Promoting Your Company

ASK ANY OF your clients why they appointed you. Chances are you will hear words like understanding, trust, compatibility, rapport. The words you probably will not hear are the ones related to your marketing efforts - advertising, website, public relations, press release, newsletters, or seminars. In professional services, clients buy individuals. People buy people. This doesn’t mean that marketing is not important. Quite the contrary, it has a very important role. But this role needs to be clearly defined. Marketing is not about selling your service; it’s about motivating the clients to want to meet with you.

Emotional Awareness of Others

SOMETIMES A BOSS has to deliver bad news. It is not part of the job description, but it is part of the job, and the way it is done says a great deal about the leadership style and overall competency of the person in charge. Depending on the organisation and context, what constitutes bad news can be one of many things. It might be about an impending corporate restructuring with anticipated company-wide layoffs, a move to less convenient office premises, or the non-payment of discretionary bonuses. Whatever the case, one thing can make all the difference in gaining acceptance and maintaining staff morale - the way the message is delivered.

When Coaches Communicate

DO NOT BE surprised if you find a sports coach attending your next annual meeting or sales conference. It has become common for leading companies to invite successful coaches to give motivational speeches on leadership. If you think about it, the principles of leadership and team building are the same, whether on the sports field or in the boardroom. The vocabulary – competition, winning tactics, team spirit and motivation – is virtually interchangeable.

Screening Your Best Prospects

IF YOU HAD a blank sheet of paper and the task of developing a list of prospective clients, where would you begin? For most of us, the first step would be to pull out some of the hundreds of name cards collected over the years and select the most likely prospects from among them. If asked to explain why those particular firms were chosen, your answer would probably be that they are big and have potential, have a large budget for professional services, that contact has already been established, or that some business has been done with them in the past.

Know Your Competition

IF YOU ASK any business executive to name a few direct competitors, the chances are they will rattle off at least three or four with no trouble at all. But then ask the same person what differentiates their company from the competition and the answer will usually be far less definite. In reply, you may get an abbreviated version of a standard sales pitch, or a few improvised thoughts inspired by half-remembered figures or a couple of points repeated from a recent management pep talk. The answer, though, will almost certainly contain a large element of wishful thinking based on “what we like to believe”, and not so many verifiable facts that stand up to further scrutiny.

Emotional Decision Making

SOMETHING IS STIRRING in the corporate world as companies finally start to recognise the paradox they have created. On the one hand, they have invested millions in computer-operated voice response systems, reducing customers and business processes to a series of acronyms and numerical codes. On the other, they wonder why clients complain so loudly about impersonal service and the inability to "just talk to someone".

Building Your Sales Pipeline

IF YOU'VE EVER had a conversation with someone in your company responsible for sales or business development, you have probably asked them a few of the stock questions. How's business going? Any recent successes? Are the numbers up? Chances are the answers you got will all have related to what has already been achieved - work done and invoiced, contracts negotiated and signed, projects confirmed but not yet started. By now, there is probably not much that can change the expected level of revenue. Of course, the entire senior management team will push everyone to "sell more" to the clients involved, but realistically that will have little impact on the bottom line.

Focus On Your Top Customers

WHEN VILFREDO PERETO noted, in 1906, that 20 per cent of Italy's population owned 80 per cent of the country's property, he had no way of knowing how widely his observation would apply to the world of economics, and to businesses. Since then, the Pareto Principle, or the 80-20 rule, as it is usually known, has proven sufficiently flexible to turn up in all kinds of business scenarios and has become an accepted part of global management thinking. Thus, we hear that 20 per cent of a company's employees produce 80 percent of its results and, with suitable modifications to fit different areas or industries, the list of examples goes on.