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Scarlett Letter #84: Opportunities will be missed if they don’t hire your firm!

Recently, I attended You’ve Got The Look: Branding and PR forSmall Business. Sally O’Dowd, founder of Sally On Media, and Emily Lonigro, founder of design firm LimeRed Studio, discussed how small-business owners can get recognized for what they do best. Excellent in their respective crafts, these women did a great job of walking their audience through a step-by-step process for branding.

Like all of us marketing professionals/consultants, Sally and Emily ask ‘Just Right’ probing questions to glean the most intel, data, and even intuitive subtleties from their clients. One such question was this:

What opportunities will your prospects miss if they do not hire your firm?
Sure, responses to this question are partially rooted within your firm’s differentiators. But, what if you are competing against ‘not hiring any firm’? In other words, what if your prospect is pondering: ‘to hire or not to hire?’ Then, not only do you have to formulate missed opportunities if they make the wrong decision and hire the other guy, but you also have to devise reasons that foregoing a consultant (by handling the project in-house, and/or by deleting the project altogether) would be a terrible, terrible decision.

Well, let’s be real. The sky is not going to fall if the prospect doesn’t hire your firm. The world will not be over.  But, there are some opportunities that could indeed be missed. For fun, I’ll take a stab at answering the question for an ‘applies-to-all’ firm in the AEC industry:

Opportunity missed = successful execution of plan.
If JoeEngineering does not hire Scarlett Consulting to do their 2010 strategic sales and marketing plan, they risk the ability to execute the tactics within. Why? Because most consultants stay at the 10K-foot perspective, while Scarlett Consulting starts at 10K, and sticks around at 3K to advise when you hit snags over time. And ambitious plans are not perfect. So you will, undoubtedly, hit a few snags during the course of execution. {Further, if you opt to handle the planning process internally, will your firm be able to complete an objective, robust plan—not to mention its execution?}

Try assessing each of your current prospects relative to ‘opportunities missed if they don’t hire us’. If prepared thoughtfully—with a fair and honest perspective—you will see that the answers will vary from prospect-to-prospect, and project-to-project.

           

Tags: AEC differentiators, Anne Scarlett A/E Marketing, design and construction differentiators, linkedin, professional services marketing, professional services sales, Scarlett Consulting AEC business development

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