It helps to identify future conflicts between IT and Marketing as the Marketing Department continues to grow and develop their own IT capabilities. The friction and turf-wars can be minimized by understanding where the conflicts are most likely to occur, and what kind of strategies can be employed to address the growing emergence.

Keep an eye out for it, and I will provide a link to the website once it has been posted.

Grant

Here is a brief excerpt:

“Based on numerous client observations, we have found that the integration between the firm’s website and internal CRM database is a necessary component to marketing professional services online. By automating the transfer of prospect inquiries and information directly to the professional’s desktop, firms are able to provide the best level of service, reduce costs, and maximize the benefits from their marketing efforts.”

You can read the full article here. I look forward to hearing your individual thoughts on this, and how it is affecting your firm.

Grant

It indicates a firm’s understanding that knowledge transfer is a key factor in selling professional services, newly acquired knowledge needs to be published regularly to continually add value, and that email is an effective tool to deliver this information to existing clients and prospects.

Yet, despite the fact that all of these concepts are correct, we have found that the email newsletter is not the ideal method of execution for the professional service firm. After numerous client observations, patterns have emerged that show the continual production of a newsletter not only inevitably results in low-value content, but receives relatively poor returns in terms of conversion and revenue.

The first step in understanding this phenomenon, is understanding that the professional service firm:

1. Relies on the transfer of valuable knowledge to sell professional services
2. Does not have unlimited access to their professional’s time for non-billable tasks, and
3. Cannot be wasteful with qualified leads that could result in large profitable contracts

The finite resources of a typical professional service firm, compounded with the high-value potential of qualified leads, demand an approach that is efficient and targeted.

So, why does the newsletter typically fall short?

The primary reason lies in the high-frequency production schedule of the average email newsletter. With quarterly, monthly, or even biweekly deadlines, professionals are hard pressed to consistently produce knowledge-rich content. A dichotomy arises that motivates professionals to publish and document “just because it’s October”, rather than when valuable insights are discovered.

The newsletter methodology drives the firm to become a virtual newspaper, rather than a thinktank. At the end of the day when a cost/benefit analysis is performed, the considerable drain on resources to maintain a newsletter timetable, are not justified by the cailber of content and intellectual capital produced.

Secondly, the sheer quantity of information within an average email newsletter guarantees the delivery of low-value information.

Your prospect’s professionals and executives are incredibly busy. When their attention needs to be captured, your firm’s message must be direct, clear, and brief. Otherwise, you run the risk of being ignored or passed on to the Junk Email Folder.

Even if your newsletter recipients are highly segmented (which is probably a generous consideration in most cases), you are still bombarding the prospect with lots of information that might not be directly applicable or of direct interest to them. The quality of the content might be extremely high, but if it is not relevant, it can be interpreted by the prospect as a waste of his/her time.

The last thing that you would want to do, is to convey to your prospects is that you don’t value their time.

Why send an entire newsletter filled with information of questionable value that demands a time-intensive review, when you can send a highly focused whitepaper or case study that is both direct and brief?

I would make the analogy that an email newsletter is akin to carpet bombing, while the personalized whitepaper or study, is a surgical strike. Less resources, with greater precision.

If your organization is currently publishing an email newsletter, or if you are a champion trying to introduce email marketing into your organization, consider looking into dynamic, personalized email campaigns instead. Im sure you will find that they are more effective and resource-conscious.

Grant

He called for his readers to present any evidence that has made a real difference in the marketing of a professional service firm, based on the contributions from a marketing expert or the firm’s marketing department.

David Maister is essentially asking two questions:

1. What evidence can be offered that indicates professional service marketers really know how professional services are bought and sold? And…
2. How can this evidence be quantified to demonstrate a positive contribution to the said firm?

For the professional service firm, successful marketing ideologies and quantifiable contributions are evident in the firm’s website.

We all know that selling professional services is largely based on the effective transfer of firm knowledge. It entails not only the knowledge of solutions and service lines, but the knowledge of its professionals, and the knowledge gained in terms of experience from previous clients and engagements.

When used properly, a website is an effective tool for transferring this information. No other medium is as accessible, interactive, or precise, in catering to different segments of the buying center.

So, what elements within the website reveal that the firm does in fact understand the principals of selling professional services and how can we quantify a positive contribution to the firm?

The first indication of this understanding, is the presence of a content-driven website as opposed to a ‘brochure-site’. Unlike brochure sites, content-driven websites are designed at providing meaningful information to educate the prospect, rather than just focusing on the firm itself. The very existence of a content-driven website demonstrates the firm’s basic understanding that information transfer is crucial in selling professional services.

From there, we need to state specific elements within the website that we feel effectively transfer firm knowledge and are identifiable through observation. For instance:

1. Is the site a knowledge repository? Can whitepapers, webcasts, webinars, etc. be easily accessed?
2. Are the professionals of the firm showcased on the site? Can data and details on each individual be found?
3. Can I find case studies and/or research of work with previous clients?
4. Is the site content organized in an intuitive information architecture that is simple to follow?

If these elements are prevalent on a firm’s website, it makes a strong case that they understand the fundamentals of a knowledge-based sale.

If you spend some time surfing the websites of legal, accounting, management consulting, private equity, and architectural firms, you would find that the majority of them lack the elements we have stated above. They are not commonplace for professional service websites.

Current, interactive, and well-written content is difficult to produce. These elements would not appear on a website haphazardly, or by mere chance. They demand dedication, conviction, and significant marketing department resources to ensure that the end product is engaging and knowledge-rich. To produce up-to-date case studies and whitepapers, continual pressure must be placed on the firm’s professionals to document their experience and work. Producing finished products from the collected data is a subsequent challenge, and accomplishment, as well.

Their presence on the website reveals the underlying marketing ideology that motivated the firm, and the adversity that was persevered in its development. They know that knowledge transfer needs to take place, and they take the necessary steps to make it happen.

Now that we have identified different factors that prove the competence of the marketing department, how can the contributions be quantified?

It can be derived in a number of ways. For example, this could include webanalytic data (the number of downloads, page views, online inquiries, content group analysis, etc.), used in conjuncture with prospect conversations and feedback during the sales cycle.

In a future post, I will elaborate further on effective metrics and methods to gauge the impact of content on the website. But, for now, I hope that we have laid the foundation of how the website can prove to be a viable contribution of the marketing department.

Grant

If potential clients cannot effectively navigate your information architecture, the website will not be a valuable tool in demonstrating the firm’s thought leadership. Ultimately, prospects will not understand what services or solutions can be beneficial to their organization, nor convinced that your organization has the best people and experience to get the job done.

First, lets establish what applications of flash I am specifically referring to. The following is a list of applications that I feel are most relevant, but this is by no means comprehensive:

1. Flash Introductions
2. Rotating Logo, or Mission Statement
3. Flash Navigation

For the sake of time, I will just focus on Flash Introductions. You will find that the rationale can be equally applied to the other two applications, and will give you a philosophy to make your own inferences on a case-by-case basis.

When I see an elaborate flash introduction (you know the kind, the one that takes 2 minutes to load and feels like a commercial) the only thing that I derive from the swirling animation and upbeat music is, “Well, at least they have a really good flash animation team.” It may seem silly to say that, but what else is there to infer?

For all of the precious attention a flash introduction demands, it tells a prospect nothing about the firm’s core competencies, prior experience, or caliber of their professionals. It is just a flashy commercial. Any firm can hire a great flash production company. However, the most successful firms will build a website with a simple and intuitive navigation structure where prospects can easily find and access firm knowledge.

Think of it from the point of view of your buying center. Your prospect’s executives are concerned with answering questions like:

1. Who are you?
2. What types of services and solutions do you provide?
3. Have you worked with companies similar to my own?
4. What kind of success have you had?

Flash introductions are distracting and create roadblocks for executives to access this information and ultimately solicit your services. It is the answers to these questions that sell professional services. Not an animated commercial.

The prospect’s time and attention, are precious. Professional service firms MUST adopt a philosophy to funnel prospects to their knowledge-base, effectively and without distractions.

Given that this could be your only shot, ensure that when a prospect comes to your website, they can find what they are looking for as quickly and easily as possible.

You will find that I have specifically linked to one of his posts below. David has posed an interesting question of how he should go about creating awareness for his website on the internet. I think it will be an excellent exercise to read the post, and discuss any strategies or tactics that might be beneficial. It’s really an exciting opportunity for someone of his caliber to even open the floor to such suggestions. Let’s see if we can provide him with something of value.

Here is the post: http://davidmaister.com/blog/114/

I will be writing a list of suggestions for him sometime in the next few weeks. If you have anything you would like to collaborate with me on, please feel free to email me. If not, try to make your way to the site and give your two cents.

Grant

This class of search engine optimizers developed their tactics and portfolios during SEO’s infancy. Low competition, low saturation, and with relatively under-developed search engines. Remember when all it took to get a client to the top of the search engines was to edit the Meta tags?

Not that current tactics are all that more complex. Title tags, focused content, keyword placement, RSS feeds, link exchanges, and blogs are all in the current expert’s repertoire. Not exactly brain surgery.

This haphazard success is soon going to evaporate though, as competition increases, more companies continue to migrate online, and the search engines refine their indexing and relevancy algorithms.

So, why are many SEO experts not as qualified as they purport to be?

The answer lies in the skill sets of the individuals who are becoming search engine optimizers. Up until now, the bulk of the search engine optimization profession recruited from the ranks of HTML developers. It actually makes complete sense if we look at the minimum skills necessary to optimize a website, and the state of the HTML development industry during the rise of the SEO industry.

HTML developers were the ideal candidates to quickly move into the profession because they already possessed the minimal skills necessary to go behind the website and edit the HTML. I think we can safely assume that to perform the current SEO, the expert needs to have a decent knowledge of web development. Although learning a markup language such as HTML is not that difficult, it would be a significant roadblock to any newcomer who wanted to enter the field. The common lay person, or nuclear physicist for that matter, would be forced to first learn remedial coding skills.

Additionally, when the internet bubble burst (along with the web developers high paying salaries) no other group was better positioned to identify the new lucrative opportunities that SEO offered. A huge population of domestic developers found themselves out of work and being undercut by cheap overseas labor. Its not surprising that they were able to segue their current knowledge into offering higher-value services that would position clients more effectively to their consumers.

The problem is that 95% of these experts have no real idea how the search engines index web pages, or determine relevancy. They are simply recycling the formulas of previous SEO success, and following the latest trial and error trends that someone in the chatroom ’swears by’. Continually implementing and testing, without any underlying comprehension of the science they are up against. Its like someone without a bio-related degree trying to recreate evolutionary studies after reading a paper on Darwinism. Its absurd. They are completely flying blind.

A true SEO expert understands the fundamentals of information retrieval.

This includes document indexing, linguistics, and a strong knowledge of linear algebra, including stochastic matrices, vector space theory, latent semantic analysis, and singular value decomposition. This is the key knowledge that is necessary to understand how the search engines view your client’s website, how that information will be received, and what needs to be done to increase their ranking.

Unfortunately, this knowledge, which does take a considerable amount of mathematical expertise, is well beyond the scope of your average HTML web developer. It has become difficult to not only find enterprise-level experts, but differentiate them from the rest of the masses.

So how are professional service firms expected to identify which SEO experts they hire are truly professionals?

In my next segment, I will continue my discussion on the survival of the SEO expert, in correlation to information retrieval. I will also introduce you to the IR Litmus Test, which are techniques that a firm can utilize to accurately qualify SEO experts, and differentiate amateurs from enterprise-level professionals.

Grant

These sources, books, and professionals, are part of a living knowledge base that we continually update and trim, again and again. We constantly re-evaluate and identify the most relevant information and cut what we feel is extraneous.

We dedicate more hours than I can possibly quantify to maintain our knowledge base. So navigate with faith!

However, that has all finally changed with the creation of this blog, and this first post. This is really the first step in our publishing efforts, and we should have quite few articles and whitepapers produced by the 2nd quarter of this coming year. This is a virtual ribbon-cutting event, and we are officially opening discussions on the tactics and strategies that successfully market today’s professional service firms online.

We will focus our discussions on how the professional service firm generates quality leads, effectively manages those leads, and the seamless integration of said leads into the organization to the applicable professionals.

Please feel free to leave comments and suggestions any time. If you would like to share any case studies or findings with us, write a post or email me directly. We look forward to hearing from you.

Grant