Your Competitors’ Client Roster – AND YOURS – is Vulnerable

Accountants, lawyers, consultants, and asset managers know how difficult it is to retain or acquire new, desirable nonprofit clients … especially ones that won’t leave the flock because of a competitor’s lowball pricing. It’s a good day when a firm lands a new engagement or contract for a big (signature) nonprofit, foundation or endowment fund, or successfully fends off aggressive competitors seeking to mine your client roster.

The Benefits of Aligning Marketing, Subject Matter Experts, and Business Development Resources

I think the next frontier in professional services marketing and business development is going to come in the arena of alignment between marketing, business development, and subject matter experts.

Some firms are making enormous strides in creating a closed loop marketing-subject matter expertise-sales process. The results of getting everyone on the same page, marching to the beat of the same drummer, toward an agreed upon set of new business objectives can have a big payoff in terms of getting more visibility, leads, and new clients or engagements.

It takes a tough professional service firm marketer to ask niche practice leaders tough questions.

In last week’s blog, I presented 6 questions that niche practice leaders could bring to the table when discussing niche marketing plans with marketers. They covered topics like strategies and tactics for getting the niche more visibility and generating leads, measuring results, and marketing processes.

To make sure that the universe is kept in balance, this week’s blog is devoted to tough questions that professional service firm marketing directors and CMOs could be asking the niche practice leaders they’re dealing with.

It takes a curious partner asking tough questions to do the tough job of aligning niche marketing and sales efforts.

I know the meaning of tough.

It just happened last week when instead of smoking a very expensive cut of meat in my brand new smoker for 6 hours like the recipe called for, I kind of forgot, and 17 hours later, discovered I had created a meat hockey puck.

Rookie mistake.

Not only was the meat tough, so too was the look I got from Janice and the rest of my family when they found out their dinner choices had gone from “Spicy Sweet Apple Wood Smoked Always a Crowd Pleaser Brisket” to a choice of bologna on white bread with yellow mustard or a bowl of Cheerios.

Agility is more than a mindset… It’s a process too!

I was sitting on the porch of a cabin in the Ozarks just after dawn, sipping a hot cup of coffee, watching the sun starting to peak over the mountain range when I saw the red-tailed hawks dancing above the tree line.

I pondered their grace and beauty (or “thunk on it a bit,” as they say in the Ozarks), but it was their agility that was stunning. Swooping. Diving. Turning. Reacting.

And when it came time to write this week’s blog post, I thunk about what it means to be agile when it comes to marketing and the possibilities for employing this approach in professional services firms that help their clients deal with regulatory and compliance issues.

Answers to These 4 Niche Marketing Questions Will Make You Smile… or Weep

Here's the definition of niche marketing cool: You beat your competitors to the punch by publishing content and an offer (linked to a landing page, of course) for providing assistance about a hot topic or issue, and leave your competitors twiddling their thumbs, coughing in the dust trail you’ve created when pulling away from them.

Blogging Needs to Be a Part of Professional Services Business Development

Blogging has still not made great inroads in the world of CPA, law or consulting firm niche marketing, but there are plenty of great reasons to blog. Firms might be worried about the time, costs or resources involved, but when viewed through the lens of ROI, the value of blogging becomes significantly more apparent.

How to Use a Survey for Lead Generation and New Business – Part II

The kids were in deep, deep trouble.

Their failing vaudevillian parents left them to go on the road, the sheriff was threatening to send them to a state work farm, and they needed to prove to their parents that they had what it takes to make it in show business.

8 Agenda Items for Niche Practice Leaders for your Discussion about Content Marketing with the Marketing Department

This past week, we’ve been going through the process of renewing our HubSpot certifications, and I gotta tell ya, it’s been a labor of love.

We’re really not big fans of test taking, but the upside is that we never fail to get an “aha!” moment because the training we need to do always shows us something new to bring out to our clients to help them get more visibility, leads and new business. We’ve gone through (what seems like) hours and hours of workshops and videos and practicums and note taking. Then, we take a peek into websites like yours to see how you’re benchmarking against today’s best digital marketing and content marketing practices.
 
(Spoiler alert: as a whole, CPA, consulting and other professional service firms .... you’re not doing so good.)
 
If you’re the leader of a niche practice, you may want to devote a bit more time to understanding the driving forces behind digital marketing, and then tasking your marketing team to execute a content marketing strategy that fills your pipeline with leads.
 
Today’s best digital niche marketing practices for CPA and other professional service firms seem to boil down to one very basic and fundamental need: if you don’t have a strategic content marketing program, and the skills, resources and technology to create and deliver it, your online marketing program is a dinosaur.

The Formula for a Successful Lead Nurturing Strategy: Patience + Relevant Content = More Sales Opportunities

 
After the eternity passed (like 4 or 5 minutes) I finally, finally, got the cash but here’s what happened. It turns out that the bank actually gave me hundred dollar counterfeit bills, which I then used to pay my bill. Imagine my surprise when the next day when I got a call from the contractor that when he tried to use one of the bills at Kentucky Fried Chicken, it started a string of events that eventually included the bank, Sherriff’s department and Secret Service.
 
The universe sure does work in mysterious ways. (There’s more to this story, so stay tuned !)