By Robert Buday

Nearly every professional services firm we talk to is counting on thought leadership marketing to boost the lead stream – especially with clients squeezing discretionary spending to the bone.   However, many professional firms are deeply unhappy with their thought leadership programs.  Their marketing campaigns aren’t delivering many good leads despite major investments.  Perhaps more frustrating, they don’t know why.

By Tim Parker

All of us in professional services visit with prospects to explain how we can help and, hopefully, to sell them our services. Almost the first question we ask ourselves to prepare for an upcoming sales meeting is, “Which sales presentation are we going to use?” This is rarely the right first question. A presentation that comes “off the shelf” cannot address the issues that a particular prospect is worrying about when he calls.

Legal Marketing Reader today features an extract of our work on Aligning Marketing and Business Development. They describe it as an excellent argument, based on real research, on the why and how of getting marketing and sales effort to work in concert for maximum benefit.This article is itself an extract of our recent book, Thoughts on Thought Leadership.