately. Assuming you have made reasonable efforts to make the relationship work, you'll have a lot more options (and make better decisions) if you take the initiative.

Take charge and get out as soon as possible. People will often be grateful if you save them the awkwardness of ending a bad relationship. It's better to plan your exit when you are the one choosing the timing and the style of the separation.

It is often tempting, once you have decided to move on, to switch off or wind down - to give up working on your relationship with your employer, client or employee. Don't. Do your best right to the end. Regardless of what happened before, or how long you were together, you will be remembered most for the way you leave a relationship.

If you have to divorce (a client or a spouse or even an employee), there's no point sniping. Resist the temptation to tell people what you really think of them and why - even if you have lots of good arguments and just cause.

Remember that friends come and go, but enemies accumulate. Be kind, say thank you for the good parts and move on. Why make an awkward situation worse?

Avoid burning bridges. It's more noble - and better for you - just to walk away, head held high, mouth shut. You'll be glad you did it that way.

My first instinct was to throw something at her, but my second instinct was to realize she was right. The lack of understanding might not have been my fault, but it was certainly my responsibility to make sure I was being understood.

This isn't a moral point, but one of simple survival. If clients don't hire me because they are too ill-informed to recognize the brilliance of my insight, it's me that loses the job. If I'm trying to advise them to do something and they just won't take my advice, they are going to view me as less than completely helpful. It may be their fault, but it's my problem.

I get questions about this all the time. Everyone has stories of "dumb" clients or people who just won't listen or cooperate or let you do the job you were hired to do. And it's so easy (since it's so often the truth) to lay the blame on the other person and throw your hands up in despair. It's so unfair, we think, that we have to work at being understood when it's their fault.

The crucial first step - taking ownership and responsibility when you feel that you are not being well understood - is a huge challenge for most of us, personally and professionally. How often have you had a disagreement with a family member, only to give up in frustration when they "just won't listen to you" or "see your point of view?"

Yet only by taking responsibility for the effectiveness of our communications can we obtain the influence or the results that we want. We have to stop attributing blame, and start viewing the situation as a problem to be solved. We have to learn to get people to engage with us, not just take opposing sides.

We have to ask questions like "Why does this person believe what they believe now?" "Why is it in their interest to defend the point of view that they are making?" As Steven Covey says, one of the keys to effectiveness is "Striving more to understand, and less to be understood."

Note the paradox here. The better you are at understanding the other person, the clearer it will be as to how you might engage them in conversation, have a chance of being understood, and lead them to a different conclusion. Striving first to understand is not (just) a moral or social point, but good pragmatic advice.

Next, it's necessary to make the obvious point that understanding something yourself is one level of accomplishment, but being good at helping someone untrained in your field to understand it is another. This requires a whole new set of skills.

I have a client who always says to me "Explain it to me as if I were a six-year old." He doesn't mean it quite that literally, but it's a helpful reminder that what he wants from me is not just answers but understanding. The skill of helping people understand complex issues is not that common among highly trained, technically qualified people.

And as we know, a free market rewards what is scarce, not necessarily what is inherently valuable. A superior ability to help a client understand your field may be a real point of differentiation, as an individual or as a company.

Of course, this applies to all our relationships, not just those with clients. If your administrative assistant doesn't fully understand what you want, you won't get back what you want. If your boss doesn't understand what you've done, you haven't done it.

Learning to communicate so that people understand you better is a vastly neglected skill.

There's a temptation in this situation (and every new relationship) to rush to prove yourself (or the worth of your subject area) by making claims for what you can offer. After all, that's what you're being asked to do.

However, the image of being thrown to the crocodiles comes to mind. You can just see the skeptical lawyer audience listening with an "Oh yeah? You've just been added to my overhead costs? You better be good!" mentality.

In this situation (as in a sales situation, or as in all new relationships) the best thing you can do is apply a variant of Shaula Evans' approach and make sure that you clarify your mandate, and make sure there are no misunderstandings about where you can and cannot help. Use this opportunity to get the relationship off on the right foot and you'll save a lot of future grief.

So, in this situation, my advice is that the new marketing director (or HR director, or IT person) should stand up, take a deep breath, and say something like the following:

"As your new marketing director, my job is to support YOUR efforts to attract, win and retain clients. I cannot do that for you; I can only help you do it better.

"If you are energized and motivated to want to get involved in developing your practice, I will be available to offer advice customized to your practice, your personal situation and your ambitions. It will not be the same advice across the board, because each of you is different, and I must learn to serve you as individuals, not as clones of each other.

"I'll try to be a trustworthy counselor to each of you. Tell me your objectives, and I'll try to help you accomplish them, if I can.

"I can offer advice and execution assistance on a wide variety of marketing activities, including seminars, articles, speeches and so on. I can help you make each of these more effective. However, I will not give blanket recommendations about which of these tactics to use, nor how each of them can best be used. In all cases, the best technique will be one that both fits you and will appeal to your clients. We will discover what these specifics are through personal discussions, or not at all.

"Part of my job will be to help you understand what it will take to accomplish the goals you say you want to achieve.

"Occasionally, this will mean that me pointing out that you are aiming for unreachable goals, or that the amount of effort and resources you are willing to dedicate will not get you where you say you want to go. While I will do my best to help you achieve your goals, I will not encourage you to launch half-measures if I don't think they will work.

"In order to serve you well, I will need the privilege of giving my opinion and sharing my knowledge about what works. I will be your advisor, dedicated to your success. I will not just do what you tell me to do if I think you will be wasting your time.

"It's not my job to tell you to get involved in business development. If you do want to get involved, then I am here to help. If you don't then, as your employee, I cannot and will not try to force anything upon you. I will only give my opinion and advice when it is asked for.

"So, please give me a call so that we can meet one-on-one, and I can truly understand what you want to accomplish with your career and your business. I promise you that, if you do, I will do everything in power to assist you in accomplishing your goals. Thank you very much."  

As you read her remarks, think of marketing and selling your services, inside and outside your organization. Shaula says:

"I know that you and I agree that many people approach business relationships like a romantic courtship: they put their best face forward, make outlandish claims and set incredibly high expectations, and then, over time, they fail absymally at the impossible standards they've set and great frustration (and often high drama) ensues for everyone.

"My approach (when I'm on my game) has been the dead opposite: I tell the other person all the very worst things about me, all the things that make me hard to work with or that might make him or her choose a different partner. In business situations over the past several years, this has meant making business partners and clients aware that I am dealing with chronic health problems that currently include insomnia (which can make scheduling calls and meetings a little extra challenging). If partners want to proceed in full knowledge that my health requires certain accommodations, great! And if not...it is not like I would be able to hide the truth for long.

"When I'm off my game, by the way, which is usually if I am feeling under pressure or insecure, I will start to want to "puff myself up" and pretend to be things I'm not. And typically, I fight down the urge to present a facade, and the relationship goes well, but when I succumb to the fear-driven need to be something I'm not (which happens less frequently, fortuneately, as I get a little older and a little wiser), the story usually ends in disaster.

"My most successful use of this technique wound up getting me married. My husband and I met online (through an email discussion list for professional actors and directors), and fell madly in love before we even realized it. Unfortunately, he was in Charleston, South Carolina, and I was in Vancouver, BC, Canada, and we had no prospects of meeting in person until a convention for actors came up in Las Vegas (roughly half way between us!) that we were both planning on attending. We proceeded to chat on the phone, and did everything in our powers to each drive the other one away-exposing all of our worst flaws and telling all our worst secrets.

"Our reverse psychology trick worked: I proposed an hour after we met in person for the first time, he eventually said yes (after he got over his initial tongue-tied shock; I really threw him for a loop since he had been planning to propose to me and he didn't see my proposal coming), and we have now been blissfully married for over 5 years.

"Back to the mundane world of business. When I have been sharp enough to try to "scare the other guy away," my results always been (almost) as good. Being brutally honest about my own flaws and weaknesses and particular needs seems to have encouraged the person or people on the other side of the table to respond in a direct, honest way (instead of an over-inflated, artificial way), so we could have a real conversation about whether we met each others' needs.

"When I worked as a technical and executive search recruiter, I used this technique, too: telling a candidate all of the worst parts about a job or employer, to find out if they were really interested; and presenting a very balanced and honest picture of the strengths and weaknesses of my candidates to my clients, so they could fairly judge if the candidate was a good match for the opportunity at their organization. In this way, I built up great, trust-based relationships with both my candidates and clients-and it was much easier to take care of everyone's needs.

"Of course, not everyone responds well to this approach. Some people are really baffled when you break away from the received conventions of social ritual, and their reactions can range from offended to upset to extremely hostile. Fortunately, such a response is usually a pretty good indicator that our communication styles won't mesh and I'm better off not starting a relationship with that person. ("A bullet dodged," as my husband would put it.)

"You can call this "reverse psychology," or "demonstrating trust in other folks to elicit their trust in you," or "telling the (ugly) truth"-it all boils down to tell the other people in the conversation what they really need to know, to figure out if they want this relationship, and to have the information they need to move forward on a secure footing. In a way, it's an anti-game approach. And the great thing is, you can initiate this strategy from either side of the table.

"If you ever try to start a new business conversation by outlining all the reasons the other person shouldn't take your business...I would be very interested to hear the results."

***

I endorse Shaula's insights.  Her approach won't always get you the most business, but pursuing that is not the key to ether profits or a happy life. The key insight is that in trying to form relationships, business or personal, you'll profit most by having an approach that screens people out quickly who aren't going to like what you do, and brings in people who do. That way, you get a high percentage of profitable, repeat engagements and fabulous word of mouth with a minimum of effort.  

Does anyone else have a business perspective on or experience with this approach?  

A large part of success in business (and perhaps in life) in getting access to the human being behind the mask.

For example, clients like to pretend that they will buy through a logical, detached process, but don't believe a word of it. It's always (ultimately) going to be trust, confidence, comfort and chemistry that will -at the tipping point - win you the business.

If you don't like getting to the really personal, emotional level, this is not all good news. Especially if, like me, you don't have a natural proclivity for intimacy. My standard line is that I love audiences - it's individual people I have difficulty with!

The role versus human being issue reveals itself when I do my consulting work. Very frequently, I will be facilitating or participating in a committee meeting to address an issue. I'll ask "Any questions?" and, often, the room is silent. (We're all in role-to-role mode.)

But as soon as we break for coffee, I get cornered in the corridor or followed into the bathroom (!) by people who want either to ask a really great question or tell me the truth they couldn't tell me in the open meeting.

Until a year ago, I was also a member of the "smoker's gossip club." Banished to the sidewalk outside the building, there were always a few people sharing my addiction, and they would always begin to tell me what was really going on. Having quit smoking, I no longer have access to that form of insider information.

People will always tell you more in informal "off-the-record" situations than they will in meetings. Formal meetings are a ritual dance, not a sincere effort at problem solving.

Early in my career, I used to avoid one-on-one, personal interactions with clients. Now, I try to create situations (for example, pre-and post-meeting telephone conversations) where I can give people the comfort to tell me what's really on their mind.

It's still an effort for me, but I've learned that, to be effective, I've got to do it.

The world is filled with people not "clients" or "bosses", and it's the "people-as-peole" who are going to give you what you want, so you had better start working at understanding them - one at a time.

What approaches do other people use to break through the role interactions and get other people to reveal themselves and their true wishes, desires and concerns?

How can you do what they want if they don’t tell you clearly what they want?

The key is to take responsibility and ask permission to ask questions.

When someone gives you a task to do, say something like ‘I really want to do a great job for you, so can I clarify a few things?’ Most people will say ‘Yes.’ You can then be sure you understand the following details about your assignment –

1. The context of the assignment – ‘Please could you tell me what you are going to do with this when I get it done, tell me who is it for, and where does it fit with other things going on?’
2. Deadline – When would you like it, and when is it really due?
3. Scope – Would you like me to do the thorough job and take a little longer, or the quick and dirty version?
4. Format – How would you like to see the output of my work presented? What would make your life easier?
5. Time budget – Roughly how long would you expect this to take (so I can tell whether I’m on track or not?)
6. Relative priority – What’s the importance of this task relative to the other things you have asked me to do?
7. Available resources – Is there anything available to help me get the job done? For example, have we done one of these before?
8. Success criteria – How will the work be judged? Is it more important to be fast, cheap or perfect?
9. Monitoring and scheduled check points – Can we, please, schedule now a meeting, say, halfway through so I can show you what I’ve got and ensure that I’m on track for your needs?
10. Understanding – can I just read back to you what you’ve asked me to do, to confirm that I got it down right?
11. Concerns – before I get started can I just share with you any concerns about getting this done (e.g., other demands on my time) so that I don’t surprise you later?

Yes, your client or boss should be good at delegating or assigning work and giving you this information anyway. But the truth is that many people won’t have thought through what they really want from you until you guide them through their ‘either-or’ choices.

If you have not received answers to these questions, you don’t yet know what to do, and the risk of being judged a failure is high!

Don’t rely on your superior (or external client) to give you all this information. Pull it out of him or her.

Well, Jeff, we certainly all know what this feels like. You try to be nice, and the other person just takes advantage of you, never reciprocating the niceness.

I invite you to think about how you would handle it if this were an employee, or a family member, or a friend or acquaintance. How do you deal with this in other walks of life?

You’ll find that the key point is that it’s all in the timing. If you were mad at your spouse, the time to raise an issue would not be when you were so desperate to solve the issue that you would lose your temper, or be under immediate pressure to get your way. Done then, you are almost certain to get it wrong.

But you also wouldn’t raise the issue the first time it happened – you would try to be supportive. What you would probably do, if this were a friend or a spouse, is to say that you don’t want to fight about what has just happened, but only want to work out how you want to work together tomorrow.

You would say something like ‘I wonder if we could just go for a walk and talk about some things. Everything’s really good now, but it would really help if we could work out some issues that are bothering me. Can we talk about the future?’ Talking about the future rather than the immediate events really helps defuse the emotions, and allows a more sensible conversation.

In the world of clients, as in personal life, you can’t take extreme positions.

On the one hand, you do have to try and be helpful and flexible and be willing to try and accommodate your clients’ needs. But you can’t keep on just being nice, because then you’ll just keep getting exploited.

If you do, it’s easy to predict that you’ll get madder and madder, stop enjoying the work and then, one day, you are going to explode with fury, really telling that person what you think of them. (That’s what happens in bad marriages where people can’t raise criticisms about each other without giving offense.)

The answer, Jeff, doesn’t lie in systems. It lies in the verbal and interpersonal ability to raise a criticism, while still being committed to the relationship.

Yes, it’s wise to get agreements down in writing at the beginning of a business relationship, and also to agree (with as much non-legalistic language as you can) what would constitute a change of scope.

I think it wise to draft a chatty letter to clients saying the following – (this is language I actually do use) – ‘just to make sure we are both thinking about the project in the same way, I want to be clear that I will be happy to engage in additional activities such as (telephone calls and preparatory reading) up to XX hours. This represents my investment in our relationship. However, if what you ask me to do exceeds that amount of time, I will contact you to ensure that you still want me to do the extra work, and agree an appropriate fee for it.’

This doesn’t stop clients being demanding, but when they are, I then call to discuss things, using the following language (also a real example) – ‘I hope you are happy with my work and that you think I am being helpful and client-centric. If you wish me to invest more time in this project, perhaps we can discuss whether or not it would be appropriate me to bill you for more investment time.’

The choice is then theirs. Now, I don’t want to pretend that this approach works in 100 percent of all circumstances. There are still going to be clients who will keep trying to get something for nothing, even though I have explained that I have ‘reached the limit of my ability to invest in the relationship.’ (Exactly the language I use.) If they still want additional work for no additional fee, I do walk away.

Everyone deserves a fair chance to work out a relationship, but I am not so desperate that I continue to work with people I know to be unfair and unjust. Not only is life too short, but I would rather accept the extra stress of developing other new business than be forced into accepting abuse and exploitation.

As always, I invite other people’s experience and contributions. Is there more advice out there to help Jeff?

Maister – Do professional firms who that are engaged in business-to-business services have an easier opportunity to use blogging than do companies who that serve the mass consumer market, or is it harder?

Rubel – It would be very misleading and limiting to think of blogging as only about conversations with customers or clients. It’s about connecting with a wide group of stakeholders.

However, if you do think about connecting with clients, it should be easier for professional service firms to take advantage of blogging.

When buyers think about hiring firms, one of the things they care a lot about is “smarts” – having really good advice and counsel to offer. Blogging brings that to life – it’s a perfect way to demonstrate that you have something to say and something to offer.

That’s good for the buyer, and if you really have something to special to offer and something special to say, it’s good for you. That’s the kind of transparency that will help the buyer choose a better professional, whether it’s a law firm, an accounting firm, a PR firm, or an advertising agency.

It’s a lot harder to hide now. If a firm or agency really thinks it has the smartest people, then they haveit has a real incentive to get them out there and to show them off.

Maister – But who’s doing the listening and participating out there? Is it the clients you are trying to serve, or is it just other consultants picking your brains and stealing your best ideas?

Rubel – I can track how people arrive at my blog, and the buyers arrive through Google. Buyers search for my topics on Google and, because I’ve been creating and giving away content for two years, they find my blog and me.

The media found me through blogging- they are there and they are listening and watching. And then the buyers found me through the media attention. They don’t necessarily join in the blog conversations, but they are listening and lurking silently, and in big numbers.

Maister – If someone truly did want to do a better job of eliciting reactions and creating true conversations, what should they do?

Rubel – One thing they definitely should do is begin by visiting other people’s blogs and participating in their conversations by adding comments there. It’s a good strategy to be prepared to be a little provocative and controversial, without being rude.

You start by going where the other people are and respectfully and politely joining in their conversations. Eventually, if you have been doing it often and regularly, they will notice you, come to you, and join in your conversation. There’s no short cut or quick hit here.

You should read widely among other blogs so that you know what people want to talk about. In the “blogosphere” that means subscribing to and reading a lot of RSS feeds, so that you know what’s being discussed and what’s hot.

Last, and most important, you should use the technology to “Trackback” and link to other bloggers so that you help visitors and yourself to be part of the larger inter-blog conversation. You won’t get a lot of intra-blog conversations going if you try to keep it all on your blog. You’ve got to link in.

Ultimately, it’s about providing value and making people want to interact with you because they derive benefit when they do.

Maister – These sound like life lessons, not just blogging lessons.

Rubel – Yes, these lessons are general. But the blogosphere has its own culture, just like a dinner party in China is going to be different from a dinner party in the UK.

If you want to join in, you need to take the time to learn the specific manners and mores. Unfortunately, it is very easy to make a big ‘faux pas’ in a foreign country by doing what you would normally do at home.

Maister – What else can blogging do for the blogger?

Rubel – Whether it’s blog-based or news-based, you can be really valuable by being the best aggregator of information in your field. The blog is the perfect tool to make that possible. That’s not just doing a cut-and-paste job on other people’s blogs, although too many people are taking that approach. You must work at contributing. I have developed systems that help me find stuff, and find it before others do. That’s part of making yourself the “go-to resource.”

I’m not a journalist. I’m a finder of information, a sharer of information, an aggregator of information. And it works, because I’m out there every day uncovering things and sharing them with my audience.

For more of Steve’s comments, and my reflections on them, go to my article Setting Knowledge Free

From bitter experience, here’s the beginning of our list:

First, don’t trust too much up front. Because I write about and consult on professional services all the time, I have been very candid with possible professional suppliers about my buying priorities, which are professionalism first, quality second, speed third, and cost last. I thought that being this candid and open would elicit professionalism in return.

We have sometimes been lucky with fabulously trustworthy (and really skilled) providers, but our approach to buying hasn’t always worked out well. In a number of cases, the vendors heard “cost last,” saw dollar bills in their eyes and immediately jacked up their proposed bid prices. Rather than helping us, as inexperienced buyers, to understand our choices, they went straight to trying to sell us the top-of-the-line model with all the bells and whistles on it. It has made us a lot more cynical, suspicious and cautious than we wanted to be.

The second thing we think we have learned from our buying experiences is that, as potential clients, we have talked too much (no surprise there for anyone who knows me!) We were so keen to make sure that our providers understood out needs, that we ended up telling them everything about what we wanted, but never really ended the conversations in any better position to gauge their abilities, intelligence, attitudes or commitment.

We didn’t want to play games by putting the potential suppliers through a phony proposal processes or conversational gimmicks, but found that just when they were trying to get us to do all the talking, we really needed them to do a lot of the talking. We realized that we needed, as buyers, to really think through the question: “What are we trying to find out about these people, and what’s the best way to find it out?”

We concluded that maybe we shouldn’t have been so giving and open about our needs, and should have tested the possible suppliers by holding back and seeing if they were smart enough to ask astute questions. It’s sad to be this Machiavellian, but it may be necessary.

We also learned that references provided by potential providers are a waste of time. Everyone’s got them, and no-one’s going to give you the name of a reference who is going to be anything but glowing about them.

Another conclusion, obvious in retrospect, is that we needed to get to a face-to-face meeting with people as quickly as possible if we were to figure out if we wanted to hire them. Everything that happened prior to that was, in essence, a waste of time.

As a possible provider myself, I don’t like participating in competitive processes, but it was clear that, as buyers, we had to talk to multiple possible providers. Even when we had found someone we thought we wanted to go with, we realized we owed it to ourselves not to commit too early, not to rush into things, and to force ourselves to comparison shop.

There’s more, but I’m keen to hear about other people’s experiences. What do you think the rules and principles of being a smart buyer of professional services are?

Some interesting results are that 84% of authors report either Very Strong or Strong improvement in their ability to differentiate their services as a result of publishing their book and 53% of authors report either Very Strong or Strong ability to charge higher fees for their services as a result of publishing their book. The report has loads of quotes from the authors interviewed (I was not one of them.)

Mike said in his email to me that – quote – I know you’re not very thrilled with the concept of book publishing these days, but it sure seems to be working out for others. Feel free to blog about it and disagree, too –end quote.

Mike was right that I don’t see another book in my future. It’s unlikely to bring cheer to the publishing profession, but I think it will be much more effective for professionals to bypass books from now on and make their thoughts and theories available purely through the internet.

In today’s world, it makes no sense to take nine months, on average, to get your material together and the same amount of time again (amazingly) to get it through the process of publication. Then begins the complicated business of marketing the book and by that time, the thoughts contained in the book are largely historic. By the time you’re in print, the odds are high that someone else has already put similar thoughts into play online.

By publishing work yourself online, through a fast and efficient website, those who want to read the work can be notified electronically of any new material and can read it at their leisure. Who needs a physical book and a bookstore when there’s an RSS feed around? If you absolutely have to mail out print copies, you can still do that, too!

Anyone who has ever written a book will tell you that you don’t make money on the book itself, unless by some (unknowable) miracle you become the flavor of the month. A book helps build your reputation, and reputation is all, but online, viral marketing is today a much more effective way for most professionals to do things. Books are so 20th century!

It’s like the music industry, where an increasing number of performers are happy to give free downloads of their music as an incentive for fans to come and see them perform live or to buy their (subsequent) albums. (Arctic Monkeys, anyone?)

Apart from all this, it has ALWAYS been my advice to new authors that the best way to build a reputation is through a regular, reliable and (most importantly) continuing sequence of individual articles, so that your audience comes to depend upon you as a reliable source of new ideas – some good, some not-so-good, but always trying to contribute.

The simple truth is that business people don’t read books. They may buy them, but they don’t read them. If you can hold people’s attention for the length of an article, that’s pretty good going. You can’t impress people much if they don’t actually read what you write, and, if they’ve heard about you at all, with a book they are probably operating on an interpretation of what someone told them they thought you meant in a book someone else told them about. (Believe me, I’ve been through this!)

And the pace is picking up. Mike Schultz himself told me that the way that people use the internet nowadays is such that shorter pieces are much more effective and that I might want to rethink my strategy of writing 3,000 word articles. (He’s probably right, too!) Others keep trying to teach me that my blogs should be shorter (Sorry, folks!)

The second reason a series of articles works better than going straight for a book is that reputations are built up over time. A book is like swinging for the fences, betting everything on one big hit. And do you know what the number of business books published in a week in the US is? Probably 50 or so. Per week! The odds against you are huge.

I can tell you from bitter experience that getting a reviewer’s attention is INCREDIBLY difficult. It’s like putting out a record: if you’re already Mariah Carey or P. Diddy or whomever, then a) your publisher will promote you b) the record stores will stock your book and c) Rolling Stone will review your new CD. If you’re not ALREADY a superstar, then, good luck, kiddo! NONE of that is going to happen.

Finally, of course, putting out the series of articles doesn’t prevent you from subsequently collecting them together and putting them between hard or soft covers and calling it a book. You even get the chance to bury the fraction of your possible chapters that, in retrospect, turned out to be rubbish.

Oh, sure there ARE virtues to books, even today. For one, speakers’ bureaus find it a lot easier to market you if you have a hot book and there is something both effective and gratifying in having a physical artifact which enshrines your (supposed) wisdom.

Still, what many of my friends either don’t know or have forgotten is that my own career and reputation (such as they are) were built on a stream of articles. It was eleven (successful and profitable) years between my first article on professional firms and the publication of my first book on the subject. You guessed it – it was, and is, a collection of my articles. Forget books — go for the online articles!

I am wondering if the tactics listed below, and their order, which you published in 1993 in Managing the Professional Service Firm, are still correct in your view. If not, what has changed?

Proven Business Development Tactics for Professional Service Firms (In approximate descending order of effectiveness)
Proprietary Research for the client
Seminars
Articles
Speeches
Attendance at client industry meetings
Networking
Referral Sources
Community Activities
Getting Quoted
Website
Newsletters
Brochures
Cold Calls
Direct Mail
Advertising

I said in my blog philosophy that I wasn’t going to blog about old topics that I’d already written about, but in this case I’ll make an exception, Beverly, because it’s cleverly phrased by you, asking for an update.

Before I give you a direct answer, remember that my 1993 book (and the recent videos and podcasts on this site) remind you that this list of BROADCASTING tactics (generating enquiries from people you don’t know)is only done long after you do other, more effective business development: achieve such a high level of client service that you are getting your new clients by existing clients telling their friends about you, and investing nonbillable time in your key existing relationships to turn them from a series of transaction into a dependable romance.

In other words (and I’m serious) you really shouldn’t have to do too much of what’s on this list at all, because it’s low ROI compared to other ways of winning business. (Read the books, watch the videos or listen to the podcasts if that’s not yet evident to you from real life.)

However, if you do have some left over to do pure broadcasting (the items on the list) it would still be my experience that the ROI is as shown, with one obvious exception – the implications of the internet.

The top 4 items (research, seminars, articles, speeches) are all at the top because they are attempts to demonstrate not assert – put some substantive evidence out there that allows me as a client to judge whether you have fresh content or are just making claims about your expertise.

My eternal rule, Beverly, is simple. All you have to ask if you want the answer to any business development question is to ask – what would work on me? So, look at the list and consider. If you or your firm were trying to hire an accountant, a plumber, a nanny for your kids, a management consultant like me – assuming that we don’t have an existing relationship, which of these tactics would most affect YOUR buying behavior and make YOU want to follow up? A press release you read in the newspaper? Someone you met at a church social? Someone who cold-called you? You figure it out for your part of the world. But face up to the fact that clients, by and large, are influence by the same thing that influences you in your purchases of professional services.

Which leaves us just one BIG topic to address, whether or not the net has changed things. Personally I think it’s changed our ability to do the SAME list better, but still in the same order.

The most effective (for marketing purposes) websites and blogs are not those with great graphics, but those that offer fresh content, in absorbable fashion eliciting the reaction (as research, speeches, article, seminars were suppose to do in the old days) – wow, I’d never thought of it that way, I’d like to talk with that person some more. (See my article Marketing is a Conversation)

The net allows increased effectiveness in make these old-style vehicles entice people to want to contact you, but the underlying approach hasn’t changed.

Maybe, just maybe, there’s a need to emphasize number 5 on my list a bit more (attending client meetings) since if you end up (as I do) doing a high percentage of your seminars, speeches and articles on-line, (webinars, etc.) you’ll be leaving out the flesh-to-flesh, face-to-face meeting people that you did with speeches and seminars in the old days. That’s a problem that needs to be corrected, and you do that by going to client industry conferences (which was always high on the list.)

So, Beverly, I think the logic, the real world evidence and the conclusions are still the same all these years later. (Which doesn’t mean that many firms continue to rush to do activities with lower ROI than those with higher ROI). Go back to the original book for a discussion of why that – still – happens.

Any dissenting opinions out there?

In your new article “Marketing is a Conversation” you say “You can’t really write a proposal until you find out which version of success a client wants with this project”. Working in Germany as a PR consultant for more than 20 years I fully agree to this. But in the past five years or so I feel it is getting more and more difficult to get close enough to potential clients to hear their personal views on their objectives and their ideas of success.

An increasing number of companies tend to follow an ideal of “objective” and “not personally influenced” decision-making processes. So we have to cope with poor briefings, short presentation (not discussion) sessions and remarks that alternative proposals are not allowed at all (especially with public tenders.) More and more decisions are made without personal dialogue and information only obtained by exchanging papers. Is this also happening in the US market?

What has worked is the “long” way: getting to know potential clients in a situation not directly related to jobs or projects or having a personal contact to a potential. And then after months or years being invited to present oneself.
What has failed is the “normal” way: coming in face-to-face contact with potential clients with a credentials presentation, a first short proposal related to the briefing and than talking briefly about the whole stuff.

The problem with this is that the chances to win get increasingly reduced to situations where you’ve got a personal relation before and beside the official business request.
You no longer can count on being a well-known professional service company.

As consultants, we seem to have only a choice of the “Here’s our firm’s approach (and proposal)” gamble that you warn us against in the article, or the “No proposal without discussion” gamble that might seem arrogant and evasive. Do you see a third way?

What you describe is happening every part of the world in every profession.

My thinking is that if a client or prospect is going to follow a purely paper-based process, then either the decision is already made and they are just going through the pretence of considering others (because their regulations require it), or else it’s going to be a price-based decision.

It’s certainly not going to be decided on trust, and it’s unlikely to be based on a sensible, thorough comparison of 5 100-page formal statements of qualifications and proposals from 5 different firms. Have you ever tried to compare 5 100-page documents? It can’t be done! You know what’s going to happen: they are going to reduce all 500 pages to a single page of 5 columns, comparing the key dimensions of all 5 proposals only by what can fit on that one page, and presented to the key decision-maker. He or she will never even see your proposal. They are going to decide it on price.

So, if they are going to do that, give them what they want. Come up with a price (one that will make you a decent profit) and invest an absolutely minimal amount of time writing the proposal. (There’s no point investing time on things that aren’t going to make a difference.)

I’d also probably say in the proposal something like “To minimize the cost to you of doing this project we have made the following assumptions about what you are looking for. If our assumptions are incorrect, please let us know, and we will resubmit our proposal. If what you wish the project to achieve changes from these assumptions after it has begun, we will need to negotiated a change in our estimates or fees.” (If they can be formal, so can you! Two can play at that game.)

If they accept it, fine. If the work goes to someone who bid lower, then you’re OK, because who would want to win work on which you can’t make a decent profit? I assume you are not a charity, and do have a family to support.

There is another way, the one that I prefer. If someone asks you to write a proposal, think carefully about whether the potential work is exciting enough and the client is interesting enough. If these tests are met, then say something like: “I recognize that I need to work to earn and deserve your business. I must also give you the opportunity to judge my worth and whether or not we have the right chemistry to work together.”

“So, let me make the following offer. Name the time and the place, and I’ll happily donate a day of my services for free, with no obligation. We can spend that day exchanging views, exploring topics of interest to you. I’ll share my knowledge and experience with you, answering any question you have. At the end of that day you can decide whether or not you still want me to participate in a competitive proposal and I can decide if I wish to pursue the opportunity with you.”

If the client or prospect accepts, then you have hit a home run. You will win the business with one day’s investment, which is a lot less than you would have done spend on preparing and presenting the proposal.

And if they don’t accept your offer, well you can always go back to plan B described above: invest minimal time and send them a number.

The points he makes are very interesting, but I can tell the author from personal experience that pointing out to important people what their flaws are, even when you’re correct, is not always the way to win their hearts and minds (or their business!)

“JAH of Connecticut” submitted this question:

As you mentioned in The Trusted Advisor, trust implies keeping client confidences. In theory, accountants, lawyers and others are also supposed to police the actions of management in the interests of shareholders or the public. But doesn’t doing so necessarily exclude them from being management’s “trusted adviser?”

The responses to Enron and the other scandals has reinvigorated the role of gatekeeper in many professions. Bankers, insurance companies, insurance brokers and agents, investment advisors, and others now have positive obligations to prevent their products and services from being used as instruments of fraud.

There are very few professionals who are so renowned or so essential that they can walk away from the miscreant client or can afford a reputation as a potential fink or “inflexible rule-citer.”

The professional who wants to work with or inside public companies now must be a gatekeeper first and a trusted adviser last. Companies attitudes now are “We used to work together, now the auditors are the policemen/adversaries not consultants/advisors. We don’t share strategies, ideas or proposals with them any more than we would share them with the IRS.”

What does this mean for the professional who is trying to market himself or herself to public companies?

I did address similar concerns as these in my USA Today article “The Auditing Debate” (which is on this website – click here) which came to the conclusion that the gatekeeper and advisory roles are inherently irreconcilable.

However, JAH may be misunderstanding what my co-authors and I meant by being a Trusted Advisor. We did not intend it to mean “I’m exclusively on your side.” A trusted advisor is not some caricature of a mafia consigliere out of the movies – a professional hit man or woman. It means letting your client know when he or she is contemplating something illegal, immoral or just something that will create a bad public image. The key to the role is the skill of doing it so that you actually have influence, and don’t just come across as a nay-sayer.

It means having a big-enough repository of trust so that you can successfully get your client to actually listen to and act on your counsel. As we stress in the book, it is an attitude and a set of skills in helping the client understand options, face reality, and reason through to a sensible decision or conclusion.

And that’s the way you’ve got to market yourself. If you even hint in your marketing that you’re an amoral gunslinger for hire to whoever pays the price, guess who’s going to hire you? The good guys or the bad guys? The only way to avoid the bad guys (ie future troubles) is be clear about the role you’re prepared to play, and what you’re not. And if that loses you business with the bad guys, well, is that good for you or bad for you? Why is it so hard for some professionals and professional firms to understand that there is such a thing as bad business you should not take on?

Yes, it is going to take a lot of courage and self-discipline to do it that way, but it’s the only sensible long-run approach that’s going to keep you out of jail. The lessons of all the scandals (and near-misses that didn’t hit the papers) is neither that we now have more onerous regulation to adhere to, nor that that commercial pressures will continue to be irresistible. The lesson is that it’s just not worth it to play it anything but straight.

I’m afraid that JAH may be right, though. Many professionals are going to continue to get themselves in a LOT of trouble by being afraid to question what their clients are asking them to do, not least because of the financial pressures imposed from firm management. I don’t think we’ve seen the last of the professional service firm provider scandals. He (and many others) think only a special elite can afford to walk.

I disagree— we can’t afford not to. And I still maintain that one of the best ways to avoid the ultimate confrontation is to point out, when appropriate, things like: “What you are suggesting is legally risky, and if you were to take that route anyone in my position would have regulatory obligations to notify the authorities. Let’s keep trying to understand the feasible options and not put you or your company at risk.”

If you can develop – and market – the counseling skills that The Trusted Advisor analyzes, you’re going to have a very healthy book of business — and avoid ending up in either the cell block or at the bottom of the river wearing concrete shoes.

Anyone else out there want to pitch in on this important issue?