THE COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO MARKETING PROFESSIONAL SERVICES
Rain Today Authors Produce A Full-Fledged Compendium
PROFESSIONAL SERVICES MARKETING --How The Best Firms Build Premier Brands, Thriving Lead Generation Engines, And Cultures Of Business Development Success. By Mike Schultz and John Doer (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey, 2009). 348 pp $27.95. To order click here----http://www.amazon.com/dp/0470438991/tag=themarcuslettero.
There is a paradox in professional services marketing that substantially separates it from marketing a product or non-professional service. For anyone working in the field, the elements of this paradox ultimately become quite clear. To newcomers in the field both marketers and lawyers and accountants it is less frequently understood.
First, there is the ease of entry into the marketing field. The professionals lawyers and accountants function in a realm of rigid training, carefully defined education, apprenticeship, licensing, and a foundation in long standing tradition. No such preparation exists for most marketers. Law and accounting schools dont teach marketing, although they really should. There are few courses on a graduate level dealing with the full range of skills needed for successful professional services marketing, and the marketing courses taught at even the most famous and well regarded graduate schools offer very little understanding of the singularities of marketing professional services.
When I started in this field in the early 1970s (pre-Bates, in fact), most of what we know how to do now had to be invented. A lucky few of us had some skills in public relations and other forms of marketing, but we groped a lot, until we began to get it right. Those who followed learned from those of us who had some smattering of experience, and those with a smattering of experience tried to teach the accountants and lawyers. When I wrote my first book in the late 1970s on the subject Competing For Clients it was not the first book on the subject, but it was the first book on the modern aspects of it. Since then, there have been hundreds of articles and many books, as the profession of marketing for professionals has begun to mature. Unfortunately, many of these books are either repetitive, or shallow not always written by the best practitioners. There are, though, a few written by people who understand not only the mechanics of marketing, but its dynamic, which is at the real core of what is not merely an array of marketing practices, but ultimately, an art form. It isnt easy, at least because of the many skills that must be grasped to know how to compete successfully in the arcane world of professional services.
Thus, we happily welcome a new book written by two experts who reside in the heart of the professional services marketing practice Mike Schultz and John Doer. The authors are the founders and proprietors of that diverse and excellent online newsletter, Rain Today. They are founders of the marketing consulting organization, The Wellesley Group. They are pioneers, and specifically expert, in the difficult practices of selling techniques for lawyers and accountants, and they sponsor extraordinarily helpful seminars and webinars on selling techniques.
What they have learned, and what they teach, is incorporated in this comprehensive book.
Marketing itself is, to a large extent, amorphous. Like all art forms, it starts with an understanding of the mechanics of which there are many and within the constraints of professional services moves on to the dynamics and the art. You have but to understand the unique constraints of professional services, as do the authors, to realize that it has rules of its own. All this is incorporated in this extensive and accessible work that well warrants its broad title.
More than just a catalog of techniques and the how-to of the mechanics (as are many such books), Schultz and Doerr offer a context for the role of marketing in professional services firms. And unlike most such books, they dont preach so much as offer a canvas on which to paint new techniques and new ideas. In other words, they recognizes the dynamic of marketing its role in professional services, and as a platform for new ideas. As difficult as it is to do in a growing field that offers more cacophony than light, the authors effectively and meticulously carry the reader through every part of marketing, particularly as its practiced by the best of the growing field of law and accounting firm marketers. Frequent surveys they do as consultants, as well as their own extensive experience, give heft to their work.
Professional Services Marketing addresses they myths of marketing held by lawyers and accountants with little or no marketing experience, and it embraces strategy as well as tactics. The authors delineate and answer the most frequently heard objections to recognizing marketing as an integral part of professional practice, particularly in the current competitive environment. It is a practical book...a guide to performance that covers every aspect of what we know today about the relationship between marketers and the professionals. It offers a platform for new ideas and concepts to deal with the changing nature of the professions and to the clientele served by lawyers and accountants, which, in the current economic climate, is crucial.
In fact, it guides the reader out of the murk of cant and into marketing professionalism. It is a book well worth the price. Even if you think you know how to do it, this book will tell you more.