Don't wait for the recovery

A lot of professional service businesses have been through a rough period in recent years. Talk of a much needed economic upturn in 2014 is helping to raise spirits. But just relying on an upturn to translate into more work for your business is a bad idea. Here’s why.

The cycles should be familiar to all of us who have lived through them before. In good times, work finds you, staff numbers expand and the phones keep ringing. Then comes the downturn. The phone doesn’t ring as often. Work contracts to a few long term clients and staff numbers are trimmed.

Then the upturn comes again but in every upturn, there are new faces and new businesses which seem to be getting the lion’s share of work. It’s as if they appeared from nowhere, or were once fledgling companies regarded at best as junior rivals, now ‘stealing’ all the best opportunities from under your nose. How does this happen?

In a word, complacency. If you are a business which is hoping to ride a coming wave of economic revitalisation and to resume your pre-downturn glory, you’re guilty of complacency. While you are waiting, others are already busy: building the reputations, forging the relationships, making the overtures. They’ll be talking to ‘your’ clients and actively beavering away on their B2B activities. They’ll be communicating often, networking, and spending time on the phone. They’ll make sure they’re on the radar of every potential client… including yours.

When the upturn comes, it’s these companies who will be the first to benefit. During any downturn, people move around, leadership roles change, and ‘old’ relationships are tested with new blood. Active businesses with an intuitive or disciplined approach to their B2B marketing know this, and are always on top of change, in preparation for what comes next. Complacent businesses are the first to discover that old networks are no longer as reliable, and even that awareness of their business offering has dropped off the radar.

So how do you prevent this?

First, start now and don’t wait for the upturn. You should be investing time and resources into building your contact lists and refreshing old lists. If you haven’t used your client database for some time, you might be shocked at how many people have moved or left old positions. You need to find where they have gone and get in touch with them and re-established the relationship.  At the same time, work out who’s replaced them from where they left and keep that B2B relationship alive.

You ought also to spend some time thinking strategically about which sectors of your market will move first in any upturn. Target them. Identify the companies that will need your services and identify the key influencers within those companies who need to be aware of your existence.

Does your collateral reflect your strategic aim? Is it time to refresh the website and those company brochures? Is it time to run a quick survey to understand how your target market perceives you, your strengths and competitive weaknesses?

You need to be communicating regularly. Once a month is not overkill, it’s minimalist. It doesn’t matter if your outreach is a mix of electronic, print, and personal contact – just make sure you have diarised this as a discipline and have a plan for regular client outreach and communication.

If you’re not a natural networker, find someone in your business who is. Make the commitment to have some sort of presence at various industry events likely to attract the sort of clients you’re interested in keeping, and those you’re interested in winning. There is no point having a box of 200 business cards in your desk drawer. They belong in other peoples’ hands so find a way to make that happen.

You will need to do all these things and more because enough of your competitors will be. They’ll be the ones picking up the work you expected to be ‘rightfully’ yours. Complacency is a common human character trait and we all suffer it. The way to counter it is through building a discipline around your B2B efforts.

Failing to do anything much other than hope to be carried along by a coming economic upturn isn’t as good a plan as getting underway now and making your own luck for the New Year.

Corporate humbug

Christmas comes but once a year, thankfully. It’s a wonderful time for family and friends but when it comes to corporate or business relationship marketing, it can also be a time when the most insincere, plain lazy and low quality stuff happens.

The tradition of a posted Christmas card from one company to its clients is still alive in some places, but not many. The card was either signed by the principals, or passed around the office for everyone to sign their name. It was addressed to the recipient. Often personally. This at least was some indication that the senders had actually thought about who they were sending it to.

Then along came email and with it the ability to send a mass email to all clients with some appropriately cheesy sentiment of the season. It was cheaper and quicker but much less personal than the postcard.

Less personal again was the online e-card, which asked you to follow a link to a site with some even cheesier sentiments, anonymously addressed to pretty much anyone.  It got even worse again, in my view, with the arrival of websites that could animate members of your team into some super cheesy rendition of a Christmas Carol or a nativity scene. Ok, they were funny at first but let’s face it, if anyone can do it, where’s the sentiment or sincerity in that? (Here’s one site http://www.jibjab.com/ which illustrates what you’ve missed out on if this doesn’t make sense to you).

Things took a another turn down when some bright sparks decided to advertise their charitable bona fides by sending out emails to clients promoting that, rather than spend money on Christmas cards, they were making a donation to a charity instead. They never tended to reveal how much was being donated. Often, they didn’t mention the charity. Pardon my cynicism, but if you want to donate to a charity at Christmas time (which is a good Christian thing to do anyway) do you really need to advertise the fact and try promote yourself this way?

So here I am, gripped by a fear of what’s about to come through the email channels in the name of Christmas and goodwill, but in every other respect lacking sincerity or the personal touch. As a piece of client communications, some of these border on the meaningless. There are so many of these that, with luck, yours might be deleted without being read and before your intended recipient can pause to think how little they obviously mean to you.

If you’re about to commit one of the mortal sins described above and might now be having second thoughts, what are your options?

If your clients actually do mean something to you, the option of the personally addressed and signed card, with best wishes for the season, ought in my view to make something of a comeback. If you don’t want to spend the $1 or $2 per client on the cost of the card and its postage, maybe you’re better off doing nothing.

Sending a gift is also a nice idea, probably better reserved for better clients. Bottles of wine have become a bit de rigeur – especially if you’ve wacked your own corporate logo on them – but the recipient with an office full of free bottles of wine probably won’t mind too much.  They also probably won’t remember you too much from the crowd who chose to do the same thing. If you’re going to give a gift, give it some thought and try be imaginative. Don’t just do what you did last year and the year before that – people might be forgiven for thinking you’re not making an effort.

The client Christmas function is another option but remember that everyone’s doing pretty much the same thing at this time of year. ‘Come and along and have some drinks on us and stand around for a couple of hours making chit chat… it’ll be fun’ seems to sum up the approach for many. If you are going to throw a function, try keeping it reasonably intimate and personal so that you’ve at least got the opportunity to meet and interact with your guests. And think hard about some angles to make yours stand out. Once again, use some imagination and dare to be just a little bit different. I’m not suggesting a game of charades but there are some things you can do to help break the ice for your guests (many of whom won’t be well networked) and which will leave them talking about you in a positive way for a while.

Whatever you choose to do, just make sure you do it well. The postcard, the party, the gift – they all require some thought and the personal touch is always best. Otherwise, it might be better to do nothing if the something you had in mind is one of those ghastly, insincere, cheap and nasty e-cards.

And you could always just quietly, and without fanfare, make a donation of time or money to a charitable cause that could do with some help. There’s no shortage of options there.

The loyal client?

If the so called 80/20 rule is anything to go by (and 80% of the time it seems to be), then your business is probably heavily reliant on around one in five of your clients for the vast majority of your work. These are sometimes what you might call your ‘loyal clients’. Given their importance, are you treating them with the sort of attention you might lavish on a new client?

Loyalty in business is a lovely idea but in practice, we are increasingly living in a competitive market where loyalties can be hard to maintain. Not only cost pressures from competitors but changing expectations of services and demands for new approaches or innovations can all conspire to convert your loyal clients into your competitors’ clients. And much like a relationship breakdown, it usually comes as a shock when it happens. The post break up analysis can reveal just why this happened but “if only I’d seen the signs” probably features on the list.

So just as important as working on securing new business, it’s very useful to focus on your existing customers. Don’t take them for granted as ‘loyal’ but treat them as a client which is entitled to go elsewhere if you aren’t doing what you can to look after them.

So how do you do that? A few simple ideas might be worth thinking about:

Communicate. Are you maintaining a regular line of communication? If your B2B communication efforts are mainly directed at winning new business, you could benefit from focussing some of it on your established clients.

Survey. I am a big fan of understanding your customers and potential customers. But sometimes we focus our efforts on surveying the broad market of potential clients at the expense of asking different questions of existing clients. People who have already dealt with you in business are the best placed to give you feedback, so why not ask for it?

Make time for one on one meetings. Nothing quite beats a one on one meeting just to touch base with your customers and listen to what’s going on in their business. This could reveal opportunities but more important, it firms your relationship and demonstrates your interest. And be sure to do so more than once a year. There’s no point saying “Yeah sure, so and so knows us really well, I catch up with them once a year.” Your competition is probably doing so more often than that.

Keep a close eye on the accounts department. It’s amazing how quickly a good B2B alliance can be crushed on the rocks once the accounts department gets involved. The last thing you want is your accounts nazi (and we all need them) giving grief to your best customers over invoices or payments or terms. Accountants aren’t strong on the PR side of things. You need to make sure that all points of contact from your business are treating your best clients with the sort of respect they deserve. Be prepared to intervene if need be and do so demonstrably so that your client knows you’re looking after them.

Share internally. A lot of your staff, including frontline people (reception for example) won’t know which clients are more important than others, unless you tell them. Sharing that bit of intel around internally can inspire a more collective approach. It can also mean that the B2B relationship doesn’t just rely on you, but also on a number of your team. Which makes for a stronger bond.

Invite their views on your business. If you’re working on some innovations or new ideas, why not share them with a few of your better clients? Ask their opinions. Do they have any suggestions for you? Even invite their views on how you can grow your business. They’ll probably appreciate being asked especially if you treat their views with respect.

Engage beyond work. Some clients enjoy social networking outside of business. But some don’t. It’s a good idea to understand their likes and dislikes. Little point always asking them to a box at a football game if they’re not interested in football and prefer fishing. It’s also to my mind why putting all your eggs into expensive things like corporate season boxes makes no sense because you’re only going to appeal to a segment of your clients. Along with your own self-interest, no doubt.

These are just a few top of mind thoughts. The important thing is to establish a discipline around client retention just as much as you establish a discipline around acquiring new clients. If you put things in the diary, it’s at least more likely to happen. The cost of forgetting can be high.  

Logo schmogo

A corporate brand is many things to many people. But it isn’t a logo. This is often confused but knowing the difference might help refine your corporate branding efforts.

A logo is basically a graphic design mark which identifies your company. If it incorporates text, it’s usually called a logotype. (Think Virgin for example). So what’s the difference between this and your corporate brand? In my view, your corporate brand is a mix of several things. The brand is much like a corporate personality. It takes into account the type of business you’re in, the style of service you offer, the sort of image you want to project about your business. Clients and customers interact with your business in many ways – by phone, in person, through your corporate and business communications – and all these are touch points where clients or customers will get a sense of what your brand is all about. 

Some big brands like Virgin do this very well. Virgin, despite being a large global business of many decades operation, is to this day a brand of defiance, of youth, and of energy. Whether it’s a credit card or an airline or a music label, the ‘Virgin’ brand is consistent. You know intuitively that what you’ll get is not ‘establishment.’ That’s also reflected in their bold use of colour (red).

By contrast, there are establishment brands which are all about stability, tradition, and dependability.  Banks are typical of establishment brands. And very often, they lean to blue as a colour signal of the type of business they represent.

The logos themselves are ideally a reflection of this brand personality. Which means that usually the brand position and strategy should come first - because the style of corporate brand is how your business projects itself while the logo is the visual personification of this.

So what, you’re asking? The answer is that corporate brand strategy is just as relevant for small and medium businesses as it is for large institutions. You obviously don’t need to invest the sort of money nor effort as majors but there are some simple things you can do to help define your brand thinking.

First, decide your personality. If for example you’re a design based business aiming to make a reputation based on leading edge design ideas, your brand should reflect this. You may want to project as an edgy, contemporary business which challenges conventional attitudes. This personality should shine through all your corporate communications, your website, brochures and even down to the culture of your staff.

Alternatively, if you’re a conservative profession which is associated with evidence or science based advice and opinion (think engineering or valuation for example) you may want to project a more conservative image.  This can be particularly important in economic downtowns where clients become more risk averse and seek out conservative, dependable reputations. Once again, this personality should be reflected in the style of your corporate communication. Every time a client has contact with your business should reinforce this personality.

Think about the content that will support your brand. For the design based example above, if you want to position your brand as edgy and contemporary, you’d support that with content that illustrates that capacity. Likewise, building an evidence-based brand built on conservative, dependable values would logically mean providing content to your target market which supports that claim. Otherwise, it might be a bit like the creative artist wearing a grey suit, or the accountant wearing the latest ‘out there’ fashion.

This doesn’t mean you can’t zig when all your competitors are zagging.  Sometimes, breaking the mould can be hugely advantageous, especially if you’re in an industry which has a recognised stereotype with significant downside perceptions. Think of the stereotypical lawyer for example, and how some firms have projected their brand as ‘plain English’ practices with ‘real people’ who empathise with your needs (as opposed to aloof hair-wig wearers with superiority complexes who view you as riff raff).  Extreme example, but you get the point. Defining yourself by describing what you are not can be very effective.

A warning though: none of your branding strategy will ever work without leadership from the top.  If senior executives are at heart conservative traditionalists with little appetite for ‘breaking the mould’ there is no point adopting a mould-breaking strategy. It will fail, if not at the first hurdle, certainly in time. The strategy itself may be sound but if for the senior leadership of the business it’s an ill-fitting suit, it simply won’t work. This can involve a bit of difficult navel gazing and self -reflection, but you’re better off being honest about who you are. You can’t act a role forever.

There are a few other elements important to successful corporate brand positioning but for now, it’s worth considering that all the aspects mentioned above don’t involve your logo. By the time you’ve decided on your brand, you should be ready to brief a graphic artist on your logo.

PS: For some fun on the subject of logos, have a look at this showcase of the ’15 Worst Corporate Logo Fails.’

It's a people business

Like it or not, you’re in a people business. Professional firms in particular rely almost exclusively on their people and their skills, networks and training for delivering services to clients. These people can be hard to replace, unlike lower skilled jobs which are highly replaceable (for example in retail or manufacturing). So why is it that so many professional firms largely ignore their own people in their strategic business development messages?

Are Australian professional businesses gripped by some sort of corporate social anxiety? Why is it so common for businesses that market to other businesses to ignore their own professional staff? Sometimes they even perversely use generic corporate images (showing some politically correct racial mix of Black American, Mexican, Caucasian and Asian all in suits) rather than images of their own people.

Whenever I am asked to review or audit a business’ marketing and BD collateral, one of the first things I look for are the profiles of the people in the business. Sometimes there may be some brief profiles of a principal or two. Often there is nothing. Instead, content often focusses on recent projects, recent client work, and (invariably) too much general narrative.

Recent project news is vitally important, particularly for businesses associated with the property and construction industry. ‘You’re only as good as your last project’ is a truism. But this ignores the vital role that professional staff have in securing new business opportunities. For a prospective client, it’s not just the most recent series of projects you’ve completed as a business that counts, but also who from your business is going to be working on their job. This applies equally outside the property and construction industry.

I’ve seen this confirmed in several surveys for a variety of different businesses. When clients are asked what influences their choice of professional services firm, it’s invariably the people in that firm; their reputations, skills, and value-adding potential. It is rarely influenced by big brand names. Corporate reputation can rate as modestly important but not as highly as people.

So if people are so important to winning new business opportunities, here are some tips on how to make more of your most important asset in your business development activities:

• Don’t stop at the principals. Your clients know full well that the principals of the business might be the rainmakers but on a daily basis, they’ll be dealing with more junior staff. So you ought to be profiling these staff and their achievements, as much as yours.

• Don’t be fazed by staff changes. ‘But what if people leave?’ is a common objection to profiling more staff. That may have been valid when marketing was totally reliant on expensive paper based documents with long shelf lives, but these days we have digital printing (ideal for short print runs) and web-based content, both of which are quickly and cheaply updated. New staff ought to in itself be an opportunity to communicate with your clients.

• Photographs are important. The human brain is programmed to respond to facial cues. Including written profiles of personnel without their photographs is just making life hard on yourself.

• Informal over formal. My recommendation usually is to try get photos which are more ‘natural’ as opposed to clearly posed corporate headshots in a studio. It just feels more welcoming – I’d rather deal with someone who looks relaxed and at ease as opposed to formal and unapproachable.

• Colour, or black and white? Sure there are circumstances when black and white images add some aesthetic value to a design but in the main, we aren’t all colour blind so my preference is for colour photos over black and white. It’s just how the mind works. (Why is it architects are notorious for creative colourful building designs but prefer their people in black and white?)

• Don’t make them hard to find. A typical fault is to ‘hide’ profiles of your people under some generic heading – particularly so with websites. A tab or page that is easily found and headed simply ‘people’ will do.

• Where to stop? My recommendation is usually to include everyone. That becomes a bit impractical in larger firms but as much as possible, it’s best in my view to include everyone from reception and account staff to directors.

• Don’t overdo the narrative. A profile means outline. It doesn’t mean a life story. While it’s important to profile your people, it’s a deadly sin to provide a full career CV than runs to several pages. 

So if you’re in the business of selling services as opposed to things, maybe you should audit your marketing collateral and content with some of these observations in mind. There is no point in your biggest asset also being your biggest secret.

Lists

Tedious, tiresome, irksome and easy to avoid but utterly essential to maintain and update, your client contact list is a critical piece of marketing infrastructure. Without it, your ability to reach out to clients, prospective clients and target market sectors is handicapped.

One of the constant challenges I see in many businesses is the need to maintain and update the client contact list. Often neglected for months or years at a time, and in some cases not done at all, it’s a simple discipline and one that pays genuine dividends for any business that needs to build new business (and which business doesn’t need new business?).

Whether starting afresh or tackling an existing database, there are a few simple regimes which can give your business an edge when it comes time to reach out to your market with important company news, updates or marketing collateral. There’s no point getting excited about a new piece of collateral – print or electronic – which you’d like to share with prospective clients if you have no way of reaching them. The reality is that this happens often, leading to boxes of un-used brochures or newsletters or email campaigns that fail to reach their targets, simply because you couldn’t find them. So here are some of my suggestions for creating and maintaining an up to date contact list which supports your business marketing ambitions.

Don’t over think it.

Too often, the simple contact list has been over engineered into a fully fledged CRM (customer relationship management) database with multiple fields designed to tell you in great detail more about your clients and prospects, based on their particular interests, where the contact came from, what their last transaction with you was all about, the name of their pets and favourite holiday destinations… you get the picture. And all too often, though it might have seemed like a great idea to capture all this information, this simply makes the task too onerous and hence it doesn’t happen. Further, much of that qualitative information - in my experience - isn’t used. What I suggest is the KISS principle which simply captures their name, surname, position, company address and email address – the essentials for making contact. You could add mobile contacts for SMS campaigns if you plan on doing these are part of your marketing/communication plan. You might add one extra category if the type of contact is important, provided you intend to segregate your marketing. Otherwise, don’t bother.

The annual spring clean

If you have an existing contact list which is used reasonably often, it should be reasonably up to date. Return to senders and bounced email addresses see contacts removed or fresh contact information added. However, it is still worthwhile going through your list, line by line, at least once a year. It will prompt you to remove a few contacts you no longer want, and remind you also of people who should be there, but aren’t. It’s also a good opportunity to remind you about people you haven’t been in personal contact with for some time. It’s especially important to spring clean if you don’t use your list often. Sending material to deceased people is a serious faux pas. And yes, it happens.

The monthly refresh

Every month, your office should be pooling business cards collected during the month and adding these to your contact list. Signature blocks on emails from clients or client prospects also serve the same purpose, and should be copied into your contact database. If this isn’t done regularly, even recent client prospects can miss out on important collateral or news. And it’s these most recent contacts that can sometimes be the most important to maintain communication with. The alternative is to let them forget about you, which surely you don’t want?

Make it someone’s job.

Unless someone in your office takes responsibility for being the list nazi, it’s quite probably going to languish. They only need to take responsibility for collecting new information from others in the office and be prepared to nag to see that it happens. Shared responsibility is fine in theory but in practice, unless someone’s driving it, it won’t happen.

There are a few other tricks about sourcing and expanding contact lists so that your business has the ability to be directly exposed to your target market, but for many businesses, simply observing the disciplines outlined above would be a big step forward. It should be as routine as the end of month accounts. If your business is ignoring this essential piece of business development infrastructure, you aren’t even able to make the most of opportunities when they arise, even if you want to.

More on why it's good to share your IP

The previous article suggested why it can be a good idea to share your IP with clients. Having a reputation for being smarter, faster and better than your rivals can make your phones ring even when markets are quiet. Following some suggestions, I thought I should follow up with a recent example and use it as a case study of how relatively easy it can be and the rewards it can bring to your business.

The little blue book.

I spent just over three years helping to get Cockram Construction established in Queensland. During that time it grew from one (me) to some 30 construction staff and $100million of work.  There were lots of contributing factors and having access to good people and leveraging an excellent reputation elsewhere were certainly instrumental. 

What was also instrumental was targeting a niche and positioning the business as the ‘go to’ people in the space. One illustration of how that was done was what I came to call ‘the little blue book.’

Cockram had some considerable expertise interstate and internationally in the delivery of physical containment laboratories (PC Labs). These are essentially positive or negative pressure sealed labs, used for research (typically) into micro-organisms which can do us a lot of harm. They are very expensive; full of complex services and if they don’t seal or otherwise fail certification, they are useless for their purpose. So having a builder who knows what they’re doing is essential.

Cockram, like many businesses, didn’t spend a lot of time sharing its IP widely. Finding out more about PC Labs wasn’t easy, until I came across a Powerpoint presentation which had been prepared by one of Cockram’s experts for a client briefing.  The beauty of the Powerpoint was that it was very visual and it had pretty much everything there, but expressed in layman terms. Clients could understand it and appreciate that the presenter knew their stuff.

To me, the presentation had all the makings of a showcase publication, designed to share these smarts with a much wider audience. It really wasn’t too difficult to take this presentation and its images and convert it into a small publication – the intellectual content was largely already there. It needed some expansion and editing but observing the KISS principle meant not letting a simple idea turn into an epic.

The ‘Brief guide to PC Labs’ went through a lot of internal review and met with predictable resistance: chief amongst which was a perceived risk that by publishing the insights, Cockram could be giving away its intelligence. But if a company is prepared to share its ideas and insights via Powerpoint presentations, what was the difference between putting it in print? At least, that’s how I argued it… and got away with it.

The first edition was published in 2011 in a small pocketbook format. Hard copies were distributed to likely clients of PC Labs nationwide. Electronic copies were likewise distributed. Feedback was instant, with a number of Cockram’s research clients commending the little blue book. It also made Cockram the ‘expert’ in the eyes of the public sector, who in Queensland knew little of the firm. But next, Cockram were being invited to give presentations to all personnel who may be involved in these types of projects. A group known as TEFMA (Tertiary Education Facilities Managers Association) wanted to circulate a PDF copy to all their members throughout Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific – and their members are the exactly the types of organisations that need to build PC Labs. Copies of the first edition ran out due to demand (how many of you can say that about your standard corporate brochures?) so a second edition was released in 2012.

More than these direct responses, it helped cement Cockram’s reputation for excellence in the field of complex, services-rich construction projects such as PC labs or advanced imaging facilities and hospitals. In Queensland, it catapulted the company’s reputation for specific skills within a clearly defined market in a way that no amount of ‘traditional’ or organic business development strategy could.

There’s just something about releasing a book, however small, that says volumes about your authority and confidence in your subject matter. Releasing the same content in electronic format only just wouldn’t have had the same effect.  This little blue book wasn’t instrumental in helping Cockram grow from a standing start to a $100m per annum business in three years during a downtown, but it certainly helped when it came to the company’s reputation and awareness of its specialist construction abilities.

And so far, not one competitor that I know of has tried to copy the idea.

(You can download a PDF copy of it if you’re interested by clicking this link.)

Share your IP.

Your business IP and the people who it resides with can be your biggest asset in a professional firm. Why then this widespread reluctance to share it with prospective clients?

If you’re in a business which competes on price you can stop reading now. You don’t need a marketing strategy; you need a funeral director because you won’t be around for too long. Price competition makes you just a commodity in the marketplace, and there’ll always be someone just that bit more desperate who will bid things down.

Instead, especially for professional firms, you should be thinking about your point of difference. What makes the service you offer different from your competitors? Why would a client choose you over another? Now I accept that clients determine pricing but let’s say a client had three firms to choose from, and price was equal (ie not an issue). What then?

The next sets of criteria are telling. In my experience, corporate reputation and brand can often be over rated. More often it comes down to the individuals in the business who will be working on the job, and just how much smarter they are seen to be, relative to the competition. This is really what you IP is all about: what makes you different from competitors is how your firm and its people approach jobs; how they’ve solved problems in the past; how they saved time, or money, for clients. And very often, how they’ve helped a client escape a f*ck up, or avoid making one. It’s a technical business term yes, but useful in getting the point across.

So if this is often a strong point of differentiation and a strong selling point for your business, why is it that so many businesses give it so little prominence? Actively promoting the professional staff and the case studies where they have performed exceptionally is the sort of content that is as rare as rocking horse poo (another tech term while I’m on a roll). Instead there’s lot of generic ‘corporate speak 101’ which is about as exciting to read as the back of a cereal packet. It’s of little interest to your potential clients because they’ve heard it all before. They probably have brochures and newsletters of their own, with the same lack of compelling content.

What sorts of things do I have in mind? For starters, are your people prominent in your marketing activity? Are their profiles easy to find on your website? Are their professional profiles and project histories part of your printed collateral? Are there testimonials and referees for how clever they’ve been on past projects? If you’re answering mainly no to these questions, maybe it’s worth thinking about?

Also, is your marketing collateral rich in content about how your people have applied their minds to client problems and found solutions which have worked? Real world case studies or hypothetical scenarios are equally as good, provided they clearly and simply demonstrate to your target audience (being prospective clients) that you and your people know your stuff. The idea here is to position your business outside the commodity market where all competitors are seen alike (and are forced to compete on price) and find some space of your own. This is also how some firms achieve premium pricing over rivals – they are seen to offer more value.

Sharing your IP more openly can only help promote what you offer in the best possible way. It’s been often suggested to me that you shouldn’t give away your IP but I wouldn’t worry, your clients can’t copy it… they need you to apply it to their circumstance. And as for your competitors, you pretty well rely on the fact that most of them will stick with the uninspiring language of ‘corporate speak 101’ and have little to differentiate themselves from others. Except maybe price. Good luck to them.