Professional Services Marketing: How the Best Firms Build Premier Brands, Thriving Lead Generation Engines, and Cultures of Business Development Success

by Mike Schultz, John Doerr

Praise for Professional Services Marketing "This book is that rare thing: simultaneously wise, practical, readily accessible, and data-driven. A necessary addition to your reading."
--David Maister, author of Managing the Professional Service Firm

"Professional Services Marketing will certainly become the bible of the field in short order! Without a doubt, the most useful compendium of marketing insight for the practicing professional services firm executive...BRAVO!"
--Leonard A. Schlesinger, President, Babson College, and coauthor of The Service Profit Chain

"It's no longer sufficient to be a good 'expert for hire'--you need a brand and a powerful marketing engine behind you. Professional Services Marketing is a gold mine of research based strategies, best practices, and specific techniques that will help you consistently win in the client marketplace and outshine your competition. It's thoughtful, funny, and filled with the how-to so often missing in business books."
--Andrew Sobel, coauthor of Clients for Life

"Schultz and Doerr offer tactics and information in an easy-to-read, concise, and enjoyable format. Professional Services Marketing should be a required resource in every professional marketer's tool box!"
--R. Granville Loar, Executive Director, Association for Accounting Marketing

"This book is an excellent resource for anyone involved in professional services. It is especially timely in our current challenging economic conditions, and the ideas and guidance are relevant for the better times to come as well."
--Josh Lee, Partner, Monitor Group

"Smart. Practical. Comprehensive. This is the one book that won't collect dust on my shelf."
--Kevin McMurdo, Chief Marketing Officer, Perkins Coie

"Professional Services Marketing is the first book to directly address the challenges of the professional services marketer. This book is filled with practical wisdom and research on best practices and processes specifically for this industry. A must-read for anyone in a professional services firm!"
--Paul Dunay, Global Director of Integrated Marketing, BearingPoint

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Management

320 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 29, 2009

About the author

Mike Schultz is a world-renowned speaker, researcher, and sales expert. He is author of several books, including WSJ Best-seller Rainmaking Conversations (Wiley, 2011).

As President of RAIN Group, Mike has grown the firm into a global leader, named a Top 20 Sales Training Company by Selling Power and Training Industry. In 2020, superior client results earned RAIN Group a Brandon Hall Award for Best Unique or Innovative Sales Training Program and four Gold Stevie Awards for Sales Training Practice of the Year, Sales Training Program of the Year, Sales Training Professional of the Year, and Business Development Achievement of the Year.



Mike and the team at RAIN Group have worked with national and international organizations such as Toyota, Citibank, Canon, Bright Horizons, BDO, Hitachi, Lee Hecht Harrison, Hologic, Optus, and hundreds of others to unleash sales performance.



As Director of the RAIN Group Center for Sales Research, Mike and an analyst team study buying and selling relentlessly. Studies include Virtual Buying and Selling Challenges, Top Performance in Sales Negotiation, Extreme Productivity Benchmark Report, Top Performance in Sales Prospecting, The Value-Driving Sales Organization, What Sales Winners Do Differently, Top Performance in Strategic Account Management, Top Sales Leadership Challenges and Priorities, and The Top-Performing Sales Organization.



Business Week, Forbes, Inc., Entrepreneur, MSNBC, and hundreds of others have interviewed and featured Mike's articles, research, and white papers. He frequently appears on top-ranked radio, TV, and podcast programs to discuss various sales topics and new research findings. 



Named an influential sales professional by LinkedIn, Mike has presented at major events, including HubSpot INBOUND, Strategic Account Management Association’s Annual Conferences, Sales Leadership Conference, and Sales Operations Institute. In 2019, he was honored as a leading keynote speaker by Top Sales World. 



Passionate about raising awareness of congenital heart defects (CHD) and organ donation, blogging at www.echoofhope.org, the American Heart Association (AHA) of Central Massachusetts honored Mike with the Heart of Gold Award in 2018.

Mike is a graduate of Brandeis University in Waltham, MA with a B.A. in American Studies, and holds an MBA from the F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College. He was an adjunct professor at both schools, teaching courses in marketing and sales.

You can download his free white papers, guides, and eBooks at www.raingroup.com/resources and watch his videos at www.youtube.com/raingroup. Follow Mike on Twitter at @Mike_Schultz and LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/mikeschultz50/

In addition to Rainmaking Conversations, his other top ranked sales books for sellers and sales leaders include:

• Professional Services Marketing (Wiley, 2013)
• Insight Selling (Wiley, 2014)
• Virtual Selling: How to Build Relationships, Differentiate, and Win Sales Remotely (2020)
• Not Today: The Productivity Code Revealed (2021)



Reviews

[Gary Spagnoli · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is opinionated and gives strong recommendations - I'm a fan of how the authors attack the billable hours model, and it's something that I originally read about in Alan Weiss' Million Dollar Consulting (a better book IMO).

The advice given on how to manage revenue streams and how pricing elevates your brand is a friendly reminder on avoiding discounting rates in the professional services space. There's nothing incredibly groundbreaking here, but the writing style makes this very quick to run through. Recommend to any smaller online agency looking to compete with more white collar / traditional firms.

[Ties · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very high quality, practical advice and how-to information that I can immediately implement in our daily operations.

[Olivia Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

I reading this book. Good strategy in this book.
I am also build my brand in Lead Generation.
https://theleadcrafters.com this is my domain.
I hope this book helpful for my brand.

[Justin Jaeger · Rating 4 out of 5]

The thing I found most useful about this book is that it separately analyzed much of the philosophies I bring to business development into individual trackable initiatives. It acknowledges the different methodologies that professional services firms practice in terms of sales and marketing while emphasizing the importance of making a plan and living in it, which is something I find encouraging about the attitude and culture in my current position. I read chapters 1-5 for my on boarding.

Some of my favorite takeaways: (I won't call them spoilers, because of the evangelistic nature of the non-fiction here)

-The power of the referral and its "transferred trust." It speaks to how we qualify leads. A referral is like a blind date- with a third party's reputation on the line. In the news world, (my background) these days people are putting their faith in blogs as opposed major news organizations because our trust in the generally accepted authority of corporate entities is trumped by the personal transferred trust of social endorsement. In our business, to market and sell our professional service, little can be more powerful than the social perception of our brand and the personal endorsement of a positively raving referral.

-Money is a conceptual thing. "It can be just as difficult to sell a $5,000 engagement as it is a $50,000 engagement as it is to sell a $500,000 engagement." The level of effort involved in a sale is rarely an indicator of the revenue an engagement will bill. We should weed out engagements that do not match our ideal client profile because our time and effort is best spent with the customers and engagements that are the best fit for us.

-Are people choosing us for our rates? our reputation? our brand? The book speaks to pricing and the importance of its role in perception of our brand. "The pricing model you choose is a tool to help you maximize profit while also creating value in the mind of the buyer."

-"Business plans do become important... if you are trying to do something new and bold." BUT "Marketing and BD remain the redheaded stepchild. It is no longer debatable that strong marketing & BD can have a major impact on the success of a professional services firm. (Although we still see firms argue long and hard about it)"

I also love the concept of distilling the seven levers that matter to increase revenue, performing a comprehensive audit to evaluate our network and marketing effectiveness, and most importantly, the four core measurable outcomes of marketing:
-New conversations with potential buyers.
-Better odds of winning client engagements.
-Higher revenue per client and per engagement, and higher fees for your services.
-Increased affinity with the actual and potential workforce.

I'm storing those three evaluation tools separately for use later with our team and the continuing development of our Business Development Charter.

[Joel Ungar · Rating 2 out of 5]

I lied. I didn't read all of it. I stopped at page 56, when the authors got on board the billable hour train - 4 sentence "...there's nothing inherently wrong with the billable hour."

I disagree 100%. And therefore I stopped reading.

Most of what I read before page 56 was ok - nothing overly original, and certainly nothing great enough to make me want to read past their support of the billable hour.

[Chi · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was a good start for anyone enjoying marketing and business development in general. Yet I hope there would be more examples and stories to describe the techniques and strategies and make the material easier to follow.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

7 years into my career in marketing (all with professional services firms). This book should be on the desk of every manager with a direct or dotted line to a marketing / business development function.

[Berenice · Rating 4 out of 5]

a useful tome

[Dionne Golding · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful, easy to understand, practical advise and information on how to market any professional service practice, of any size. Invaluable resource!