Your Services Are Your Brand … Well Almost

Rethinking the way you present your services
by Randy Shattuck, The Shattuck Group

Rethink the Way You Present Your Services

Smart professional services (PS) executives know that they have to manage their brands effectively to consistently increase revenue, profit and demand. But the problem is that most of us don’t really know what a PS brand is. When service executives think of “brands,” sports cars, cola drinks and tennis shoes often spring to mind. These are a long way from the world of tax and audits, technology architectures, business plans and bond portfolios.

Whether you know it or not, your services are a key part of your brand — one of six elements of PS brands. Most PS firms carve out a market niche slowly over time where their services, their brand name and their reputation co-mingle together to create their position. The market comes to think of them this way: “If you need (CPA, consulting, legal, technology or financial, etc.) services, call (insert company name) because it’s a solid firm.”

There are several problems with this approach:

1. The services come to define the brand, rather than the brand defining the services.
2. This takes a long time.
3. It’s limiting and pigeonholes you in a niche that can be difficult to escape.
4. Service portfolios are typically built based on the service provider’s skill-set, rather than on market opportunities.

Asking the right questions

To help our clients build service portfolios that maximize revenue and profits, we take a systematic approach. We almost never begin this process by asking, “What are the skill-sets of the existing team?” Instead, we ask these questions:

• Who is the ideal client for this business?
• What are the top challenges and opportunities of ideal clients? What keeps them awake at night worrying or excites their imagination?
• What services most effectively address the ideal client’s challenges and opportunities?
• How should our client build a service model that addresses these challenges and opportunities? What services should our client offer?
• How much profit can our client make from addressing these challenges and opportunities?
• How do we package these services to make them compelling to ideal clients and shorten sales cycles?
• How do we position our client’s brand in front of its ideal clients consistently over time?

This is very different from the way most PS firms build their service models. Often PS executives ask:

• What are the skill-sets of the people on our team today?
• How much demand is there for these skill-sets, and how much can we charge for them?
• How much profit can we make by charging the maximum hourly or project rate?
• How do we let the market know we have these skill-sets?

Do you see the differences in these lines of questioning? One is client-centric, and the other is skill-centric. Which one is more effective? The client-centric approach is 10 times more effective, and here’s why. No one cares about your skill-sets until they know how they benefit them.

The Shattuck Group conducted market research with PS firm leaders and discovered that many claim to have an ideal client profile, but very few have actually conducted market research to deeply understand their ideal client’s top concerns. It is our sense that this is why 58.4 percent of PS leaders are either “not confident” or only “somewhat confident” that they understand what motivates ideal clients to spend money.

Why the client-centric approach works best

Service buyers are incredibly busy and have multiple brands pitching them for their limited dollars. A skill-centric brand talks about you, your capabilities and why you’re great. A client-centric brand talks about clients, their concerns and what they want to accomplish. Which would you rather hear — a pitch about a skill-set you’re not convinced you need or a solution to a challenge or opportunity you care about greatly?

Skill-centric PS leaders tend to run ineffective marketing campaigns that don’t produce new clients or new deals. These are often brand awareness campaigns. How many times have you seen an advertisement in a business journal that says, “We are ABC firm, and we do 123″? These campaigns are practically a waste of money today because nearly everyone ignores them.

Thought leadership alone is not enough

When PS firms promote a white paper, a video or podcast or a webinar that tells decision-makers how to solve a problem they care about, those firms have more leads than they can handle. And in truth, even if firms offer the same skill-sets, client-centric firms close a lot more deals at better profit margins than skill-centric firms.

And if you think that a couple of white papers will fill your coffers with new deals, think again. It’s not that simple. A lot of PS firms offer white papers that pique the interest of prospects, but deals don’t close. Why?

Ideal clients need to see how your services address their challenges and opportunities and deliver real benefits to them. They need to understand how your services will take them from where they are now to where they want to be in the future. If your services literature talks about you instead of about your ideal clients, all the white papers in the world won’t increase your close rates.

So take a few moments now and ask yourself some questions. What kind of service brand are you building? Is it about you or about your ideal clients? Do you promise to deliver skill-sets or results that matter to ideal clients? Do you center your service offerings around you and your team, your collective capabilities and your expertise — or do you center it around the challenges and opportunities that matter most to your ideal clients?

The way you market your services determines how people view your brand. And this is the big difference between taking control of your services brand or having it take control of you.

Randy Shattuck is a senior marketing executive and founder of The Shattuck Group, a full-service marketing firm that specializes in growing professional services organizations. You can reach him at randy@theshattuckgroup.com.