Professional Services Marketing: How the Best Firms Build Premier Brands, Thriving Lead Generation Engines, and Cultures of Business Development Success
- ISBN13: 9780470438992
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Praise for Professional Services Marketing “This book is that rare thing: simultaneously wise, practical, readily accessible, and data-driven. A necessary addition to your reading.”
—David Maister, author of Managing the Professional Service Firm “Professional Services Marketing will certainly become the bible of the field in short order! Without a doubt, the most useful compendium of marketing insight for the practicing professi… More >>
March 16th, 2010 at 10:18 pm
This an excellent book; however, the writers frequently refer to studies and reports and provide URLs for those studies and reports. However, those URLs merely refer to pages on their company’s website where the reports can be purchased at exorbitant prices. Unlike books and scholarly material, these materials are not readily available at public or university libraries. Such gimmicky, if not unethical, tactics are better suited to snake oil salesmen than two authors who represent themselves and profession as more than that of used car salesmen. I also think it shameful that their publishers to have allowed such behavior or to have published a book without properly checking the references.
Without access to the studies and reports, a reader has no way of verifying the veracity of the claims the authors make.
Rating: 1 / 5
March 16th, 2010 at 10:39 pm
Anyone running a professional services business should add this book to their shopping cart NOW! I’ve had the privilege of working with Mike and John for the last six years to develop the marketing strategies at my business and the results speak for themselves – Inc. 5000 two years in a row. Apply the concepts in this book and they will work for you, too.
-Mike Cooch, CEO, Everon Technology Services, LLC
Rating: 5 / 5
March 16th, 2010 at 11:23 pm
Professional Services Marketing delivers on the key marketing factors of branding, lead generation, and culture. As a writer and consultant on building brands, it’s a pleasure for me to recommend this book as being a model for how to differentiate. The book clearly differentiates itself from other books on marketing because Schultz and Doerr offer ideas and strategies specific to those in professional services. This isn’t your typical “one size fits all” approach to business. These guys know their audience (as you should) and they deliver value (as you should). They also hit my personal hot button – culture. No strategy will work unless the culture supports and drives the behaviors and actions necessary to advance that strategy. Professional Services Marketing lays out how to develop a rainmaker culture – a culture, in the authors’ words – “of business-development hustle, passion, intensity, and success.” Hmmmm…..are hustle, passion, and intensity really appropriate to the marketing of professional services? As this book makes the case beautifully, they are not only appropriate, but absolutely key to your success. This book absolutely delivers – really excellent.
Rating: 5 / 5
March 16th, 2010 at 11:27 pm
I consider Professional Services Marketing: How the Best Firms Build Premier Brands, Thriving Lead Generation Engines, and Cultures of Business Development Success a “must read” for anyone interested in leveraging their expertise and experience into coaching, consulting, and speaking profits.
Professional Services Marketing is especially important for nonfiction authors who want to leverage their book into profits beyond those originating as a publisher’s advance or royalties from book sales. In most cases, the majority of the author’s income comes from coach, consulting, and speaking activities-all of which require the author to be able to market and sell their professional services.
Professional Services Marketing is a 23-chapter book written by two professionals whose company has been researching what works, and what doesn’t work, in service marketing for decades. It addresses every aspect of selling professional services, including:
* Client expectations
* Target marketing
* Pricing
* Offer development
* Message development
* Lead generation
* Branding
* Pricing
* Client development
* Client retention
What I like most is that it doesn’t promise miracles–a failing of many business books. As this excerpt from the Introduction shows, “The first rule of services marketing-a key to revenue and profitability grown-is getting your service right.”
Mike Schultz and John Doerr emphasize the pragmatic aspects of marketing and selling, i.e., profit generation-dollars & cents results. Branding without sales is wasted.
Another favorite quote that expresses the authors’ approach and style, “If you’re doing only 70 percent of what you need to do, you don’t get 70 percent results; you get much less. Like patching a lead in the bottom of a bucket, if you don’t patch it 100 percent, it still leaks.” I like the directness and pragmatism of the quote, as well as the fact I haven’t encountered it elsewhere.
Four Outcomes Possible
The authors have synthesized effective marketing for professional services firms in terms of four measurable outcomes; the first three form the backbone of Professional Services Marketing:
1. Conversations with potential buyers
2. Better odds of winning client engagement
3. Higher revenue per engagement and client, and higher fees for services
4. Increased affinity with the actual and potential workforce
It is the emphasis upon “measurable” that sets Professional Services Marketing apart from similar books. Mike Schultz and John E. Doerr are co-founders of the Wellesley Hills Group, a leading business development firm for consultants, attorneys, authors, technology professionals, engineers, and other professional services providers.
Judging Professional Services Marketing’s true value
Professional Services Marketing synthesizes data from the above, and other, research reports that total well over a thousand dollars, and combines them with detailed suggestions and tips for creating effective marketing in the Web 2.0 age.
Professional Services Marketing is well written enough to read on a plane or train, yet detailed enough for authors to use it as a daily guide and checklist as they leverage their books to profits from services marketing. It offers both absolute and relative value; absolute in the value of its organization, concise style, and detailed information, and relative value in terms of its cost compared to the $200 to $400 price range of many of the research reports upon which its conclusions are based.
Rating: 5 / 5
March 17th, 2010 at 1:29 am
John Doerr’s book Professional Services Marketing is the most comprehensive book on the subject since Philip Kotler’s 2002 book Marketing Professional Services. Keep John’s book handy as a practical guide to the marketing of your services.
Rating: 5 / 5