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.