A Professional Services Marketing Self-Assessment
This professional services growth and marketing assessment allows you to self-score 11 critical growth-enabling areas, then, weights and prioritizes each area for attention.
Building Consensus in Professional Services
If you find yourself in a partner meeting having achieved consensus on a strategic choice without blood and guts having been spilled on the conference table, then you have probably not made a strategic choice. Professional services firms don’t build consensus...What is Marketing?
My wife says that I tilt at windmills when I try to convince the professional services world that Marketing is strategic and more than making things pretty. Alliance partners and business leaders say they have the “strategic stuff” covered. My marketing peers wonder why I expend so much energy and political capital fighting an undefeatable foe. After all, it’s easier to just ride a horse in the direction it is going.
In the immortal words of John McClane in the movie Die Hard, “Yipee ki yay,…!”
PODCAST: Responding to the Threat of Content Marketing
In Episode 3, Responding to the Threat of Content Marketing, Jason and I tackle the approaches professional services firms can use—must use—to defend themselves from the SaaS onslaught and the commodification of “proprietary” intellectual capital. Most...Are Your Efforts Delivering the Results You Want?
This week two disparate events converged in my mind to provide some useful advice to professional services firms wanting to grow. The first event was the release of a professional services “high growth” benchmarking study. I’m not a fan of this report because I think...How Much Should a Professional Services Firm Spend on Marketing?
This is one of the most popular questions asked among practice leaders and marketers in professional services. An agency colleague told me recently that the correct answer from most marketers is always “more.” Yet, most partners and busines…
6 Tips for Assessing Growth Opportunities in Professional Services Firms
Planning for next year is well underway in firms around the world. Soon performance goals and marketing budgets will be allocated in hopes of achieving desired growth. It is an exciting and exhilarating time. Over the years, I’ve seen many zealous practice leaders...How to Become a More Strategic Thinker
Immersing yourself in business books will never make you a strategic thinker. Not in a million years. Clients and friends often ask me how I developed my “strategic thinking ability”—what they sometimes describe as my way of connecting seemingly disconnected things...Does Your Firm Have the Confidence To Be an Industry Leader?
Firms often label themselves as “…a Leading (fill in the blank) firm.” I suspect they believe that saying as much will speak the result into being. Unfortunately, as most of us already know, being an industry leader requires much more than saying you are one. When I...Using Your Intellectual Capital Agenda to Drive Growth in a Digitized World
In The Marketing Trend Devouring Your Core Business, I described how SaaS companies are using content marketing to aggressively commoditize traditional professional services firms. This week I offer some suggestions firms can put in place to immunize themselves...The Marketing Trend Devouring Your Firm’s Core Business
There is much talk about digitization’s impact on blue-collar jobs, including job elimination, skill depletion, and role obsolescence. From my vantage point, the risk is just as high, if not higher, for many “white-collar” jobs. The phenomenon is hitting some experts...Why I am Building a New Firm
If you have been reading my blog for some time, you know that one of the key tenets of my growth philosophy is that firms must align their core capabilities, market opportunities, and brand relevance if they want to set a smart growth strategy in motion. Today, we are...About the Author
Listen to Jeff’s Latest Podcasts
Rattle and Pedal
- Growth Conversations: Gunnar Branson, CEO of AFIRE, Identifying Long-term Growth Opportunities Amidst Short-term Chaos
- Growth Conversations: Jay Laabs, CEO of Spaulding Ridge, Discusses How a Growth Philosophy Leads to Market Leadership
- How to Retain Your Client Base: Plugging the Proverbial Leaky Bucket
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