Most people old enough to be in senior management roles today know the slogan ‘Let your fingers do the walking’. It did wonders for promoting Yellow Pages and joined the advertising hall of fame back in 2002. But how about ‘Let your clients do the talking’? Nope, that doesn’t resonate quite so loudly does it? But it should, because credible endorsements from others are one of the most potent sales tools in business-to-business, especially if you’re selling professional services. PR professionals call this ‘third party endorsement’ (TPE) and, well managed, it can win you business, forge alliances, improve recruitment and retention, and help in a multitude of other reputation-enhancing ways too.

TPE is so powerful because it responds to a basic psychological need. In business – indeed in life in general – when presented with an important choice, dilemma or problem, we tend to look around us to see what others in the same circumstances have done. Even if we already have a good idea about the appropriate course of action, we still tend to look for external validation of that choice. Both scenarios present management with an opportunity for their firm to be seen as the best choice of solution provider.
Here’s another very good reason why TPE is valuable in marketing terms. Journalists will be much more interested in your story ideas if they are ‘client-told’ as opposed to stories told purely by the firm. Good journalists will instinctively seek out independent validation and evidence when presented with a claim. It’s part of their training to be cynical.

They also know that good stories need tangible examples readers can relate to in a meaningful way. They want drama, personality and, even in dry business publications these days, a little entertainment. Because journalists are more time-pressed than ever before, if you feed them your choicest case study morsels, chances are they’ll bite your hand off.

So, by exploiting TPE, you’ll be benefiting from powerfully-told endorsements of your services and expertise, and pushing against an open door when your PR team contact the media. Why then, are more firms not making the most of such a great opportunity? That’s something I’ll cover in a forthcoming post.

Elle Macpherson and a ceo. I know which one I'd prefer to have in my boardroom

Earlier this month Elle Macpherson, one of the original ‘supermodels’, was interviewed by Lucy Kellaway in The Financial Times. You can read the article here (although you may need to register). It’s a great read, though it left this formerly neutral reader, and I suspect many others, with a rather dim view of ‘The Body’, as she used to be known. It made me wonder what the original objective for doing the interview was, what preparation went into it and whether the outcome might have been better for McPherson, who clearly went into damage limitation mode judging from the writer’s account of post-interview phone calls.

Super models, like others at the top of their game in fashion, media and sport, are used to journalists fawning over them. Because they are hugely in demand, they can pick and choose who they grant interviews to, with the result that most journalists have to accept the sometimes ridiculous conditions they (and their publicists) demand: so-and-so will not talk about this; you are not allowed to mention (insert sensitive issue). You can see evidence of it in Kellaway’s piece but all such attempts at media interview control were never going to work with The FT, which as most people know is much more interested in business than celebrity stories.

Kellaway doesn’t make her living interviewing the likes of Elle Macpherson so had nothing to lose from writing an honest and frank account of the meeting. Though she is fair, she has a low tolerance for flaky business ‘guff’ and isn’t afraid to get the highlighter pen out when she encounters it. So why did Macpherson’s PR firm, a high-end fashion PR agency based in Savile Row, think it was a good idea to do this interview? My bet is that they approached Kellaway rather than the other way round. Why, at the bare minimum, wasn’t Macpherson briefed and ready to talk about business instead of underwear? Did they think their client was safer talking to a female reporter?

Tellingly, Macpherson misinterprets Kellaway’s reference to the basic accounting term ‘wasting asset’ and responds frostily (savour the mental image, as the ‘Ab-Fab’ PR agency minder sitting in on the interview didn’t get it either). We are left wondering if she really is as deeply immersed in the business world as she claims to be.

What’s the most important lesson? I’m torn between “never use a fashion PR agency to handle business media relations” and “if your client is the brand and writes a ‘brand poem’, make sure they never mention it during a media interview.”

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.

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.

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