Archives: Archives

When I first meet a client, I deliberately do very little research on them beyond looking at their website. Not because I don’t want to make the effort but to put myself in a prospect’s shoes and to hold onto that all important first impression. I’ve done this many times and a recurring pattern I … Read more

I used to be a big fan of the elevator pitch, proudly being able to explain to a stranger what I do in one or two sentences. But I’ve completely changed my mind. The main reason being that I’ve never actually been asked by someone what I do in an elevator 😊 and even if … Read more

I don’t expect you to care about my firms’ mission, vision, how good I think we are or how many awards we might have won, so much so I would never enter any awards. I don’t care you don’t care because I don’t care about yours either, all I’m really interested in is; are you … Read more

It’s time to turn our attention to the differentiation dilemma. We are not going to pretend it’s easy because it’s not – how do you differentiate one firm from another when from the outside it looks like you all do basically the same thing at a similar level of competency? Well we will tell you … Read more

I often say to clients no one really knows if you’re any good at what you do until they start working with you, do they? They typically agree, but then I respond with, well no that is not always true, there is a way to establish trust before you work with someone, or even before you meet … Read more

The 2 biggest problems my clients seem to have are; Overcoming the fear of going narrow Writing content I’ll explain later, but problem number 1 is intrinsically linked to problem number 2. In the past 5 years, I’ve written about 200 articles and 4 e-books which I think is a pretty good output for an … Read more

I’m always asking clients and prospective clients have you done this or done that like you said you would. Ready to start the project? Looked at that proposal? Thought about your positioning or lacklustre marketing efforts? Written that content yet? Read what I sent you? … etc And often the answer is that old chestnut, “Sorry … Read more

By far the greatest challenge I see with professional services firms from a marketing perspective is their ability (or lack thereof) to differentiate from their competitors. Differentiation is a marketing 101 concept so why do so many struggle with it? Unfortunately, most firms are victims of poor differentiation due to their own willingness to adopt … Read more

Let’s discuss the state of play in terms of professional services marketing. From my experience and yes it’s anecdotal but very few Management Consulting firms are serious about marekting and of those that are, most aren’t doing it all that well.  But don’t just take my word for it lets have a look at some research … Read more

I spend a lot of my time talking to professional service firms, reviewing their marketing collateral and in particular their websites. One glaring recurring theme I see is that everyone is trying to differentiate themselves on exactly the same things. Of course, if every firm’s differentiators are the same, then they aren’t differentiators no matter … Read more