A previous post talked about how lawyers don’t market themselves very well. There is one notable exception that I know of and, not surprisingly, it is the firm with the happiest clients according to a Legal Business magazine survey. The firm in question is Liverpool-based Thomas Higgins Partnership (THP), which specialises in commercial debt collection. Marketing has a number of definitions but if you agree that, at its core, it is about finding out what customers want and then satisfying those needs profitably, then THP is clearly an exemplar.

Getting paid in reasonable time is probably the biggest bugbear for any small-to-medium-sized company. It can make the difference between financial survival and failure. It’s why in November 1998, the UK was one of the first countries in the EU to introduce legislation to give businesses a statutory right to claim interest on outstanding commercial debts (more info. here).

I’ve used THP very effectively to deal with a persistent late payer. The company in question had a very badly-run finance department with a steady turnover of employees. I got fed up with hearing implausible excuses for not paying on time (“we’ve lost/never received the invoice, we can’t find the order number, the invoice needs countersigning by two people and one of them’s on sick leave,” etc, etc.). My client contact at the company tried and failed to intervene. So each time invoices became overdue I spent a few minutes on THP’s site setting up a ‘letter before action’ and always got paid within a couple of days. And I made sure my extra costs were included in future invoices.

In summary, THP stands out for offering a great service at great prices. And it puts others in the legal sector to shame with its marketing-led business approach. Take a bow THP.

This is a story that will ring plenty of bells, and should be encouraging, for those who spend most of their time pitching stories to media. It might also be revealing to those who pay their salaries.

A couple of years ago I worked for a management consultancy. The firm specialised in the corporate finance function, helping CFOs of medium to large corporations improve operating efficiencies, and generally improving the ability of their finance functions to serve the business strategically. It was all very sober stuff and, as might be expected, the firm’s employees were smart and switched on. That’s the background, here’s the story. I got talking to one of the firm’s principals about ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR) and how it seemed to be gaining some traction beyond the early hype. He presented a compelling case about why finance directors were the best people to lead a company’s CSR strategy. In a nutshell, it was all to do with their knowledge about data, its collection and its presentation. I was convinced. After a bit of digging around, it became clear that no one else had really talked about this.

Now, The Financial Times has a weekly accountancy column that’s occasionally opened up to outside contributors. Knowing this, I did my preparation, called up the column editor and pitched the idea of an opinion editorial for my client, timed around a topical industry event. He quickly rebuffed the idea, doubting accountants were interested in CSR and telling me that, in his opinion, it was a flaky subject anyway. At that point, most in my situation would have given up and reported the rejection back to their client. But I was bemused. A well-developed instinct for stories told me this was still a good idea. So, a few weeks later when the section editor was replaced by someone else, I tried exactly the same pitch again. Her reaction was the diametric opposite of the first and produced this article.

The lesson here is twofold: trust your instincts and be (selectively) persistent when pitching media stories. I said there was something in this for the PR team paymasters and here it is: a good media result often takes time, skill and effort. Please set your budgets accordingly.

From time to time, we’re all faced with presenting something complicated to an audience, and we often worry about how we can make what we have to say interesting, memorable and engaging. That’s why I want to share this great video from The Royal Society of Arts. It demonstrates well how to use ‘scribing’ a technique I first came across in 2004 when working with a management consultancy and have since seen put to great communication effect. You can find out more about scribing and how it can be used here. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the video as much as I did!

I’m going to give Duncan Bannatyne, one of the BBC’s business gurus from the popular Dragons’ Den TV series, the benefit of the doubt here. I think someone else must have written his opinion editorial published in last Thursday’s Daily Telegraph newspaper in the UK.

Duncan Bannatyne sports a red nose for charity

Because I can’t believe someone who started with a £450 ice cream van and is now said to be worth £350m would ever be capable of writing the following business advice: “plan for every possible eventuality and think carefully about your marketing strategy.” First, no business owner would ever do anything else if they did the former. The latter grates because it ranks alongside ‘make sure you get dressed before leaving home’ in terms of useful business advice.

He goes on to say that “the principle of making marketing consistent with the business plan is something that applies equally to all companies.” Last time I looked, one of the longest standing, plain English definitions of marketing was something along the lines of ‘find out what customers want and give it to them.’ Or, if you prefer, ‘right product, right place, right price, right promotion’. In Bannatyne’s world, marketing is something you apply after the business plan is drawn up, instead of something that actually defines it. The article continues with more absurdities: “The most important thing is awareness of your product.” Anyone in marketing knows this is not the case. People are well aware of many things they have no intention of ever buying (perhaps now including the idea that Bannatyne is a business guru?). Awareness is certainly important but, in itself, is never enough: you have to create a desire to purchase – ideally a lasting one that revolves around preference and advocacy.

The Telegraph article’s headline was ‘Does BP now stand for bad promotion?’. Perhaps it does, but some might say bad promotion is also an apt description for what this article does for brand Bannatyne.

Outside the obvious targets of the City and shareholders, who are understandably most interested in the numbers, an annual report has many audiences. Still, all too many make for pretty turgid reading, and rely primarily on the standard pie/bar charts to convey the data. So it was a pleasant surprise to see Home Retail Group, owners of well-known UK high street brands Argos and Homebase, taking a different approach this week with this nice creative use of video. It’s a pity, though, that they didn’t recognise that the rather dry, jargon-laced corporate language used in a printed report wouldn’t work as a spoken narrative. Still, it’s better than many I’ve seen.

In the UK, high street (retail) banking is dominated by a handful of five, big brands so similar you’d be hard pushed to fit a cigarette paper between them. So news of Metro bank’s launch, which The Telegraph newspaper points out is the first new entrant to this market in 100 years, ought to be welcomed, didn’t it? Especially when you hear its billionaire founder Vernon Hill likes to have fun and plans to “to eliminate every stupid bank rule we can find.”

How refreshing. Well, on the surface, yes. Any new-comer promising to shake things up and put customers (and their dogs) first has to be welcomed, if only to keep the stuffy old established banks on their toes. But then I came across this CNN story about Vernon Hill.

The photo is enough to have you running from the room screaming, Edvard Munch-style, but the line that did it for me was “Duffy dines on caviar and filet mignon!” I showed this to a couple of people and one of them said “he’s not getting his hands on my money.” Quite.

Coming soon to London: the dog-friendly bank we’ve all been waiting for. Photo courtesy Photos8

Chances are, the existing banks are so dozy, Metro will succeed all the same. But Hill has some pretty stiff and equally disruptive competition arriving soon in the shape of Tesco and Virgin. Personally, I’m not so sure Metro’s ‘open all hours’ strategy is the right one for UK retail banking, but, being an early and willing convert to internet banking, perhaps I’m not the type of customer he’s after. In my book, the only sensible motive for walking into a bank has to be robbery.

Postscript: shortly after writing this I came across this superb, prescient Harvard Business Review blog The Case for Being Disruptively Good by Umair Haque, director of the Havas Media Lab.

Reading a major, left-leaning British newspaper on Saturday I was struck by two separate stories featuring what is now the world’s largest technology corporation, Apple. In the first, Apple was the story. It was a light, positive piece about the frenzied events at the company’s flagship London store on the first day that Ipads went on sale. Apple marketing folk must have been delighted by the scale and tone of the article. The second story was altogether different, and must have tainted the pleasure prompted by the first. It was about a spate of suicides by unhappy workers at a Chinese factory owned by Foxconn, a major supplier to Apple.

How much image 'polishing' went on for Jobs' Foxconn visit? Photo Credit UPI Photo/Stephen Shaver

Once the supplier realised the Western media had taken an interest, it announced that wages were to be increased by 20%, subsequently raising this to 30%. Today Steve Jobs of Apple, sensing a potential PR drama brewing, felt compelled to go on the defensive. He was reported by the BBC as saying:

“You go in this place and it’s a factory but, my gosh, they’ve got restaurants and movie theatres and hospitals and swimming pools. For a factory, it’s pretty nice.”

He may have been quoted selectively, but I couldn’t help thinking that he seemed to be saying that the suicidal workers should have been more grateful for such a working environment. You can imagine the careful orchestration of the Chinese owners to present Jobs with a ‘shiny, happy people-style’ image for his visit.

Next time, he should arrive unannounced and insist on unrestricted access without a chaperone. He might then see why Chinese migrants prefer to make the ultimate protest than continue working in Apple’s supply chain. The people in London who grappled one another to get their hands on an Ipad might do well to reconsider their preferred choice of gadget brand as well.

Some would say lawyers deserve all they get reputation-wise: they communicate in a strange, obscure language, deliberately designed to complicate the simple; they inhabit a rarefied, archaic world largely untouched by modern business norms such as offering high customer service levels and value for money. I suspect Luke Johnson’s recent damning column in The Financial Times speaks for many. The British government clearly thinks things need shaking up too because its ‘Legal Services Act’ comes into force next year, and aims to open up and deregulate the market. It has been described by The Times newspaper as the legal sector’s own version of The City’s ‘Big Bang’.

This polar bear ‘brief’ in Vancouver is probably the world’s only cool lawyer. Credit: photo courtesy Claire Dancer, Flickr

If, as expected, it creates greater competition, in-flows of capital and outside management, will these factors drive a big improvement in the way British Law firms market themselves? I think it will, and it’s long overdue according to James Baxter*:

“The legal sector remains on the whole undifferentiated: the same lawyers, offering the same services to the same clients who have little idea what distinguishes the amorphous mass of firms before them.”

Baxter ought to know. He is a former editor of Legal Business magazine. For those firms who’ve not yet taken the plunge into marketing, here’s one simple, important and overriding rule:  never entrust the task to any of the partners, unless they can demonstrate genuine, business and brand-building experience. This is what happens when you break that rule. Last month I received an alert saying my Twitter stream @andymturner was being followed by no less than ‘London’s coolest law firm’. How do I know this apparently oxymoronic claim is for real? Because that’s how the firm’s founder and senior partner trumpets his firm’s Twitter account biography. Somewhat surprised, I clicked through to the firm’s website expecting to see the epitome of cool, but of course, found just another dull-looking law firm with an equally ordinary client list. So I couldn’t resist writing to tell said senior partner that it’s unlikely anyone wants ‘cool’ from their law firm and to find a better USP fast before anyone important sees it, or at least just drop it. He replied with what seemed a little ‘froideur’ saying that he probably will, that he didn’t take Twitter seriously anyway (which is evident because he’s following 8,000+ people) and that it’s better to be talked about than not at all. I took the trouble to reply but haven’t heard from him again. Some people are so damned ungrateful on receipt of free, sensible advice.

Like others, I’m interested in keeping up with how businesses are using Twitter and what benefits they accrue. So was keen to read a recent article on this theme penned by international property consultancy Drivers Jonas Deloitte, DJD for short. After a bit of a struggle to find DJD’s Twitter page (they forgot to tell us in the piece), I noticed that the firm had a seemingly impressive number of followers (1100+). Curiosity is something I’m not short of so I delved a bit deeper. As I saw some of the followers’ profiles, the article comment describing Twitter as‘a watering hole at which to meet potential clients’ came back to me in a flash, but not in the sense originally intended: several of them were obvious porn peddlers.

Credit: photo courtesy Steve Punter at Flickr

So, either DJD doesn’t realise (did it bulk-buy followers?), it doesn’t care (someone at the firm must have manually accepted these follows), or it has no company policy for who can follow its corporate Twitter site. I found the same situation with another company I encountered recently. In that case, the firm had clearly bought the bulk of its followers. You could tell because there was a distinct over-representation of micro-businesses in Wales, despite the fact that the firm in question has no business or operations in that country, is based in London and it sells to a different scale of company entirely. I advise anyone who wants to avoid this kind of situation to read Michael Kristof’s and Chad Engle’s excellent content here

P.S. After writing this I came across this related post by Adrian Short about the unintended reputational consequences of using Google AdSense on your corporate website

Most companies who hire marketing services firms love to assert their power by making their suppliers jump through hoops from time to time, and it’s an increasing practice. Which is why, a few times each month, suppliers of advertising, public relations and other marketing services have to participate in a time consuming and usually fruitless ‘beauty parade’ game, otherwise known as pitching for client business (other businesses use the more generally known term: selling).

I’ve been on both sides of the fence on many occasions and can tell you it isn’t pretty. Clients often draw up flaky briefs that are impossible to interpret and then refuse to be pinned down by answering perfectly reasonable questions of detail. The agency people will try to persuade the client that they’ve had their best account team giving lengthy, considered thoughts to the brief. In reality, it’s likely that most of the effort is the result of whichever individual has enough free time working into the wee hours of the night before the pitch. So it was interesting to see the results of a survey on this theme from the UK’s Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA) reported here.

The survey, completed by 51 out of the 180 PRCA firms, found that the amount of time spent on a new client sales pitch varies widely but the average is 20 hours. That got me thinking about the cost. Fortunately, the PRCA also produces another survey called the ‘inter-firm comparison’. This is an anonymous survey allowing agency management to benchmark their businesses against other PRCA member firms on various factors, including hourly rates charged. To arrive at a reasonable cost estimate for our average 20 hour sales pitch effort we have to make some assumptions about how that time breaks down. Here are my ‘best guess’ assumptions:

• Board Director: 2 hours
• Account director: 8 hours
• Account manager: 6 hours
• Account executive: 4 hours

Using the PRCA’s 2009 hourly rates for the different job levels, and the above breakdowns for time, the theoretical cost of that one sales pitch, based on unrecoverable hourly rates alone is £2,292. Over a typical 46-week working year, assuming the agency pitches once every two weeks, the theoretical annual cost amounts to £52,716 per agency.

This figure excludes any third-party costs. PRCA communications director Richard Ellis says the 20 hour average refers to ‘time spent preparing for a new business pitch’. We must therefore assume it does not include the time travelling to, from and attending the various pitch process meetings, multiplied by the number of people from the agency involved; it looks a bit on the low side otherwise. Neil Backwith* thinks so too. He tells me 50 hours is the average time investment for a new business pitch made by the groups of PR firm CEOs he works with. If we use Neil’s figure, the annual cost jumps to £142,312 per agency. But even this might well be conservative. Ellis says the survey figures “went into the ‘over 200’ at the other end of the scale”!

Who pays for all this? Clients ultimately, of course, but indirectly through the fees agencies have to charge for their services. As Backwith points out,

“By asking more agencies to pitch clients will end up paying higher rates for the privilege – quite the opposite of what they hoped for!”

Do they and their procurement colleagues realise this? Do they care? Is there a better way? Microsoft’s Peter Devery clearly thinks it’s time for a change, stating in a recent PR Week article that:

“…. the PR pitch beauty parade is a legacy of an old industry. The process is lengthy, costly, resource-hungry, inefficient and often does not result in the required level of understanding which will lead to a fruitful partnership. We have to move the industry on, for both the agencies’ and clients’ sake.”

Some in the agency world are fighting back by banding together and refusing to pitch. But sadly it’s the Belgians who are doing the rebelling, not the Brits.

* Neil Backwith is a management consultant, trainer and mentor to professional services firms and their leaders. He was previously chief executive (EMEA) at PR firm Porter Novelli. He is author of the PRCA book ‘Managing professional communications agencies’.