Reflect for a moment. Who are your best clients? What do they have in common? Chances are, they are the ones who listen to you. They acknowledge your expertise. And they act accordingly.
By “act accordingly,” I mean they give you the permission to conduct your engagement on your terms, not theirs. They take your advice. They work collaboratively with you, and they do it enthusiastically. In short, they view you as a true expert in your discipline.
Clients like these are not born. They are made.
And ideally they are made long before you ever meet them.
Let me explain.
There are a number of ways that prospective clients discover professional services firms. They can be referred to you by current and former clients. They can be referred to you by partners in adjacent businesses—those that serve clients like yours but which don’t compete directly with you. For instance, lawyers and accountants often refer clients to each other. Prospects can meet you at a tradeshow or conference. Or they can see your advertising at the very moment they have a need.
All of these marketing techniques work, but they come with a built-in problem. Even though marketing tactics like these can put you on a company’s radar, the prospect doesn’t really know your firm. You still have to convince them you are worth taking a chance on.
That can mean responding to RFPs, along with dozens of your competitors. Or it can mean preparing elaborate pitches that involve a platoon of expensive team members. And at the end of the day, after the client has selected you, they begin the relationship crossing their fingers that they chose wisely.
Most firms of any size will (and probably should) use some, if not all, of these techniques. But there is another way—one that the most successful firms understand sidesteps this problem entirely. This strategy is not new, but it is widely misunderstood.
The strategy I’m describing is thought leadership. Most firms think of thought leadership as a nice-to-have, a supplement to their “real” marketing program. Often firms take this view because they know creating high-quality content is hard and distracts top talent from lucrative billable client work. These firms may do thought leadership but they implement it haphazardly. They simply don’t recognize its true potential.
When thought leadership is done right, however, you attract a different kind of prospect. These folks have been following you for months or years. They read everything you write. They attend your webinars. They fly to conferences to hear your experts speak. And when they finally raise their hand, they are ready to buy. From you—often only from you.
This approach involves educating your audience and sharing, for free, some of your expertise. At its best, your thought leadership—the topics you write and speak about—has a distinct point of view. It is this distinction that makes your work so compelling and separates what your experts say from other firms in your industry.
Over time, you not only build up a following, you establish deep credibility and trust. By the time these prospects reach out to you, they are bought into your firm and your system. This alignment not only makes the sale easy and quick, it sets up the engagement for success from the very start.
If, on the other hand, you enter an engagement and the client isn’t 100% convinced of your expert status, they can be hyper sensitive to any mistakes you make. Even the smallest error adds friction to the relationship and erodes trust. The engagement can still be salvaged, but that can take heroic measures from (and a toll on) your team.
To sum up, the best clients are those who got to know you long before they engaged you. They learned from your experts, and they came back to the well again and again. When they are ready to buy, you are at the top of their list. And when they engage you, they trust you implicitly, so you can do your best work.
That’s the power of a well-conceived thought-leadership strategy. Is your marketing strategy designed to attract your best clients?
