Professional Service Firms: Market to the Clients You Already Have

Professional services firms have awakened to the need to market themselves as a means of acquiring new clients. However, once the client’s added to the list they’re too often simply “communicated with” rather than “marketed to”, and that means missed opportunities.

Communications are important. Sending clients a regular newsletter three or four times a year is always a good idea. But that doesn’t necessarily equate to a genuine marketing effort.

Think back to the general rule that it takes five times as much expense to acquire a new client as it does to retain an existing one. This tells us that we still have to keep spending to retain clients, even though the amount is a lot less than it took us to acquire them.

The cost of your communications to existing clients has to be viewed as an ongoing marketing expense that’s a part of doing business. It may help to create a separate marketing budget item that identifies these outgoings as “retention” rather than “acquisition” so the two can be compared for their effectiveness.

Now consider the difference between communicating and marketing. When you communicate to someone you’re simply sending them a message. News about what your firm has done and who’s joined it are typical messages of this nature. But is this really marketing anything? The answer is “no”.

Now consider a marketing communication. What it does is to sell something. It’s not about the sender; it’s about the recipient, and about the benefits the recipient can get from something the sender has to offer.

Most firms offer a variety of services. It would be unusual for a single client to take advantage of all these services, and it’s also highly possible that some clients source some of the services you offer from other providers.

You need to create a marketing strategy to existing clients that will sell them more of your services and get them to buy from you what they’re getting elsewhere. This is what marketing to existing clients is all about, and it can be a solid revenue-builder if it’s done effectively.

Review every client and identify the services they’re now acquiring from your firm. You should know them well enough to at least guess at what they might be sourcing from other firms that you could now provide. Even better is to find out what they’re acquiring from other firms that isn’t in your current list of offerings but could be added without incurring too great an expense.

What you’re doing now is creating the basis for a list of marketing targets that is also a list of what it will take to generate more business from your existing client base. After all, you’ve already created the customer and these are the clients that will be the most cost-effective to generate more revenues from.

One technique that accomplishes this is to survey your existing clients, preferably by engaging the services of an outside firm of market researchers. They can ask questions that will give you valuable information about your own firm’s performance and how well you’re already meeting clients’ needs.

You’ll also gain those useful insights into what other firms offer that you’re not offering. If your clients are buying them there’s a definite market out there to at least consider.

Growing the business that you do with an existing client will also contribute to the growth of the relationship between your two organizations. Your offering can be custom-tailored to meet their specific requirements so it becomes extremely difficult for any other firm to capture their interest.

Marketing isn’t a magic “fix” for your own shortcomings if you’re trying to get a client to leave their other supplier of a service. Your product has to be at least equal to what they’re sourcing from somewhere else, and hopefully better. You need to find out what your competitors are doing well and work to exceed their offering.

You also have to accept that some relationships your clients have with other suppliers is so strong that you’d never be able to break that bond. The most important result of your research will be to find out what your competitors are doing so you can add it to your list of services, even though its greatest appeal may be to the new clients you acquire.

Copyright 2004, RAN ONE Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission from www.ranone.com.