Transcript

Speaker 1:
You’re listening to Rattle & Pedal, divergent thoughts on marketing and growing professional services firms. Your hosts are Jason Mlicki and Jeff McKay.

Jason Mlicki:
So Jeff, today, we are going to talk about the critical marketing questions you’re not prepared to answer. I guess I don’t mean you Jeff. But I mean collectively, I think it’s the questions that we’ve noticed that we ask clients often when they start conversations with us that they often don’t have answers to. They need to have answers to them. We’re going to cover a lot of ground. I don’t know how many we’ll get to. That’s why I’m not putting a number on it. It could be five. It could be 10. It could be 50. Who knows? But we’ll just jump right in.

Jeff McKay:
All right. I only have 30.

Jason Mlicki:
A 30? That’s it. That’s an all-time low for you. Usually, you start with a 106. You want to start? Where do you want to start? Do you want me to start?

Jeff McKay:
Oh, I always like you to start.

Jason Mlicki:
Oh, gosh.

Jeff McKay:
Hey, you remember that adage age before beauty?

Jason Mlicki:
Well, you are the older of the two of us I think. Anyway.

Jeff McKay:
I was going to say that you have me on both fronts.

Jason Mlicki:
That’s a kind statement. All right. You said you were in a bad mood, you’re not in bad mood at all. Okay. So the first one that jumped out to me, and we shared a few before the call, was just growth and the question of how much do you want to grow your firm. I mean a lot of times that… And I just shared a story coming into this about how we got an inquiry from a small firm that wanted to do a rebrand. And my joke to you was that you’ve ruined my business because 10 years ago, I just said yes, and giving them a fee to do the rebrand.

Jason Mlicki:
And now of course, I say, “Well, time out. What are we trying to do here? How much do you want to grow? Where do you want to grow? How do you want to grow, and how is this investment in brand going to help that?” Asking all those questions that then ultimately the marketing lead couldn’t answer because in this particular situation the marketer really it wasn’t privy to those things. Those were things that were, in her words, above her pay grade that the ownership had that information.

Jason Mlicki:
That’s a problem because if you’re looking to make a brand investment you really need to know how that’s going to ladder up to strategic business objectives for the firm, either growth or other objectives that we think that brand investment is going to solve.

Jeff McKay:
Yeah. Whether it’s a brand investment or a sales investment or some kind of line of business investment, you need to understand how to ladder it up. You said it was the marketing person who didn’t know that it was above his or her pay grade. A lot of my work with practice leaders and managing partners, a lot of them don’t even know how to answer that question, which may be why many marketing leaders don’t.

Jeff McKay:
You know, some firms aren’t going to share it, but other firms simply don’t know or, and this is where I generally take this question in talking to clients, is reconciling these growth priorities because normally it’s decentralize practice says I’m going to grow this much and that practice says I’m going to grow this much or there’s a number handed down. We need 10% growth or 15% growth. Figure out where it’s going to come from. The firm never can reconcile and agree to its strategic priorities.

Jeff McKay:
So I would take this question a couple of layers deeper is what are the top three strategic growth priorities? Where’s that growth coming from? Is it new logos? Is it existing clients? Is it new markets? Is it new solutions and which ones? Because when you ask that question, they’ll say, “All of the above. Yes.” Okay. Well, which ones? Because you can’t grow them all because you’ve got a two or three person marketing team and you’re not investing enough money yet. So you got to select some of those. So they don’t want to answer a question.

Jason Mlicki:
Some of your strongest thinking, and all the times we’ve doing this podcast and I don’t remember exactly which podcast it is, and when it dawns on me, I will put it as a related episode, but it’s around that notion of that growth is not heterogeneous, meaning that a lot of times you see firms say, “Well we have these five practices and they’re all going to grow 10%.” That’s the first thing you always say and you’re so articulate about this saying, “Well, no. You get to figure out where the growth opportunities are and then target that.”

Jason Mlicki:
Now, practice one might be your biggest practice, but it might be your lowest growth practice for a whole variety of reasons. Practice five might be your smallest, but it’s your highest growth and it has the most potential. You’re so elegant about articulating that and then also the other gap in that that you see is that even if they’ve got over that hump and they’ve said, “Well, we want this practice to grow considerably, 30, 40, 50%. We think it’s the high growth practice.”

Jason Mlicki:
Now they allocate resources, where resource allocation go. Well, a lot of times that practice still gets starved because it’s the smallest and all the money goes to the big practice because they’re the ones that [inaudible 00:05:04] all the loudest or whatever, right?

Jeff McKay:
Yep.

Jason Mlicki:
You have a really good model for that and you’re really articulate about it. I think that’s the really interesting part about this, too, is it’s not only just where is the growth’s going to come from, it’s how are you going to get the growth and how are you going to allocate resources to get it. Those are the questions. It’s like no one’s even having that conversation a lot of times, which is crazy. Right?

Jason Mlicki:
We’ve talked about Google so much, but it’s this thing about big diversified corporation, Alphabet Corp, right? 90% of the revenue comes from Google search advertising and another, I don’t know, probably 150% of the profit. I have no idea, but it’s something like that. But then think how much capital they’re flowing in everything else. AI, autonomous vehicles and all these other things that are getting tons of money because they think that that’s where future growth is going to come from. Not saying they’re starving search, but they’re putting way more money in AI than they are Geo Core search. Of course, AI fuels search. A big company thinks that way, but firms a lot of times think that way. Right?

Jason Mlicki:
Moving on, what’s the next one? Give us another one.

Jeff McKay:
This is one that often stumps people longer term and that’s, do you actually have the capabilities to attack said growth opportunity? Where have you demonstrated those capabilities? I’m sure everyone listening to this podcast probably had this conversation in a strategic planning session. We need to move upstream. We need to move up to the C-suite. We need to move up to bigger companies, bigger engagements, which makes perfect sense. I get that. But when you ask the question, “All right, who’s going to have the conversation with the C-suite? Who’s going to sit down with that CFO? Who’s going to sit down with that CEO?” Then there’s just silence after maybe one or two names. That’s just at a strategic conversation that’s required to move upstream to a more sophisticated buyer. They think somehow that’s an easy thing to do.

Jeff McKay:
The only reason that they’re not having those meetings is because the C level buyer just isn’t aware of the brand. Well, that may be, but more often than not, the C level buyer may be aware of the brand and just doesn’t see you as relevant in that space. So the question that people need to answer is, do you have what it takes to move into where you want to play? Most firms don’t want to have that conversation because it makes for hard conversations internally. It’s a real hard look in the mirror or it requires a huge amount of investment in training, in your acquisition or some other form of way to acquire those skills.

Jason Mlicki:
There’s a couple layers to what you said that I want to dive into that are really interesting to me. The first is the conversation that’s had in the firm is we need to move up to the C-suite. That’s the first thing. Right?

Jeff McKay:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jason Mlicki:
The C-suite. We talk about it like it’s a monolith and that everybody in the C-suite has the same objectives, and as you know, they don’t. Right?

Jeff McKay:
Right.

Jason Mlicki:
So you have to pick one. You got to say, “Oh, we’re going to talk to the CMO or the CIO or the CTO or the chief security officer or the chief medical officer. Whatever it is, you got to pick one. And then the other layer on that that I was thinking of, you said, “Well, who’s going to have the conversation?

Jason Mlicki:
The other second is what conversation are you going to have? Because it may be that your firm in its current iteration or your whatever it is you do, you’re not tooled for that conversation because as you pointed out in our podcast about leadership teams, I think it was, there are some conversations that just aren’t relevant to that audience.

Jason Mlicki:
They don’t want to talk about that. They don’t want to talk about website conversion and lead gen objectives. That’s just not what they want to talk about in that leadership conversation, they want to push that conversation down the organization and that’s purposeful. You’re going to have to change your conversation probably, and do you know what the conversation is you’re going to have or not? That’s a big one. Right?

Jeff McKay:
Yeah.

Jason Mlicki:
So that was good.

Jeff McKay:
[inaudible 00:09:04].

Jason Mlicki:
That was really good. All right. Give us another one. You reframe that really nicely. So I’ll let you keep going. I know your list is longer than mine. I don’t want to admit that my list is really short. I’m going to embarrass myself at like minute 15 in the podcast.

Jeff McKay:
This is another really important and valuable one I think for leadership teams and that what has to go right for us to recognize, achieve the growth that we desire. I think I talked about this and we didn’t probably talked about it on the podcast as well, but I definitely wrote a blog on it about evaluating growth opportunities.

Jeff McKay:
A lot of things have to come together in order to be successful. If you don’t know what those are and you don’t know what hurdles are in the way of achieving those, then you’re not engineering or planning for success. You’re hoping for success. The more you can beat up these growth opportunities and look at what’s going to get in the way so that you can plan, whether it’s process or people or technology or tactics around it, you’re not going to achieve that growth. Most people in firms don’t want to ask that question because it means I can’t pursue it. Right? It’s hard work. It’s hard work to answer those questions.

Jason Mlicki:
Is there a cultural thing there, too? Meaning that it’s acknowledging that there are risks that we’re going to face that we may not be prepared for and people don’t want to admit that.

Jeff McKay:
Absolutely. I have a question on my list that I think encompasses so many of these questions generally and it is how does our culture help or hinder this desire or pursuit of growth? There are a lot of hindrances. People that don’t want to sell, people that don’t want to produce thought leadership, people that are driven by utilization metric instead of a growth metric. Or people that hoard work and don’t develop younger people or don’t have a client centricity or aren’t innovating around new products and solutions.

Jeff McKay:
I mean culture drives behavior and if the behaviors aren’t aligned with a growth mentality, it’s going to hinder your ability to do that. Everybody knows what the cultural problems are, but nobody wants to ask the question about how is this helping or hindering our growth and how do we either work with it. Say, we know that our people aren’t this way, we are not going to change that. Therefore, we need a different approach to growth or we can no longer have a culture that supports and reinforces this bad behavior. We need to manage culture and develop culture in a different way. Most firms don’t ask that question.

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah. I may have told this story before and if I have, stopped me. I remember we had a engineering firm client years ago where there was a specific practice that I was convinced. I’m like, “We can grow this practice using thought leadership. It was a transactional practice and I knew that we could grab search opportunities and we could basically grow this practice online. Find clients we’ve never heard of all over the country.”

Jason Mlicki:
CEO has bought in. He said, “Absolutely we’re doing it.” And then the guy that ran the practice, we physically could not get him to train people behind him to do the work so that when demand came in, we would be able to deliver. Yet he didn’t enjoy the work anymore. So we were essentially held hostage by the practice leader and the CEO eventually gave up. He said, “I give up. We can’t do this.” And it’s just like, “Wow. You just missed a growth opportunity that the CEO knows is there.” I guess the agency and the marketing lead knows it’s there, but you can’t get the culture inside the firm to react to it.

Jason Mlicki:
I had another client of mine. It’s a commercial construction company where the owner had worked really, really hard to get them into Walmart at a large scale of work and he couldn’t get anybody on his team to support working with them. They ended up not working. He was like, “You know, it would have been lower margin work, but it would have been massive scale.” He’s like, “It could have grown exponentially potentially, but couldn’t have it.”

Jason Mlicki:
I don’t say this much, but don’t dismiss the importance of culture and behaviors and what people are willing to do and not do and it’s to get your growth targets, something that you always say.

Speaker 1:
You’re listening to Rattle & Pedal. Divergent thoughts on growing your professional services firm. Your hosts are Jason Mlicki, Principal of Rattleback, the marketing agency for professional services firms, and Jeff McKay, former CMO and founder of strategy consultancy, Prudent Pedal. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us by telling a friend and rating us on iTunes. Thank you. Now back to Jason and Jeff.

Jason Mlicki:
The one that I always find interesting is what does an ideal client look like? How frequently firms just really do not have any answer for that question? Usually, the response I’ll get when I ask that question is, “Well, we have four or five” and well, okay. That’s kind of okay. I mean, yeah, you have different sides of your business and of course there’s different buyers for different sides of the business.

Jason Mlicki:
Okay, I can understand that. But at the end of the day, isn’t there one that’s better than all else? I mean isn’t there one client that you know is the best client you could have? I would always say to them, I’m like, “You know, you’re a 30, 40, $50 million firm and you can’t ask that question.” Yet I know the CMO of one of the largest credit card companies, credit card service providers in the world at the time, half a billion dollar company, he could answer that in a string paragraph off the top of his head at any moment at any time.

Jason Mlicki:
To me it was saying, well, the need to understand that is even more critical in a smaller organization because you’ve got less resources to put the bear to things. Right? But it’s a question that very few firms can answer and when they do answer it, it’s incomplete. I mean, I always say, well, lately I’ve been breaking it down into firmographics, demographics and psychographics. You know, so what is the nature of the company that we want to do business with? Who are the people inside the company you want to do these businesses and then what are they thinking and feeling right now about what it is that we do?

Jason Mlicki:
It’s trying to get that type of wrap around it to say, “Okay, now we can do something with that. We can produce a piece of thought leadership that resonates with that person in that company, in that situation, with that need filling that way. And that will logically start a conversation. We do it right.” But man, it’s hard to do when you don’t have that answer. Right?

Jeff McKay:
Oh my gosh. I think it’s impo- Well, no, it’s not impossible. It just takes a lot more time, money and effort if you don’t answer that question. I insist all my clients answer that and answer it concretely. If you ask that, who’s our ideal client in a firm, you would get a hundred different answers and it’s all going to be someone, well, anyone with buying authority, and need, time. You know, it’s just your BANT, right? Anybody, they don’t pay us. Right? I understand why people say that, but it’s bad. You need to answer that question.

Jason Mlicki:
All right. Well, I think we have time for maybe one more. It’s going to be a short podcast today.

Jeff McKay:
Okay. I know you have a brilliant one.

Jason Mlicki:
I don’t. I was waiting for you. I mean, I’m sure I have a brilliant one, but… Well, it will be the one that’s left off the list. That’s just conspicuously at the 23rd minute of the podcast when the podcast ended at 22:30.

Jeff McKay:
Yeah. Okay. All right. So rapid fire, rapid fire.

Jason Mlicki:
Oh, rapid fire. Okay.

Jeff McKay:
I find this one is so difficult for people to answer and it may be why they don’t ask it, but I don’t think that’s the reason why. I think they don’t think to ask it. And that is, what problem do you solve for your clients?

Jason Mlicki:
And that was mine. You stole mine. That was the number 31.

Jeff McKay:
Yeah. I gave you a chance to throw it out and we both had that on our list. But it’s so important because we think as professional services firms, we think in terms of solutions, but buyers don’t necessarily think in terms of solutions. They think in what’s the problem. And almost every prospect I meet with, they don’t understand what people are actually buying. They think they’re buying the specific solution when really they’re buying, and it’s almost trite to say this, the benefit of the solution, right?

Jeff McKay:
I was with a prospect this past week and they do pressure testing of very mission critical parts on assembly lines in refineries where the engineers designing these things want to make sure that they’re going to work, and there’s any number of reasons why someone would test that part. It could be to reduce liability and they just want validation that the part was tested. It could be to reduce warranty cost. It could be to protect the life of one of their workers or one of their customers. It could be to reduce cost or downtime on a line. It could be all of those.

Jeff McKay:
But if you’re not even thinking in those terms and you only think of pass fail, yeah it passed, yeah it failed, you’re missing out on a golden opportunity to not only differentiate your firm, but to really drive growth both from a sales and marketing perspective but also a solution or product development perspective as well is your understanding, what are they actually buying? And most firms just don’t ask that question.

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah. It’s interesting because we have a very straightforward framework that we use to message a practice, to message a service page, just to message something that you’re trying to sell. And the framework is problem, solution, benefit. It’s three steps, right? I’ve gotten pushback over that from the years. People will say to me, “We’ll, our clients know what their problems are.” Number one, I’ve found often they don’t. They think they know what their problem is, but sometimes they misunderstood it or they’re looking for you to restate it.

Jason Mlicki:
Number two, that’s the most important part because you’re showing to them that you understand what their problems are. That’s the most important part of it that you have a clarity in view on the problem that they’re facing and the way your solution has been designed to solve that problem or problems. To me, it’s the most critical thing and you look across… And at times I waver on this.

Jason Mlicki:
Sometimes I think, “Oh, maybe I’m thinking about this all wrong.” Maybe we should go straight to solution and be a lot be simpler, a lot more straightforward. But when you look across the landscape of the marketplace, I would argue that it’s the understanding of the problem definition that drives everything and drives, like you said, solution design. Oh, it probably drives value pricing as well. I’m just going to say you probably make more when you’re really designing a solution that creates a benefit that solves the client’s original problem versus just selling them a straightforward pass or fail in your example, right?

Jeff McKay:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jason Mlicki:
So everything comes from that. Pricing, solution, investments, client understanding, marketing strategy, everything comes from that understanding, that definition. So it’s really fascinating.

Jason Mlicki:
We have a hard stop today, so we have to wrap it up here. This was a really fun discussion. I enjoyed this and we could do this one again. I’m sure there’s a ton left on the cutting room floor on your side. I know there’s a lot of mine as well, too. So thanks for joining me on this exploration of questions and answers, I guess.

Jeff McKay:
That was fun. Now listeners, go ask those questions and answer them.

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah. The hard part, right? It’s easy to name them. So I don’t think that actually answer them.

Jeff McKay:
You know, we didn’t answer this question. This is the important one is, who asked the question of whom? Think about that. [crosstalk 00:21:01]. You should be answering that question.

Jason Mlicki:
All right man. Have a great rest of the week.

Jeff McKay:
See you, buddy.

Jason Mlicki:
See you.

Speaker 1:
Thank you for listening to Rattle & Pedal. Divergent thoughts on marketing and growing professional services firms. Find content related to this episode at rattleandpedal.com. Rattle & Pedal is also available on iTunes and Stitcher.