From the category archives:

Marketing Professional Services

How To Build Yourself As The Authority Figure In Your Industry

7 August 2010

Today’s article is a guest post from Travis Petelle of Breakthrough Business Solutions. Travis has picked up on my ideas on Authority Marketing and shares some excellent tips on how to build an authority position in your business. Building yourself as an authority figure in your niche could possibly be the best thing you could [...]

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Authority Marketing: The Essentials

10 July 2010

In recent posts I’ve been musing over the concept of Authority Marketing. After my last post where I talked about the benefits of establishing authority, one reader rightly posed the question: “what’s the difference between authority and expertise?” It’s a good question. We all feel intuitively that authority implies something more than expertise – but [...]

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Linkedin Profiles – My Shocking Findings

16 June 2010

Last night I was finalising a training course I ran today on Linkedin. I was having a quick look round at people’s profiles for good/bad examples – and what I saw shocked me. First a little bit of background: In my landmark post 10 Linkedin Tips for Professionals (still showing on page 1 of google [...]

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Win Clients With Presentations and Seminars: A Get Clients Video Tip

10 May 2010

This latest Get Clients Video Tip is about how to use presentations and seminars to win clients for your consulting, training, law, accounting or other professional business. Feedback appreciated – either here or on Youtube – thanks! Ian

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Authority Marketing

22 April 2010

Sometimes my blog posts are fully formed ideas that I’m sharing, or examples of best practice from my experience, or a snippet of the training I deliver. But sometimes the blog acts as more of a conversation with myself as I explore a new concept or topic. This is such a blog post. What you [...]

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Vertical Differentiation

19 April 2010

You can’t turn a corner these days without bumping into a marketing consultant banging on about the importance of a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) and differentiation. I’ve written on the topic before – and in my view, for most service businesses it’s actually far more important to focus on creating compelling client value than it [...]

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Are You Exploiting This Key Strategy To Get More Clients?

23 March 2010

We’ve all heard multiple versions of the “it takes 6 touches before a customer will buy from you” saying. But how true is it? In my experience it’s very true. But it’s also very misleading. You see, it kind of gives the impression that all you need to do to win a client is communicate [...]

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Are Traditional Websites Dead?

4 March 2010

I recently recorded a podcast interview with Raintoday.com entitled “Is the Traditional Website Dead?” (You can listen to it free here). The focus was specifically on websites for professional service firms – and reflected my experience with the success of my own site over the last 9 months. Despite being a rather small outfit (and [...]

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Meet: Lawyers – great idea

13 November 2009

Over on my (small but very friendly) Rainmaker Network Linkedin group we’ve been discussing using Linkedin for business development in professional services. One idea I’d not heard before came from Julian Johnstone. He’s set up a group called Meet: Lawyers where lawyers who are travelling can set up “meetings for coffee” with other lawyers in [...]

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Lead Nurturing – Latest Issue of Outside In Newsletter Published

8 October 2009

The latest issue of the Outside In Newsletter for Professional Service Firms focuses on Lead Nurturing: how you progress an initial client relationship over time to a point where you’re actually doing business together. Lead nurturing is critical for professionals: at the point at which we initially meet clients very few of them need our [...]

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Is the Free Initial Consultation Dead?

7 October 2009

Yes, in my view. For many years, consultants, coaches, trainers – and even accountants and lawyers – have been offering “free initial consultations” as a way of encouraging clients to engage with them. The logic, of course, is that once they work with them for an hour or so, their fears about whether the professional [...]

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