Thursday’s profit tip for authors

Professional Services Marketing: How the Best Firms Build Premier Brands, Thriving Lead Generation Engines, and Cultures of Business Development Success is a “must read” for nonfiction authors interested in leveraging their book into back-end coaching, consulting, and speaking profits.

Today’s informed authors understand that book sales typically represent only a small portion of the author’s income. In most cases, the majority of the author’s income comes from coach, consulting, and speaking activities–all of which require the author to be able to market and sell their professional services.

Professional Services Marketing is a “soup to nuts” guide written by two professionals whose company has been researching what works, and what doesn’t work, in service marketing for decades. Its 23 chapters address every aspect of the topic, including:

• Client expectations
• Target marketing
• Pricing
• Offer development
• Message development
• Lead generation
• Branding
• Pricing
• Client development
• Client retention

As an example of Professional Services Marketing’s pragmatism and tone is the following sentence from the introduction:

The first rule of services marketing–a key to revenue and profitability grown–is getting your service right.

At every point, Mike Schultz and John Doerr emphasize the pragmatic aspects of marketing and selling, i.e., profit generation–dollars & cents results. Branding without sales is wasted.

Another favorite quote that expresses the authors’ approach and style:

If you’re doing only 70 percent of what you need to do, you don’t get 70 percent results; you get much less. Like patching a lead in the bottom of a bucket, if you don’t patch it 100 percent, it still leaks.

Decades of field tested research

The authors have synthesized effective marketing for professional services firms in terms of four measurable outcomes; the first three form the backbone of Professional Services Marketing:

1. Conversations with potential buyers
2. Better odds of winning client engagement
3. Higher revenue per engagement and client, and higher fees for services
4. Increased affinity with the actual and potential workforce

It is the emphasis upon “measurable” that sets Professional Services Marketing apart from similar books. Mike Schultz and John E. Doerr are co-founders of the Wellesley Hills Group, a leading business development firm for consultants, attorneys, authors, technology professionals, engineers, and other professional services providers.

The firm’s RainToday.com research and publishing division is responsible for numerous professional research reports. These include:

• How Clients Buy: 2009 Benchmark Report on Professional Services Marketing & Selling from the Client’s Perspective
• What’s Working in Lead Generation
• The Business Book Publishing Series studying the business impact of writing a book and summarizing the best practices of business book authors.

Judging Professional Services Marketing’s true value

Professional Services Marketing synthesizes data from the above, and other, RainToday.com research reports and combines them with detailed suggestions and tips for creating effective marketing in the Web 2.0 age.

Professional Services Marketing offers both absolute and relative value; absolute in the value of its organization, concise style, and detailed information, and relative in terms of its cost compared to the $200 to $400 price range of many of the RainToday.com research reports backing up its advice.

Professional Services Marketing is well written enough to read on a plane or train, yet detailed enough for authors to use it as a daily guide and checklist as they leverage their books to profits from services marketing. This book is likely to become as essential a part of an author’s library as Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style.