Published in Institute of Chartered Accountants Journal February 2003
“Marketing” is a bit wishy-washy for many to come to terms with. It doesn’t seem to follow and rules or process. It’s almost just a case of “lets do it and see if it works!” It doesn’t need to be. It DOES have rules and certainly has process.
This article is not about theories or concepts. It will not discuss how to develop a unique competitive advantage or achieve a specific brand positioning. You will read about a 4-step process that makes marketing decisions logical and based on common sense. You will also read that mass media is generally ineffective and should only be a small part of your marketing budget. What works is a series of surprisingly small and extremely low cost ideas, some quick examples of which are included here.
A 4-step marketing plan that really works
We’ll start by asking where your next 10 new clients come from? Apart from the Yellow Pages, a couple of client functions and a Christmas card, what do you do to grow and nurture your client base? Should you be on radio, in the press regularly, perhaps on TV or do a business-box drop? Perhaps billboards or maybe paint a bus? What about being in a phonebook wraparound? Should you increase the size of my Yellow Pages advert?
How do you make this decision? By following this 4-step marketing process the decisions become much easier.
The four steps are:
- WHO are my clients?
- WHY would they use my services?
- WHERE do I find them?
- WHAT do I do to tell them about me?
Step Four is where many start. To tell potential clients about yourself, logically you should do some sort of advertising - but what sort? Is radio better than Yellow Pages? This is exactly how NOT to make the decision. There is no basis for the decision. So rather than starting at number 4, start at number 1. Let me explain.
Step ONE - WHO are my clients?
No they are not “everyone that need an accountant”. Your target market will be surprisingly narrow - and you must know exactly who is in it. Start by looking at who your best clients are. List your top 15 for each income-generating member of the staff. Beside their names, write their value in fees and then add up the list and calculate how much the total is as a percentage of the total fees that person generates.
This will almost always be between 70% and 100%, which goes to confirm the Pareto Principle (the 80/20 Rule). Say you have 100 clients. Which ones do you want to replicate? The bottom 20 that you generally have to discount the fees for or the top 15 that generate 80% of your fees?
The key here is to be very focused on exactly WHO you are trying to target. Take a good look at the top-15 list (call this your 1st 15). Now that you know what type of client can generate good fees (I usually find that people are quite surprised at who is on the 1st 15 list), which ones would you want more of? Now make a second list of 15 (call this your 2nd 15). This second list should be of the new clients that you really want. It may not be possible to put names on the list so much as types of clients. For example, you might want 5 new “manufacturers with at least 20 staff and a turnover exceeding $2 million”.
The whole point of this is to get you focusing on the type of new clients you really want Why chase the ones you don’t want?
Step TWO - WHY would they use my services?
Lets continue with the manufacturing example. Why would they be inclined to use to use your firm as opposed to others offering fundamentally the same services? Word-of-mouth? Perhaps they read something about you. Perhaps they saw your Yellow Pages ad. It is critical to understand why potential clients would choose you. Go back to your ‘1st 15′ for a moment. Add a column to the list that you head up “Why” and fill in why they are your clients. If they precede your time with the firm, ask someone who was there at the time.
This list will often give you the answers in that what has worked in the past will work again in the future. For example, if none of your 1st 15 came from the Yellow Pages, why would you spend lots on the Yellow Pages? If three came from direct referrals from one source (perhaps a law firm) then what are you doing to foster them and encourage them to do it again? I hope that the importance of this step has become apparent.
Step THREE - WHERE do I find these potential new clients?
If you were wondering when the title of this article was going to become relevant, it is now. There are three sources of new clients and a proven formula as to allocation of time and money. It is the 40/40/20 Rule, which means that you spend 40% of your time and marketing budget on existing clients, 40% on other people’s clients and 20% on advertising.
A quick explanation. Many of your new clients will be referrals from existing clients and much of your new fees for next year will be more work for existing clients - hence the need to recognize them in your marketing plan by allocating 40% of your time and money to them.
On the subject of referrals, apart from existing clients, you will have ‘friends’ in non-competing firms that send direct referrals. These could be law firms, financial planners, business advisers, specialist accounting firms and so on. What are you doing to encourage and foster this? This is what I mean by the 40% you should allocate to ‘other people’s clients’. Other non-competing organisations already have the clients you want.
The final 20% can be allocated to advertising, which is really a lottery. You have no real control over who replies to your ads and these would usually be at the bottom end of the client scale.
Step FOUR - WHAT do you do?
So you know whom you really want, why they would respond and where to find them. So what do you do? The list here is almost endless but you will find it easy to formulate if you spent time on steps 1 to 3. To give you some ideas however, here is a short list of some very low cost, proven, easy-to-implement marketing tools that really work.
Business cards - Make these a mini-brochure about your services. You can even print a small booklet of 8 or 12 pages the size of a business card.
Never waste a lunch - You work for about 225 days of a year, which means you have 225 lunches. Take a good client out to lunch. Take a partner from a non-competing firm out to lunch (refer Step 3 above) Take the business reporter from the local paper. Take your own PA. Start making up a list. It will be the best marketing spend you make all year.
Be different - In marketing, the rule is to be different, rather than better. (It’s too hard to be better) Rather than Christmas cards, send New Year cards, rather than a Christmas gift send an Easter gift, rather than a bottle of wine, send bottle of Schnapps. Just by being different you will be remembered.
Newsletters - The rule is every 90 days, which means 4 per year. They do not have to be glossy or in colour, they do not have to be more than two pages, they should not be full of jargon and should not be written by you. On a more positive note, simple and readable are the keys. Contract a freelance journalist to ‘interview’ you and write the stories for you. This saves you a huge amount of time and ensures that the articles will always be written from a client’s perspective.
I have only been able to touch on a few ideas and rules in this article, but I hope it has given you a new perspective on the marketing of professional services.
Spread the word: 
