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WHITE PAPER

STRENGTHEN CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS AND MAINTAIN PROFITABLE BUSINESS WITHIN THE NEW PROFESSIONAL SERVICES LANDSCAPE

Create and deploy IT solutions for business

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The landscape for providing (PSOs) professional services has changed and the dramatic pace of transformation shows no sign of slowing down.

Because a service organisation often operates in a competitive marketplace where an intangible service offering is the key to your unique selling point – setting yourself apart from multiple competitors is often the difference between success and failure. The ability to differentiate affects the way your customer perceives you and qualifies how you interact with each other.

Regardless of whether your company operates as a consultant, architect, accountant, construction company, lawyer or IT vendor; the main underlying challenges faced are the same:

1. How do we drive down business costs and maximise profitability without impacting our service delivery and quality of care?

2. How do we improve the perception of our specific services and our ability to project our professionalism to our target audience?

3. How do we ensure a consistent and sustainable quality of service?

4. How do we ensure we retain customers and attract repeat business so they become our advocates?

Of course a clear business strategy and value proposition is imperative if you want to succeed in a competitive environment, in addition to solid processes that act as the foundation for your team.

The way in which your business communicates is often at the core of the answer.

And in order to communicate well – both internally and externally – mind-set throughout the business is the ongoing solution; but this has to be supported by the right business systems and technology to facilitate.

In this whitepaper we track different areas of a professional services organisation and discuss how these four challenges can be overcome with the right attitude, process and technology.

THE MARKET FOR PROFESSIONAL SERVICES ORGANISATIONS

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Professional service firms are often in the middle of complex supply chains, and their horizontal nature can mean that their target audience can be as wide as practically possible. Therefore a resulting challenge is how to be as targeted as feasible in your marketing to attract the right audience and to develop a value proposition that resonates with them, is authentic and competitively unique to your organisation.

What do you want to be famous for? What do you know you can deliver? What is it about your organisation that your customers love?

Whilst each firm is different, some best practices and fundamentals remain the same across the sector. In order to deliver your message and reach your target audience you must put your focus in the channels that work best for your marketing and sales teams; e.g. networking events, direct marketing or social media. Each marketing and business development initiative must have a target and KPIs in order for you to benchmark, and that feed into an overall plan and set of objectives.

What marketing methods are working currently for the professional service sector? Do you know where your organisation sits against these trends – and therefore your competitors?

MAXIMISING PROFITABILITY – WINNING AND KEEPING THE RIGHT BUSINESS

In a 2016 Marketing Leaders Benchmark survey conducted by Meridian West and PM Forum; 61% of respondents said that their focus was to tailor marketing processes by client segments and markets – moving away from standardised and generic approaches.

Content marketing – thought leadership approaches for positioning yourself as a credible player in the market – is also on the rise; “66% of marketers say they plan to do more of this in 2016, compared with 56% who cited thought leadership as a strategic priority back in 2015”.

In the Construction Marketing Outlook Survey for 2016 by the Construction Marketing Association, it was found that 93% of respondents said that they would be increasing marketing activities in 2016. In terms of most effective channels, “71% of respondents will be increasing email marketing tactics in 2016, while direct mail, advertising, promotions, and trade shows saw a similar decrease response”. Digital is a fast growing tactical area with 88% of respondents saying that they will “increase social media usage in 2016. Paid search is expected to increase less than other internet marketing tactics”.

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Re-energising your business with Big DataMaximising profitability – winning and keeping the right business

No matter what the most successful mix of marketing and sales tactics is for your organisation, it is apparent that you need the right processes in place in order to manage campaigns, capture response and analyse success.

Business management tools such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software can support and connect your business development teams in their efforts. Microsoft Dynamics CRM has out-of-the-box functionality that promotes best practice and tracks the customer journey seamlessly; whilst keeping business KPIs in mind. For example, there is a standard process bar of sales stages that helps your sales team to qualify, nurture and win a prospect. By putting your customer at the heart of your business in this way, the client experience is consistent throughout all touchpoints. This also helps when marketing handover leads to sales and when sales start to handover the won business to the project management team; to ensure all documentation and history is captured for a streamlined and efficient approach.

A CRM solution also assists your tender management team with bid/no bid decisions; allowing your business to spend time and money on bids you want to win and that are profitable. Often, particularly in construction, whilst the value of the bids can be large, the margins are incredibly tight; therefore you need to get the cost of sale appropriate from the beginning. Dynamics CRM can help with putting controls in place, minimising risk; with an easy to use traffic light system if bid criteria are met, role-based rights for yes/no scenarios within a scoring matrix that fits your business model.

CRM solutions are no longer a one-dimensional system of record; for example with Dynamics CRM there is more and deeper integration with collaboration tools such as Yammer, Outlook and Skype for Business. What this means is that communication is made easier from within one business application, adapting to how your people naturally want to interact.

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We’ve discussed how segmentation and digital techniques are becoming more popular within service organisations as a way to reach prospects. Social media is a channel that is fast growing but one where many companies fail to capitalise on the true potential of using it as a selling and service tool that integrates with other activities.

Marketers do not want a plethora of separate business applications to manage and they want to understand, quickly, what combined effect different methods have on a campaign or prospect in order to track ROI and reduce contact fatigue. Depending on the complexity and size of your marketing operation, tools such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM or Dynamics Marketing can help manage and facilitate multi-channel marketing techniques.

These tools allow for deep integration with the functionally rich social listening tool, Microsoft Social Engagement. Going further than just a replacement for social publishing apps such as Hootsuite or Tweetdeck (which it can), the tool can help you analyse how your PSO is being perceived with sentiment analysis and social analytics, keep track of competitors and key influencers, as well as being a key means of reactive and proactive customer service.

Once you have won a client, it is imperative that you retain them; in order to secure repeat business and to ensure referrals.

We will discuss successful project management in the next section; but how can an Account Manager and the marketing team help to nurture the customer or indeed prospective client in the background to ensure your firm is front of mind for any future business opportunities?

In the same 2016 Marketing Leaders Benchmark survey, 79% of senior marketers from PSOs say that they want to focus on improving client experience this year. 37% said that their number one priority is to obtain more feedback from clients.

A concerning statistic from the same group that many have little or no account management or feedback framework in place. Those that do, use a mixture of tactics – telephone, online, reviews etc.

This is a basic requirement of “knowing your customer”, but what happens with the feedback itself? How does it qualify your business approach both tactically and strategically? In the same survey, just 12% integrate client feedback with financial data and only 29% segment their value add services according to client segmentation or analysis.

Automated nurturing is the backbone of any customer contact strategy, this can be segmented to suit your business needs; for instance by key account, sector, job function etc. Email marketing and marketing automation tools such as Click Dimensions or Dynamics Marketing can help with this. Click Dimensions natively integrates with Microsoft Dynamics CRM to offer multi-level email campaigns, online surveys, web landing pages –which all feed back into the prospect / customer record.

In turn if this analysis is kept within the central CRM, which then connects with your finance or ERP system, this allows the business to interrogate both sets of data in order to understand where the truly profitable relationships lie. Remember also that the service team is also using CRM, where SLA performance is being measured, analysed and shared.

By becoming smarter and more targeted with your marketing techniques (leaving behind the spray and pray email blast approach of old) and managing your social media presence, your public image perception is improved. For example if your social listening tool picks up a tweet from a potential prospect who has a complaint about how a competitor has invoiced for non approved work; a case study is delivered to your team on remote time sheet approval so that it can be sent out, aligning your organisation with their needs.

PERCEPTION IS EVERYTHING – HOW TO ENGAGE AND STAY CONNECTED WITH YOUR AUDIENCE

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REALITY MUST BACK UP PERCEPTION – DELIVERING EXCELLENT CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES

So, we know that 8 in 10 of the marketers in that survey plan to focus more on improving client experience. We have covered what sales, marketing and management can do to start to promise and then achieve this but if a service organisation fails to deliver on projects, they fail to deliver a great experience.

Excellence means delivery of projects on time, every time, to budget, to specification.

A successful project starts with comprehensive scoping, handover and kick off meetings with key stakeholders from sales, pre-sales and consultants. To help them achieve a profitable and smooth project, the project manager needs to avoid administrative inefficiencies by using project planning tools that are easy to adopt and that integrate with other areas such as resource planning (including utilisation KPIs), document management, finance/ERP (cost control, KPIs and billing) and HR (time and expenses for employees and contractors).

Tailored CRM solutions such as PSA CRM from Prodware can offer all of the standard functionality of Microsoft Dynamics for sales, marketing and customer service teams; but with all the additional requirements of a professional service organisation to help with streamlined project management.

By having this project information firmly within your CRM, this allows for easier knowledge sharing back down the chain to business development; for instance to help marketing with capturing project details for writing future tender submissions, case studies or that content marketing that we know is on the rise.

Customers also expect a consistent level of service from your organisation where ever you are. Because PSOs traditionally have a higher proportion of remote workers; there is an inherent need to ensure that your back office is available to them on any device. Which is why CRM applications such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM are available via the web or apps, via smartphone, tablet or laptop.

For example, with Prodware’s PSA for Dynamics CRM; consultants on the road can update timesheets, process expenses and have worksheets electronically signed for remote approvals.

Not only does this save your business time on monthly invoicing, reducing customer queries and credits; it also improves customer perception of a professionally run, modern business.

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Reality must back up perception – delivering excellent customer experiences

As a service organisation, with an intangible offering, often your greatest assets are your people. As such are staff engagement, support, collaboration and empowerment among your management priorities?

Giving your team the right tools for the job is a basic requirement and should serve as the backbone to any strategic goals you are aiming for.

The recipe for success

In a book aimed at the legal profession entitled “The Trusted Advisor” the authors described the trust equation which represented factors involved in how clients chose their providers:

Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy divided by Self-Interest

• Credibility – whether the lawyers appear to know what they are talking about;

• Reliability – whether the lawyers do what they say they will; and

• Intimacy – whether the lawyers understand the needs and interests of the client’s business.

Although this covered the legal profession, this equation can summarise the best practice approach for all professional service organisations in order to win, retain and secure repeat business.

Your firm must differentiate itself through best practice in relationship management – from targeting through to qualification of bids through to project management and value adds.

By harnessing productivity technology applications such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM that are tailored to your industry needs, you can capture and act on empirical insight in real time; the potential for success is there.

It is heartening to see from the PM Forum survey that 46% of respondents see their primary strategic focus as exploiting the latest marketing technologies to achieve better performance.

In order to be dynamic, agile and competitive, service organisations must ensure they are allowing their teams to use the best technology to help them succeed, because it is out there.

Speak to Prodware, a fellow professional service organisation, about how we assist clients with forward thinking technology to support business ambition.

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