News Read a summary of Suzanne Lowe's upcoming book The Integration Imperative™. The One Piece of Advice You Can't Generate Leads Without, Rain Today, September 2007 What Would a Female Superhero Do for Gender Diversity?,” American Bar Association’s Tort, Trial and Insurance Practice Section newsletter, July 2007 New from the Expertise Marketplace™ Blog Can PSFs "PSF" themselves? Are you "cup half-empty" on Marketing ROI? From "Out of the Box" to "Zero Gravity" Thinking I told the truth -- and got hired anyway I should hate David Maister See all the posts at the Expertise Marketplace blog Subscribe to the blog's RSS feed for regular updates. (Need RSS help?) Subscribe Did a colleague forward this newsletter? Sign up to receive your own copy. "What a great newsletter — about the only one I've ever found useful in the marketing space." — Marketing and Communications Director, New York investment firm Recent Issues A Year of Doing Things Differently, December 2007 Doing Things Differently – Using Budgets Proactively to Evolve a Professional Firm’s Marketing Program, November 2007 Orchestrating Improvements in Professional Service Marketing Processes, October 2007 You can order Marketplace Masters from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, your favorite online bookseller, or CEO-READ.

The Marketplace Master™ is a monthly email publication on professional service marketing from Expertise Marketing, LLC.

Doing Things Differently - Harnessing the Power of Web Video to Demonstrate Personal Expertise

Happy New Year and welcome to a new season of Doing Things Differently in marketing for professional services.

In addition to our updated design, this issue of The Marketplace Master™ launches our new-for-2008 series: Five Questions for Increasing Professional Service Marketing Effectiveness.

We'll be talking to different experts each month, asking them about what they're doing to increase their firms' marketplace effectiveness.

This month we talked to Eileen Harrington, VP of Marketing for Analysis Group, which provides economic, financial, and business strategy consulting to leading law firms, Fortune 500 companies, and government agencies. Eileen discusses how her firm turned to the Web for a new way to reach its audience.

Suzanne Lowe
President, Expertise Marketing
Author, Marketplace Masters: How Professional Service Firms Compete to Win

P.S. Is your firm employing unique marketing and business development strategies or tactics? Are you marketing your firm differently? Let us know if you would like to be featured in a future issue.

Five Questions for Eileen Harrington, VP, Marketing, Analysis Group, on the Firm's Web Initiative

Lowe: Describe a "Doing Things Differently" initiative that is intended to increase your firm's marketplace effectiveness.

Harrington: Early in 2007, several of our senior consultants noticed a significant reduction in the number of client and prospect phone calls they were receiving -- and a correlating jump in email volume. So, in considering how best to update our web site and direct marketing efforts, we decided to "do things differently" by:

Eileen Harrington, Analysis Group

• Transitioning much of our snail mail direct mail to email (newsletters, updates, "pitch" letters)
  
  
• Inserting in these emails links to specific content on our web site that would be relevant, and would provide greater detail than possible in an email
  
  
• Experimenting with different media on our web site, both to repurpose content and attract visitors to the site with an interesting "human" experience

For the latter, we filmed several consultants at our annual internal orientation meeting, in which they talk about the nature of the firm and the work we do; we also separately videoed some of our senior management team on their topics of expertise, such as climate change and risk management, pharmaceutical litigation, the role of quantitative disciplines in business strategy, etc.

These videos, once posted on our web site, will allow potential clients to listen to our experts and see how they come across "in person," since many of them are hired to testify in court, and their ability to create an impression of authority and knowledge leadership through verbal presentation is critical.

It also will allow candidates interested in working here to get a more personal glimpse of their potential coworkers than a brochure can provide. And we felt that using new media would differentiate us from our competitors.

Lowe: How did you realize that something different needed to be done?

Harrington: We brought in a new hire, a senior writer who had been at a huge global firm, and who had been active in new media and use of email marketing. He got the ball rolling about the same time we were making our "phone vs. email" observation, so it all kind of came together from that point.

Lowe: How did you overcome the obstacles or internal challenges to turn your idea into reality?

Harrington: The biggest challenge is being thoughtful in how we select the subjects for filming. Since this is a partnership and a flat organization, we wanted to be inclusive.

So we started by enlisting the CEO's support, went to the six or seven partners we knew would be most interested and most proficient at being interviewed on film, and got them and their topics lined up. We then emailed the entire partnership, outlining the video program and how it could distinguish us competitively, and asked them to express their level of interest in participating.

We made it clear that we would start with a few clips, and over time, branch out to as many partners, and eventually VPs who wanted to be included. We told them that it would be an opt-in program, and that we would be working with a very well-established NY production company in order to emphasize the professionalism of the project. The result was a well-qualified, self-selected, and small group of interviewees.

We also scored a few budget points by showing how the reduction in printing and postage costs from our increased use of email could contribute to offsetting the video costs.

Lowe: What's the status of your “Doing Things Differently” initiative now, even if it’s not finished yet?

Harrington: We have completed one set of videos and will post them in the next month. The second set will be posted Q1 2008. The email program we are using is inadequate to our needs (we want to connect it to our CRM system as well as our web site) so we are researching upgrades and will implement in early Q2 2008. But it has helped us to build a strong and targeted list of email addresses over time.

Lowe: What advice would you give other professional service marketers who want to Do Things Differently?

Harrington:

• Make sure you are doing things differently for a good reason - not just for the sake of being different.
  
  
• Position the effort as an experiment, the results of which you will measure or survey. With a pilot approach, you can limit the initial investment and scope, manage expectations, and contain the damage if it does not succeed.
  
  
• Find a couple of champions at a senior level who share your enthusiasm and who can be early adopters and / or influencers.
  
  
• Do your homework and find other companies that may be doing something similar, even if they are in a different industry. Having an admired or successful example to point to is valuable.
  
  
• Remember that doing things differently doesn't have to mean wholesale change or reinvention. Sometimes it's just "repurposing" something you already have in a different form (turn a white paper into a roundtable or a podcast, suggest a client breakfast instead of a conference call, turn a presentation into an email alert, etc.)
  
  
• Involve as many members of your team as possible -- everyone likes the chance to do something new!
  

Your feedback is important to us. Please contact us with your comments and questions.

Call for interview subjects: Do you know of a professional service firm that is taking steps to integrate its marketing and business development functions and would be willing to be interviewed for Suzanne’s upcoming book, The Integration Imperative™? If so, please direct them to our page on The Integration Imperative™ for more information.

Take the confidential, web-based Marketplace Masters professional service firm differentiation assessment test for instant feedback on whether your firm is doing differentiation right.

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