branding

Branding tactics for practice managers

Jerry Walters, one of the best guys I’ve ever worked for, repeatedly told me to “get a sale, you need four things: timing, relationship, money and a relationship. If you have the relationship, everything else is easy.”

In an earlier post, we conducted interviews and almost everyone interviewed said new business was generated via “trusted relationships.”

In that spirit, we’ve become quite competent at executing small but highly targeted outreach programs designed to build or enhance the personal brand of a firm’s individual practice manager(s). These campaigns help practice managers build their portfolio of critical relationships and expand their network of buying decision makers.

This post describes one process we use for elevating the profile of a practice leader in approximately 4 to 6 months from start-to-finish. These programs are focused on building relationships through mutual shared discovery of needs and wants.  This is “intelligent selling” through Trojan horse marketing, but it’s done at a practical, street-level. It is done in a sophisticated way that leads to trust in relationships through a mutual fair exchange of ideas.
 
SAMPLE APPROACH

One approach used in the past  (and there are many other tactics at our disposal) is to publish version 0.9 of a whitepaper. We then conduct outreach to a defined group of key prospects and thought leaders seeking their input as a way of finishing the whitepaper. The goal of the outreach is to elicit additional comments and facilitate personal discussions between your practice manager and the prospect that can be incorporated into a next generation whitepaper as a series of practical best practices interviews.

In this example, the primary goal of the process is not the whitepaper. It is the outreach itself. It is the conversations about your products and practices that are most important to this process. We facilitate and organize conversations so your practice manager has more face time with key prospects. The goal is to learn about their needs in a non-intrusive and valuable way that builds trust. 

The value of this overall approach is significant because it is immediate. This approach is effective because it generates IMMEDIATE relationships with interested parties who have needs.  

Program success can be measured in several different ways.

• Substantive interactions initiated with the target audience
• Number of prospect sign-ups for ongoing communication
• Requests for download of whitepaper from qualified prospects (this KPI is less important that the others so it can have a smaller weight in final calculations)
• Signups for specialized roundtable or survey about the whitepaper 
• Change in web traffic from launch date and forward
• Web traffic from this whitepaper landing page/blog to the main website
• Number of referring links to whitepaper/blog plus viral seeding of specific information by tagging via any of several social networking resources
• Inquiries of substance leading to articles or other posts by authoritative opinion-shapers

The compensation model is also unique and I believe this model is the primary reason for our recent growth — we put 50% of our fees at risk. This means that together we define the scope necessary for program success and only when we are successful do we bill for the remainder of project fees.

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