Recent Articles From EvanCarmichael.com http://www.evancarmichael.com/ http://www.evancarmichael.com/Sales/3167/BUY-BEFORE-YOU-BUY--GETTING-PAID-FOR-LEAD-GENERATION.html http://www.evancarmichael.com/Sales/3167/BUY-BEFORE-YOU-BUY--GETTING-PAID-FOR-LEAD-GENERATION.html By Mike Schultz and John Doerr Free is Fine, but Can I Pay Instead? Marketing is expensive. Especially when you sell complex products and services, your investments in brochures, websites, ads, direct mail, and PR can be steep. After all, you need to educate your prospects and seduce them with your solution and its benefits. This is a bit more involved than grabbing people's attention with a free sample for an impulse product like a cube of bubble gum with a gooey surprise in the middle http://www.evancarmichael.com/Sales/3167/INCONCEIVABLE--7-MISCONCEPTIONS-ABOUT-PROFESSIONAL-SERVICES-LEAD-GENERATION.html http://www.evancarmichael.com/Sales/3167/INCONCEIVABLE--7-MISCONCEPTIONS-ABOUT-PROFESSIONAL-SERVICES-LEAD-GENERATION.html By Mike Schultz and John Doerr Vizzini: Inconceivable! Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. - The Princess Bride As service firms begin to awaken from a long recession-inspired hibernation period, they are again beginning to think about proactive lead generation. If your firm is stepping-up your outbound marketing, your first step should be to re-examine your firm's thinking about what works and doesn't work. Consider the following seven service lead generation misconceptions. Destroying these myths can lead to more production and better return-on-investment for your marketing time and dollars. http://www.evancarmichael.com/Sales/3167/GENERATING-LEADS-BRAND-RELATIONSHIPS-AND-TRUST-AT-THE-SAME-TIME.html http://www.evancarmichael.com/Sales/3167/GENERATING-LEADS-BRAND-RELATIONSHIPS-AND-TRUST-AT-THE-SAME-TIME.html By Mike Schultz Relationships. Trust. Delivery of superb value. These are core ingredients of a successful service firm. Talk to 100 service firm marketers and leaders, and they'll all tell you (and most of them believe it, even if they're wrong) that their firm is in the top of their industry in each of these categories. Why, then, do service firms typically do such a poor job of bringing relationships, trust, and value into their marketing mixes? http://www.evancarmichael.com/Sales/3167/TOP-10-LEAD-GENERATION-MISTAKES-MADE-BY-PROFESSIONAL-SERVICES.html http://www.evancarmichael.com/Sales/3167/TOP-10-LEAD-GENERATION-MISTAKES-MADE-BY-PROFESSIONAL-SERVICES.html By John Doerr Williamson: [handing Roma lead cards] I'm giving you three leads... Ricky Roma: Three? No, I count two. Williamson: There's three leads there… Ricky Roma: I'm waiting for the new leads. - Glengarry Glenn Ross, David Mamet 1992 Leads, leads, leads. It seems it is all about leads once the referrals and the circle of family and friends aren’t enough to keep our firms growing. Yet, when it comes to generating leads, most professional services firms get it all wrong in ten very common ways. http://www.evancarmichael.com/Sales/3167/GIT-R-DONE-EXECUTING-YOUR-LEAD-GENERATION-PLAN.html http://www.evancarmichael.com/Sales/3167/GIT-R-DONE-EXECUTING-YOUR-LEAD-GENERATION-PLAN.html By Mike Schultz Question: On a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being "always" and 5 being "never", how often do you stick to project schedules and keep commitments you make to clients? I'm guessing that most of you would give yourself a 1 (or a 2). Of course you make commitments and keep them. What kind of professional would you be if you didn't? (I don't know about you, but many a service provider has made commitments to me and not kept them. A topic for another time...) http://www.evancarmichael.com/Sales/3167/HOW-TO-CREATE-A-BRAND-ONE-PROSPECT-AT-A-TIME.html http://www.evancarmichael.com/Sales/3167/HOW-TO-CREATE-A-BRAND-ONE-PROSPECT-AT-A-TIME.html By Robert Croston Having spent longer than I care to admit pursuing traditional brand development through advertising, I recently became fascinated with the prospect of building brands using direct response marketing and lead generation activities. (I wonder what my colleagues at the ad firm would think if they knew!) Traditional wisdom has always told us marketing types that our marketing communications are either 1) emotionally oriented and image based OR 2) direct oriented and response based activities. You simply can't do both at the same time. Or can you? http://www.evancarmichael.com/Sales/3167/THE-THREE-RS-OF-SERVICE-BRANDING-REACH-RECOGNITION-AND-REPUTATION.html http://www.evancarmichael.com/Sales/3167/THE-THREE-RS-OF-SERVICE-BRANDING-REACH-RECOGNITION-AND-REPUTATION.html By Robert Croston Think about your most recent branding campaign. Were your television ads as successful as you'd like them to be? Perhaps the billboards didn't create the recognition that you were looking for, but your online ads on Yahoo! and AOL worked quite well. Did you pick the right professional athlete to represent your firm's services? If you're reading this far, and you work at most service businesses, you probably think I'm nuts. You don't do any of this. Well, maybe you're a big firm and you do (kudos to you), or you've tried something here and there. But in most of our service business realities, advertising-as-a-primary-branding-vehicle is not the norm. And it shouldn't be. http://www.evancarmichael.com/Sales/3167/ON-SERVICE-BRANDING-DIFFERENTIATION-AND-MARKET-SHARE.html http://www.evancarmichael.com/Sales/3167/ON-SERVICE-BRANDING-DIFFERENTIATION-AND-MARKET-SHARE.html By Mike Schultz and John Doerr To maximize profit, managers have pursued the Holy Grail of becoming number one or two in their industries. Recently, however, new measures of service industries like software and banking suggest that customer loyalty is a more important determinant of profit. - James Heskett, et. al., Putting the Service-Profit Chain to Work, Harvard Business Review Product companies seek to become market-share leaders. To do this, they look to launch and manage a portfolio of differentiated products that have specific features most appealing to a specific target audience for a reasonable (but as high as possible) price. http://www.evancarmichael.com/Sales/3167/RAMP-UP-YOUR-BRAND--SLEDGEHAMMERS-AND-SERVICE-BRAND-PREFERENCE.html http://www.evancarmichael.com/Sales/3167/RAMP-UP-YOUR-BRAND--SLEDGEHAMMERS-AND-SERVICE-BRAND-PREFERENCE.html By Mike Schultz and John Doerr Swing the Hammer Imagine the strongman game at the carnival. You lift the sledgehammer over your head and swing it down onto the platform. When it strikes the target, a metal cylinder rises up and up—20 feet up the pole until it rings the bell. On its way down the pole the cylinder passes the same words it passed on the way up: strongman, tough guy, athlete, junior, and weakling. In a way, establishing a services brand follows a similar process. You swing the hammer (your marketing tactics, the marketing mix you employ, and the quality of your company's services) and the strength of your efforts determine whether or not your brand moves up the pole and makes it to the top to ring the bell. The question is, “What stages must your brand pass through in order to ring the bell?” http://www.evancarmichael.com/Sales/3167/AVOID-THE-REVENUE-ROLLERCOASTER-TRAP-WITH-CONSISTENT-LEAD-GENERATION.html http://www.evancarmichael.com/Sales/3167/AVOID-THE-REVENUE-ROLLERCOASTER-TRAP-WITH-CONSISTENT-LEAD-GENERATION.html By Mike Schultz and John Doerr Many consulting, professional, and technology service businesses find themselves trapped in the following vicious, no-growth cycle. The firm is either: Heavily marketing because they don't have enough leads and new business, or Heavily billing and delivering, and thus have no time for marketing, lead generation, and selling. We call this the service revenue rollercoaster. It's a common trap for many professional service companies because when they get busy they can't sustain their marketing momentum...they're too busy with client work. Then, when the client work slows down, they must start marketing from square-one all over again, as all momentum from previous marketing efforts has stalled.