MAKING LEAD GENERATION WORK FOR PROFESSIONAL SERVICES: SECRET #3

The following is an excerpt from Wellesley Hills Group's complimentary white paper, "Making Lead Generation Work For Professional Services". Download the entire white paper for free here.

Engaging any new professional service company is a leap of faith. The client is never certain what he will actually get; whether the service provider is reputable and reliable; whether the process will work in their culture. Your prospects consider all of these questions before they buy from you.

The Trouble With Selling Services

Services are intangible by nature. You can't see, touch, smell, or taste them before you buy them. This intangibility often makes services difficult to depict in clear and meaningful ways. Many companies' inability to depict their services tangibly leads to the following conditions:

Condition	Description
Difficult to conceptualize	Clients and prospects have difficulty picturing, in their mind's eye, the services process and outcomes.
Difficult to evaluate	The difficulty in conceptualizing leads to difficulty in evaluating the service. They don't know what they'll get, the value it might offer, or when it will be successful.
Uncertainty and perceived risk	Without a clear evaluation framework, the client level of uncertainty and perceived risk rises. Added uncertainty and risk is anathema to selling services, especially in new client generation where you have yet to establish trust.
Difficult to promote the offering	Difficulty conceptualizing also leads to difficulty in creating focused marketing communications (from the firm's perspective) and difficulty selling the services internally to colleagues (from the client's perspective).

How do you make the intangible tangible? Take a cue from your local ice cream shop… let your clients and prospects have a taste. Professional services businesses can do this by creating and leveraging offers and experiences that allow potential buyers to see, touch, and taste a bit of what you will provide for them as a client.

With a new sense of tangibility, you can promote your services more clearly and minimize the clients' risk (both perceived and actual) of engaging your services. Your clear depictions of the service tangibles will help your clients and prospects to conceptualize, evaluate, and promote the offering internally.

How can you tell the difference between a potential client who's tasted your services, and one who does not yet have a good sense of what you can offer them?

When you sit down at the table with a prospective client for the first time, you might encounter one of two possibilities:

Possibility #1: I've never heard of you. I don't know what you offer. I don't know why you're here. Now what did you want to sell me?

Possibility #2: I've read two of your white papers, saw you speak, and regularly read your newsletter. I love your website and your ABC Methodology. I've been looking forward to speaking with you for years now.

Of course, Possibility #2 is what you want to hear. You can accomplish this through your firm's lead generation activities, if you create and leverage offers and experiences in your lead generation process. Several common offers and experiences that work for professional services businesses are:

• Consultation
• Sales call
• Entry service
• Seminar
• Teleseminar
• Webcast
• Speech
• Articles
• White papers
• Speeches
• Books
• Research

Why Offers And Experiences Win

Offers and experiences are the best way to market actively in the lead generation process, for many reasons:

1. They provide a preview. Offers and experiences give your prospects a chance to sample what it might actually be like to work with you. If you can provide value before they're your client, they will easily be able to imagine what it will be like after they hire your firm.
   
   
2. They're easy for people to accept. People will accept an offer of a white paper, a seminar or an in-person dialogue about new research results much more readily than the too-often-used “Call us and become our client” offer.
   
   
3. They generate better response. Marketing tactics using offers work better than those that don't. An ad in the Harvard Business Review for a major law firm touted the nature of the firm as offering “solutions” versus just “services”. Many people saw that ad… and did nothing. If the ad had focused on new research in intellectual property protection for technology companies that could be downloaded as a white paper, the ad would have been less of a waste. (Of course, when you start thinking like this, ads become a much less attractive marketing option.)
   
   
4. They get attention, and get prospects to consider action. Offers and experiences break through the noise and give prospects a decision to make. “New research… that sounds valuable. Do I want to take 15 minutes to hear the results, or not?” The more valuable and interesting the offer, the more it breaks through the noise.
   
   
5. They allow you to approach prospects via thought leadership. Through offers, you can introduce your valuable, genuine, and distinct points of view to prospects in non-threatening, non-salesy ways. Reading your white papers, hearing you speak, and meeting with you about a specific topic are all ways to hold a spot in the mind of the buyer while also demonstrating your expertise. If you want to gain clients and be viewed as a thought leader, creating and disseminating offers and experiences will do a lot to help you get there.
   
   
6. They can increase revenue opportunities with current and past clients. If you currently work with 100 clients, and you are generating leads for one particular service area of yours, it's possible that 80 of them don't even know you offer the service you're promoting. Since these 80 already know and trust you, they're much more likely than others to accept the offer and move into your pipeline.
   
   
7. Their impact improves over time. Repeated, value-based offers over the long-term will seduce clients with your value. There's no better lead than someone who has been following your work for years.
   
   
8. They generate contact information. Acceptance of offers allows you to capture information that you can use appropriately for ongoing lead generation and lead nurturing.
   
   
9. They create both lead generation outcomes and relationship outcomes. If you make an offer, and it truly has value in it for the prospect, you will generate leads and create relationships with people before you even meet them. You also strengthen the relationships you already have. 

Takeaway: Buying professional services is a leap of faith. You can shorten that leap of faith with valuable offers and experiences.

To read the rest of the complimentary white paper, "Making Lead Generation Work For Professional Services," click here.