Barbara Walters Price

"Marketers optimistic about finding social media ROI"

Just the title of the post from Mashable makes me sad.  It doesn't get any better because the first sentence of the post reads:

Marketers are hopeful that this will be the year that they finally link social media marketing to ROI, a new survey says.

So far, we marketers are not sounding like the sharpest tools in the shed.  The post goes on to say:

For the past few years, marketers have been content to measure “soft” metrics, such as the number of “Likes” or followers their brands have acquired. These numbers, though, are usually not indicators of an active community.

While those soft metrics still rank highly in importance, marketers are now turning to more traditional metrics that showcase true value. Site traffic tops the list as the most important factor for CMOs measuring social media ROI, as it did last year. In 2011, though, twice as many marketers plan on incorporating conversions — the total number of completed desired actions, such as “Likes” or clickthroughs, divided by the total number of impressions — as compared to 2010.

Take a look at yesterday's piece by Jay Baer on another recent social media survey for greater context.

For professional service firm marketers like me, it all boils down to what is making the phone ring (with the right kind of business from the right kind of prospects).  Maybe I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, but none of this helps me much.  Maybe these posts will help you.

Einstein supposedly kept a sign in his office that read: "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."  Hmmm.  More later. My phone is ringing ...

If you hate to market but desire to eat - a pep talk and a top 10 list

C.J. Hayden has a nice post entitled "10 Ways to Break Down Marketing Roadblocks" posted at RainToday.com (I love RainToday).  I might have titled the post "I Hate to Market But Need to Eat, So How Do I Get Motivated?"

From C.J.:

Have you ever found yourself knowing exactly what you need to do to market your business—and then you don't do it? ... Many independent professionals find that the hardest part of marketing isn't figuring out what to do. What's hard is actually doing it.

Marketing yourself can be a confronting process. Making phone calls to strangers, writing marketing letters, and talking about yourself and your accomplishments can bring up fear of rejection, harsh commentary from your inner critic, feelings of incompetence, and the discomfort of performing unfamiliar activities. If you let them, these inner saboteurs can stop you dead in your tracks.

The good news is that you don't have to completely eliminate these internal roadblocks in order to move forward in marketing. It is possible to feel afraid or uncomfortable and still take useful action.

She then goes on to provide a list of "10 ways to quickly break through internal barriers and get your marketing unstuck."

If you hate marketing, find it uncomfortable, intimidating, or even unbecoming, but find that the year is beginning a bit too slowly for you, check out this post. While not every item on the 10 point list is for everyone, there is at least one idea for you to get you started.  Good luck.

Speaking Engagements Work

Tom Kane writes the Legal Marketing Blog. He has been blogging for years and provides consistently solid marketing and business development content for attorneys, yet his advice is applicable to CPAs and business appraisers as well.

A recent post - Speaking Engagements REALLY Work, If You Work At It! - caught my eye. Speaking engagements made Tom's top 10 list of best marketing practices.  He is right. Speaking engagements do work if you are strategic in choosing the right venues, deliver a winning speech, and most importantly, follow up. 

Read Tom's post here as well as a recent article of mine entitled "How to Get Started Speaking" if you need inspiration to begin using speaking engagements in your marketing mix. 

The Magic of Consistency: How can something so boring be so effective?

This post is a reprint of an article recently published in the American Society of Appraisers Business Valuation E-Letter (Issue 14-38, 9/22/10).  It has gotten a great response which is nice because it was easy to write.  I feel strongly about the topic and the true story related in the article was the inspiration I needed.  I hope you enjoy it.

What is more important in marketing efforts: a new system, process, piece of hardware or software or plain ole’ consistency?

Let me tell you a true story.  There were two investment bankers working a narrowly defined industry niche with lots and lots of companies in that niche.  One was older and very successful in generating new business.  The other was younger and not so successful in generating new business. 

The younger professional smartly asked the older one the secret to his success.  The answer was simple, he was told.  The older professional identified three new prospects every Monday morning and every Monday afternoon sent a pitch book to each.  He spent a block of time mid-day following up on past pitch books sent.  He recorded the day’s activities in longhand on a legal pad and repeated these activities every Monday.   

So, did the younger professional take the advice of the older one and begin a prospecting program such as his?  No. Why?  He tried to emulate the system but said that, in the end, it just wouldn’t work for him.  Again, why?  Recording the activities on a legal pad was too cumbersome and he had tried several technology solutions but none of them worked for him.  So, the younger professional decided to become a business appraiser because surely that must be the easier path to success.

And so it goes.

Why is consistency so hard?  Because doing the same thing consistently week after week, or month after month, or year after year, is beyond boring.  It’s mind-numbing.  It feels like it is soul-killing.  Yet, it can be your secret weapon. 

Keep in mind that I’m not talking about consistently doing the wrong things.  Rather I am talking about the importance of consistently doing those things that have proven to provide a return for your efforts. 

I have been in the business valuation profession for over 25 years.  I often ponder why some professionals and/or firms have longevity and success and why others who seemed so promising years ago turned out not to be.  I have realized that one of the attributes of success for these professionals and/or firms is consistency.  Consistency in their marketing and business development activities. Consistency in staying on message.  Consistency in quality.  Consistency in training.  Consistency in follow up.  Consistency in so many things. 

Another hard truth about consistency is that you can’t really measure its impact in a short time period.  Years of consistent effort yield the greatest results and it takes literally years to see those results clearly.  Our CEO, Chris Mercer, talks about the “magic of compound interest.”  There is magic in compound consistency.

The myth of consistency is that it means being unwilling to change.  Let me debunk that.  Unwillingness to change or embrace new ways of doing things or a new technology has nothing to do with consistency.  For example, it is a marketing best practice to communicate with your market on a consistent basis.  Twenty years ago, that meant a printed piece.  Today, that means an e-mail or a touch via social media.  The best practice hasn’t changed just because the tools have. 

The younger professional in my story chose what was, in the end, a much harder path to success.  If he had consistently done what seemed to him too cumbersome, maybe even too boring or too pedestrian, he would likely have seen success in time.

The next time the idea of doing what you’ve been doing for years bores you to tears, get over it.  If it works, do it.  Then do it again.  Then do it again and again.  Over time, you won’t regret it.

Make It Easy, Please!

This will be an on-going theme as I highlight those things that 1) drive me crazy, 2) potentially make you look dumb, and 3) place a hurdle between you and business.

Today's "Make It Easy, Please" plea is:

On your firm's website, please put your contact information (INCLUDING e-mail) directly on your CV

Why, oh why, do you make it hard for people to find a phone number or an e-mail address?

I am on your firm's website (congratulations) and I am viewing your CV and now I want to call or e-mail you. Where is your phone number? Your e-mail address? Oh wait, it's under "Contact Us." No, it's not. Hmmm. Okay, it's bound to be under "About Us." Nope, not there either. Errrrrrrr!!

If I am still searching, I will try "Firm Management" or "Professionals" or whatever other label you use.  That is "if"...

Don't make this hard. Make it easy, please! Put your contact information on your CV.

Google Alerts - If You Are Not Using It, You Should

I spoke in early August to a group of business valuation professionals on the topic of professional services marketing.  I offer tips and strategies to help their marketing efforts be more productive. 

I always include Google Alerts as part of my presentation and am always surprised by how few people know it exists. In this particular group, only two professionals there where familiar with Google Alerts.

So,what is Google Alerts?  From Google's website:

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

Enter the topic you wish to monitor, then click preview to see the type of results you'll receive. Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:

• monitoring a developing news story
• keeping current on a competitor or industry
• getting the latest on a celebrity or event
• keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams

In a nutshell, using Google Alerts allows you to monitor the web (including blogs, news sources, discussions, and video) for information important to you by providing Google with search terms and telling it how often it is to search and return the results.  Once Google searches per your instructions, it returns the results in an e-mail to you.  This graphic might make it easier to understand:

 

As the CMO of Mercer Capital, I use Google Alerts to monitor activities of competitors and key clients, to check to see who is writing about us and/or our key professionals and what they are saying, and to locate possible business opportunities connected with strategic service lines. 

I know of an appraiser who has great expertise in a well-defined industry niche and he uses Google Alerts to stay current on the activities in that niche.  I know of another who has a product to sell and he uses Google Alerts to track what is being said about his product and by whom.

There are certainly other uses.  If you're not using Google Alerts, think about how it might benefit you and then give it a try.  It is free.  Caution - start slow.  Enter 1 - 3 search terms in the beginning and see what results it provides.  Refine those search terms as you proceed to get better quality search results.  Good luck!

Don't miss this article: Is Your Firm Wasting Valuable Profits on Marketing?

Tracy Crevar Warren has written an article this is a must-read for marketing directors and professional service firm managers.  The provocative title, Is Your Firm Wasting Valuable Profits on Marketing?, leads you into a short but meaty piece.

A key excerpt:

“Marketing is a waste of resources if you are not going to do something with the leads you generate.” quipped Russ Molinar, director of Global Markets at Ernst & Young. “Winning new business requires firms to tie marketing to sales. Unfortunately many firms fail to connect the two and the result is less than desirable.”

The article references Suzanne Lowe's excellent book, The Integration Imperative — Erasing Marketing and Business Development Silos in Professional Services Firms, in which Lowe strongly makes the case that for many professional service firms, marketing and sales function from separate silos.  (If you don't have a copy, get one today.) 

Are the marketing and sales functions of your firm cooperative?  The article helps the reader "connect the dots between marketing and sales."  Don't miss it.

PSF Marketing Professionals Need to Understand "Effective Billing Rates"

Professional service firm marketers need to understand the concept of the "effective billing rate."  It is a metric that every professional services firm measures.  The best explanation I've seen comes from Mercer Capital's new president, Matt Crow, in one of his addresses to the firm:

One thing Mercer Capital has in common with all professional services firms is that our production implements are people and that people are mortal.  This is significant because mortals don’t live forever, and as a result time is precious, and time is money.  Your career will probably span something on the order of 50 years, and in that 50 years or so you have to maximize your economic opportunity.  One measure of how well you’re doing is the effective billing rate.  Put simply, it is the total professional fees we receive from a given project, divided by the number of hours put in the project. 

Obvious?  Yes.  But stay with me.  As a professional services firm, we have a certain inventory of billable hours to sell.  In a given year, there are approximately 252 eight hour work days, and the typical professional services firm hope to fill about two thirds of those hours with billable activity.  Yes, you can do more for short periods of time, but eventually the rest of your life intrudes, you take a vacation, and the firm can no longer bear the opportunity cost of you not doing other, important, non-billable activities, like marketing, training, systems development, etc.

You can think of the effective billing rate as a happiness index.  When it goes up, we are all better off, when it drops, we are miserable. 

How do we get our effective billing rate up?  The metric is a numerator/denominator kind of equation, so we can either get the numerator (our fees) up, or get the denominator (number of hours required to do a job) down.  We can control both.  Although the market sets our fees, we can make our services worth more to the market by enhancing our image, increasing the quality of our work, providing better service, increasing our specialization, and becoming more the sort of firm that everyone wants to do business with.  We can minimize the hours we put into a job by becoming more efficient, planning the job, communicating with each other and with our clients about what we need to get it done, learning excel tricks, enhancing our templates to make them easier to use, and attracting work that we are very familiar with doing such that we can do it well and do it quickly. 

Each of us has a role in maximizing the firm’s effective billing rate.

Marketing professionals can't do much about the denominator (# of hours required to do a job) in the effective billing rate equation.  However, the activities that we initiative and/or coordinate should positively impact the numerator (fees).  In their excellent book, Professional Services Marketing, Mike Schultz & John E. Doerr state that:

"Good marketing can:

1. Create conversations with potential buyers
2. Increase your odds of winning client engagements
3. Generate higher revenue per engagement and higher fees
4. Increase affinity with actual and potential workforce"

Marketers in professional service firms need to be savvy enough to understand the importance of the "effective billing rate" metric.  It's certainly not the only metric measured but I would wager that every professional services firm tracks it.  Use it as yet another way to measure the impact of your success.

Pricing Wisdom

Consulting Tips from the Million Dollar Consultant: Forty Methods to Increase and/or Protect Fees
 
  By Alan Weiss, PhD, CPAE, CSP, CMC
 
Fees remain a topic of conversation -- especially in a down economy. Here is a compilation of tips and ideas from Alan Weiss. Take a look ...
 

1. Establish value collaboratively with the client.
2. Base fees on value, not on task.
3. Never use time as the basis of your value.
4. Don't stop with what the client wants. Find out what the client needs.
5. Think of the fourth sale first. Fees are cumulative, not situational.
6. Engage the client in the diagnosis. Don't be prescriptive.
7. Never voluntarily offer options to reduce fees.
8. Add a premium if you personally "do it all."
9. If you're forced to consider fee reduction, reduce value first.
10. Provide options every time: the choice of "yeses."
11. Always provide an option that is comprehensive and over-budget.
12. As early as possible, ask the key scope question: "What are your objectives?"
13. Broaden objectives as appropriate to increase value.
14. Ensure that the client is aware of the full range of your services.
15. If something is not on your playing field, subcontract.
16. Always ask yourself, "Why me, why now, why in this manner?"
17. Determine how many options the buyer perceives other than you.
18. Use proposals as confirmations, not explorations.
19. When asked prematurely about fees, reply, "I don't know."
20. If you must lower fees, seek a quid pro quo from the buyer.
21. Do not accept troublesome, unpleasant, or suspicious business.
22. When collaborating or subcontracting, use objective apportionment.
23. Any highly-paid employee must bring in new business, not merely deliver.
24. Seek out new economic buyers laterally during your projects.
25. It is better to do something pro bono than to do it for a low fee.
26. Fees have nothing to do with supply and demand, only with value.
27. If you are unaware of current market fee ranges, you're undercharging.
28. Psychologically, higher fees create higher value in the buyer's mind.
29. Value can include subjective as well as objective measures.
30. Introduce new value to existing clients to raise fees in these accounts.
31. Do not accept referral business on the same basis (e.g., hourly) as the source.
32. When forced into phases, offer partial rebates to guarantee future business.
33. At least every two years, consider jettisoning the bottom 15% of business.
34. Start with payment terms maximally beneficial to you every time.
35. Offer incentives for one-time, full payments.
36. Never accept payment subject to conditions to be met upon completion.
37. Focus on improvement, not problem solving.
38. Provide proactive ideas, bench marking, best practices from experience.
39. Practice stating and explaining your fees.
40. Always be prepared to walk away from business.

New Article, "How to Get Started Speaking," Published

My newest column for NACVA's publication, The Value Examiner, has been published. In it you'll find wisdom from several very prominent business appraisers on how they got started speaking.  I hope you enjoy.  You can download the article from the "Free Downloads" section of the blog.

Feedback on the column, as well as ideas for future columns, are appreciated.