WHY WON’T YOU BUY MY FLOWERS?
A Definitive Survey On How Clients Buy Professional Services.
HOW CLIENTS BUY: The Benchmark Report on Professional Services Marketing and Selling From The Client Perspective. By Michael Schultz, John Doerr, and Andrea Meacham. The Wellesley Hills Group, Framingham MA. 2005. Available from RainToday (www.raintoday.com). Download, $445.00. Hard copy, 495.00.
The danger in surveys is that the results, while potentially useful, tend to become benchmarks, which can be misleading. This is particularly true in professional services, where the needs of a client and the firm’s ability to meet those needs are most often distinctive, if not unique. What serves one client or firm may not serve another. But the more serious problem with surveys is that in many cases, people’s answers don’t always correspond to their real feelings. Not that they dissemble, they just don’t always know. Even the most experienced and competent business people don’t always make rational decisions. Which is not to say that surveys don’t have their uses.
A very impressive consulting firm, the Wellesley Hills Group, has conducted a massive survey on How Clients Buy. The survey is intensive, meticulous, and useful – well worth the asking price. The results, shown in a detailed report (including methodology, without which a survey is useless) of more than 160 pages, tells us a great deal we already know (or should – and for those who know, it affirms it), a lot of what we don’t know, and a lot more about the professions that, while not the subject of the survey, are depressing.
This survey is comprehensive in eliciting that and more information from their respondents, and for that alone, it’s valuable. Even the fact that it confirms a great deal that many professionals have known from instinct – or should have known from training or experience – is valuable. There is no question that even the best professionals can find in the study’s results a foundation for a measure of self-examination – of fine-tuning the business relationship methodology.
Its major thrust is to determine the criteria companies use in retaining professional services – lawyers, accountants, and consultants. How do clients find the firms they consider retaining? What are the criteria they use? What do they look for? What turns them on or off? What criteria do they use for switching firms? What satisfies them and what doesn’t.
For this quantitative survey, a panel of some 200 buyers of professional services rated eight service specialties that they were responsible for purchasing. The range of companies represented went from small (under $1 million) to large (more than $1 billion). The panel was qualified and provided on a blind basis by Eisner Associates, a professional sampling organization, and results were tabulated by Mark Eisner of Eisner and Associates, a market research firm. Mark Eisner is also a professor of market research.
It tells us, for example, that companies hire firms that seem to best understand their problems and needs -- a concept that we’ve been pushing here and elsewhere for decades. It tells us, for example, that buyers of professional services resent professionals who don’t listen, and that buyers tend to prefer professionals with some experience in the buyers’ industries. And that communications with buyers are important. This, of itself, is not revelation. The revelation here is that the buyers are articulating, in detail, how important the buyers believe these factors are. The message is that if you don’t trust your marketing professional when he or she tells you these things, here it is, in this survey, from the horse’s mouth.
The research team, and the authors of the study, go one step farther with an analysis of the answers to each set of questions. Their analysis is useful for putting the results in some perspective, and in a mild way, in suggesting what professionals should or can do to improve their selling and client relations skills.
In a sense, another value of this survey is to serve as a rebuke to professionals, because when you look at what respondents say about why they don’t hire some firms, or switch firms, the answers are amazing. Just look at the responses to the questions about why clients don’t hire, or why they switch. “They don’t listen.” “They don’t return phone calls promptly.” “They try to sell us services we don’t need.” And so on. Granted, client relations is not taught in professional schools, but for the successful practitioner, these things should be fairly obvious. And for this information alone, this survey is worth its weight in gold. It’s a clarion call that warns that being a good lawyer or accountant is not enough. Without clients, competence is nothing.
But while this survey is valuable and useful, and comprehensive as well, it doesn’t fully resolve the problem of why and how clients buy. Nor can surveys of this type measure the intangible personal factor – the underlying sense of trust that one individual has for another, and that colors the buying decision, sometimes unconsciously. (“These individuals listen well, and seems to understand my needs, but can I work with them?”) And a mystery it is, beyond the several factors that surveys such as this one covers. Why?
Because of the very nature of professional services.
As we’ve often said, in these pages and elsewhere, the problem with marketing a professional service is that nobody ever woke up on a bright sunny morning and said, “What a great day to get an audit.” Or, “This is a good day to write a contract, or to sue somebody,”
In other words, for a company to retain a law or accounting firm is rarely an option. While a cookie manufacturer can cause you, through its advertising, to salivate and to be impelled to run to the store, no marketing program can persuade a company – or even an individual – to hire a lawyer or accountant without a compelling reason. What company, of any size, is without an accountant or a lawyer (either on retainer or on staff)?
At the same time, accounting and the law are so specialized and complex that few clients fully understand how the processes work, and how to distinguish one firm from another. (With exceptions, obviously, but not that many).
You may talk of branding, which many do but few who do so really understand it, but what you’re really talking about is not branding in the product sense, but name recognition and reputation. Few firms reach the status that implies that everyone in the firm is equal in ability to every other person in the firm. In fact, in many such firms of consistent quality, there can be a lock-step approach to service, and an arrogance, that, while it makes the firm look good to outsiders, can be deleterious to fully serving the needs of specific clients.
You know that the next tube of toothpaste in your favorite brand is going to be exactly like the last one. Is the next accounting problem your client faces going to be the same as the last one? Will the performance of one lawyer or accountant in your firm be the same as another in the same firm? Where, then, is the validity of the branding concept? (Is it unkind to note that the one accounting firm whose name carried the weight of a brand, in its classic definition, was Arthur Andersen?)
Professional service marketers talk of differentiation, which, frankly, is baying at the moon. As may be seen elsewhere in The Marcus Letter, differentiation is highly overrated, and is perhaps, like branding, a myth. How do you differentiate one law or accounting firm from another? You can’t say, “Our firm gets better mileage.” But neither can you say, “We do better audits.” Or, “ We write better briefs.” No, instead of focusing on differentiation, better to focus on the philosophy of your service, or the extraordinary experience and skills of your professionals. That’s the kind of message that resonates with the prospective clientele, who is likely to be looking for competence and experience and the ability to understand and resolve the client’s problems. Baseball teams differentiate by getting more home runs. Professional firms serve by being professional, and by addressing and resolving the specific and distinctive needs of each client.
What, then, is marketing professional services about?
It’s about keeping your firm relevant to the needs of the clientele, and projecting that competence. It’s about understanding that your professionalism resides not in your degree, or status, or membership in the AICPA or the American Bar Association, but in your ability to relate your competence to your client’s needs. Marketing works best when you can project that professionalism. It works best when the nature of the individual exudes trustworthiness. Your profession is not about you, it’s about your ability to serve the client. It’s about the degree to which the buyer trusts the seller, and that’s hard for a respondent to articulate.
The missing link in this invaluable and otherwise excellent survey is that you can’t survey professional services client satisfaction in the same way that you can survey the preferences for different brands of cola drinks. And the difficult problem is that too few clients understand the processes of law and accounting to be able to say why they buy or don’t buy in precisely those terms.
The fact is that as useful as surveyed material may be in helping people to understand how people are motivated to buy, or how they really make buying decisions, the written or online survey can supply only a limited amount of valid information, no matter how valuable or reaffirming that may be. There is, however, much more to be derived by individual face-to-face discussions
How Clients Buy is an important work, and should be seen by every professional. It helps to understand a great deal. But the nature of professional services makes the buying decision complex, and, to a large degree, still mysterious.