Growing your Practice in 2018

No matter in which professional service you practice (legal, health care, accounting etc), if you want to learn how to win at growing your revenue year after year, then this article is for you!  So let’s talk …

Sales, sales, sales!

Sales isn’t something we normally associate with professional services, but it is 1000% the foundation of a practice.  Unfortunately, if you don’t understand this, you will lose.

If you think about making an impact in the world, i.e. selling something, obtaining a donation, getting voted for in an election, whatever the “transaction”, the strategy can be broken down into sales and marketing.

I never considered myself a sales person (more of a tech-head), mainly because I associated sales with sleazy tactics that attempted to “trick” people into buying whatever they didn’t need – and that wasn’t me!  But when I did some analysed (told you I was a tech-head) I found it was completely the opposite.

Truth be known, I have always been a sales person, I just didn’t know it!  Otherwise, I wouldn’t have run my own business for over 20+ years.

The type of sales and marketing that works best for professional service practices is relationship sales and marketing.  So why is that important?

Often, the vulnerability with marketing is it’s often touted as “one size fits all”.  E.g. Business X, in your industry, got a “thousand” new clients from Facebook Ads, so it will work the same for you”.

1. 1. INACTION:  Sitting at your desk waiting/hoping for the phone to ring is not going to cut it!  In most practices, it’s a high-touch 1-1 conversations where you are attempting to bring value to the other person that will.  So make reaching out part of your every-day!
   2. IDEALISM:  If you are clinging to the idealistic vision of how you made your money or found your clients in the past, move on!  The world is changing!  The way you were successful yesterday definitely won’t be the way you are successful today.  You need to look forward, and be totally unromantic about what you did in the past that got you “here”.  You need a new strategy!

One thing to consider, is that the landscape of business and the communication in our society has made a profound shift over the last decade.  So you need to think differently too.

The #1 rule in your sale playbook has to be – ATTENTION!

Before you consider selling your services you have to understand who your client is and where they hang out.

Where do your clients spend their time?  Is it LinkedIn, Google AdWords, Email, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter? YouTube? Is it events?  Sporting games?  Where are they?

Or more significantly where do their eyes and ears go?

With all the information available on the internet you can now truly “know” more than ever about your client, then react to that information to reach anyone at any time.  It doesn’t matter if they are the CEO of a bank or Mike the local plumber, 99% of the time your customer is going to be searchable and accessible online.  Oh, and BTW if you didn’t know, consumers spend 10 hours a day in front of their screens with approximately half of that time on a mobile device.

Clearly, the internet has our attention. 😉