Louise Copeland has been named director of marketing and alumni relations for William Mitchell College of Law effective May 20, 2008. Copeland comes to William Mitchell from the University of Minnesota, where she has been director of marketing services for the Carlson School of Management.
“Louise brings many years of marketing experience in higher education and business, including leading successful advertising and marketing campaigns at one of the preeminent business schools in the nation,” said Linda Keillor Berg, vice president of Institutional Advancement for Mitchell. “Her talents will help engage our extensive network of alumni and communicate Mitchell’s strong brand of practical legal education that has trained so many leaders in the legal community.”
Prior to joining the Carlson School, Copeland worked as a marketing consultant, and as a marketing manager for Land O’Lakes, Inc. She earned her bachelor of science degree from Seton Hall University and master of business administration degree from Carlson School of Management.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Williams Mullen Hires New Marketing Coordinator
Williams Mullen is pleased to announce that Jennifer S. Griffin has joined the firm as Marketing Coordinator for the Raleigh, Research Triangle Park and Wilmington offices.
Jennifer holds a Bachelor’s degree in Public and Interpersonal Communication from North Carolina State University and specializes in Social Media. Ms. Griffin is an active member of the Triangle chapter of the American Marketing Association.
About Williams Mullen
Williams Mullen provides comprehensive legal services to regional, national and international clients. With 325 attorneys and offices in North Carolina, Virginia, Washington, D.C. and London, we deliver innovative solutions to support our clients’ diverse business activities. Close working relationships with clients have been the foundation of Williams Mullen’s progressive approach to law practice since the firm was founded nearly 100 years ago.
Jennifer holds a Bachelor’s degree in Public and Interpersonal Communication from North Carolina State University and specializes in Social Media. Ms. Griffin is an active member of the Triangle chapter of the American Marketing Association.
About Williams Mullen
Williams Mullen provides comprehensive legal services to regional, national and international clients. With 325 attorneys and offices in North Carolina, Virginia, Washington, D.C. and London, we deliver innovative solutions to support our clients’ diverse business activities. Close working relationships with clients have been the foundation of Williams Mullen’s progressive approach to law practice since the firm was founded nearly 100 years ago.
6 Steps to a Successful Direct Mail Program - Jill Eastman
When developing or managing a direct mail program, there are practical strategies you can implement to streamline the process. Incorporate a D.I.R.E.C.T. approach to your direct mail program by following these steps:
Develop Your Tools
Take time to lay the foundation of your direct mail program by developing planning tools. Examples of useful tools include:
* Campaign Summary Form: Design a form that summarizes the campaign goals and includes information such as: the target geographic market, target industries, titles of decision makers, timing, and possible mailings to present to the audience.
* Campaign Folder: Each time a new project is undertaken, create a project folder that contains everything relevant to the project. Include all documentation, such as the creative brief, text, graphics, printing and mailing information.
* Routing Checklist: You should attach a routing checklist to the outside of the folder. Use it to track each element of the campaign as it works its way through the entire process. If you cannot check something on schedule, you have identified a bottle-neck in your campaign and know where to take action.
Initiate The Right Piece
Figure out what type of direct mail piece will deliver the right message to the right prospects at the right time. Start by asking yourself what your objective is.
Is your goal to announce a new service offering? Send a brochure that shows your firm has a tradition of successful new service launches.
Or, do you want to communicate industry competence? Send a quarterly newsletter or industry trend alert. These build trust and establish your firm as an industry leader with your targets.
Whatever you choose, keep in mind that direct mail works better as part of an integrated marketing strategy. Consider how you might compliment your direct mail efforts with other elements, such as PR, e-mail blasts, online events, etc.
Realistic Expectations
Misguided expectations can break any direct mail campaign. Set expectation too high and you and/or your stakeholders will be disappointed, regardless of the campaign's result.
Avoid this and set realistic expectations from the start. Have a campaign planning session with your stakeholders to discuss expectation for such things as timing, costs, partner involvement, end results and response rate.
Also, make sure everyone in the process understands the impact of meeting their individual deadlines. By establishing these expectations early, you can leave your initial planning meeting with everyone on the same page. You can then use your routing checklist to monitor the process.
Energize Yourself And Keep Momentum
Always update your routing checklist. It tracks your project's success and marks each small victory. That will keep you energized and the project's momentum going.
It also helps to know you are effectively managing the various parts of your campaign.
Champion Your Project
Be your own cheerleader! One of the most important yet overlooked steps is promoting direct mail pieces within the company.
Informing everyone in the company of marketing efforts, direct mail or any other, has the benefit of marketing the marketing department's efforts. Ultimately, everyone from the CEO to the front desk should know what was delivered and when.
Direct mail also reaches your partners' clients and prospects, which makes it especially important for them to know what is being sent.
You can do all this by making the information available on the firm's intranet. Include the piece, mail date and description of the mail list.
Track Your ROI
One of the biggest challenges in marketing is the age old issue of measuring and tracking results.
A one-to-two percent response rate for a mass mailing is considered successful. Two-to-three percent is excellent, and anything above that is exceptional.
Besides receiving phone calls in response to a direct mail campaign, there are other means of measuring the success. For instance, add a Web site address specific to each campaign so that they can go directly to that dedicated landing page. Utilize Web services such as Google Analytics and you can quantify the number of hits your Web site received through the duration of the campaign.
Other ROI measurements include the costs of the campaign and total number of active leads and fees (both year one and annuity) of new engagements. You may have a harder time measuring other important things such as brand awareness and name recognition.
It is also important to review the process for each campaign at the end. Determine what worked well and what improvements could be made.
Jill Eastman is a Marketing Communications Manager with Weaver and Tidwell, L.L.P. Her background is in integrated marketing communications, including direct marketing, niche building, design, electronic media and research. Jill is also a member of the Association for Accounting Marketing ("AAM") and a contributor to the AAM's bi-monthly newsletter MarkeTrends. You can reach Jill at jaeastman@weaverandtidwell.com.
This article courtesy of www.raintoday.com
Develop Your Tools
Take time to lay the foundation of your direct mail program by developing planning tools. Examples of useful tools include:
* Campaign Summary Form: Design a form that summarizes the campaign goals and includes information such as: the target geographic market, target industries, titles of decision makers, timing, and possible mailings to present to the audience.
* Campaign Folder: Each time a new project is undertaken, create a project folder that contains everything relevant to the project. Include all documentation, such as the creative brief, text, graphics, printing and mailing information.
* Routing Checklist: You should attach a routing checklist to the outside of the folder. Use it to track each element of the campaign as it works its way through the entire process. If you cannot check something on schedule, you have identified a bottle-neck in your campaign and know where to take action.
Initiate The Right Piece
Figure out what type of direct mail piece will deliver the right message to the right prospects at the right time. Start by asking yourself what your objective is.
Is your goal to announce a new service offering? Send a brochure that shows your firm has a tradition of successful new service launches.
Or, do you want to communicate industry competence? Send a quarterly newsletter or industry trend alert. These build trust and establish your firm as an industry leader with your targets.
Whatever you choose, keep in mind that direct mail works better as part of an integrated marketing strategy. Consider how you might compliment your direct mail efforts with other elements, such as PR, e-mail blasts, online events, etc.
Realistic Expectations
Misguided expectations can break any direct mail campaign. Set expectation too high and you and/or your stakeholders will be disappointed, regardless of the campaign's result.
Avoid this and set realistic expectations from the start. Have a campaign planning session with your stakeholders to discuss expectation for such things as timing, costs, partner involvement, end results and response rate.
Also, make sure everyone in the process understands the impact of meeting their individual deadlines. By establishing these expectations early, you can leave your initial planning meeting with everyone on the same page. You can then use your routing checklist to monitor the process.
Energize Yourself And Keep Momentum
Always update your routing checklist. It tracks your project's success and marks each small victory. That will keep you energized and the project's momentum going.
It also helps to know you are effectively managing the various parts of your campaign.
Champion Your Project
Be your own cheerleader! One of the most important yet overlooked steps is promoting direct mail pieces within the company.
Informing everyone in the company of marketing efforts, direct mail or any other, has the benefit of marketing the marketing department's efforts. Ultimately, everyone from the CEO to the front desk should know what was delivered and when.
Direct mail also reaches your partners' clients and prospects, which makes it especially important for them to know what is being sent.
You can do all this by making the information available on the firm's intranet. Include the piece, mail date and description of the mail list.
Track Your ROI
One of the biggest challenges in marketing is the age old issue of measuring and tracking results.
A one-to-two percent response rate for a mass mailing is considered successful. Two-to-three percent is excellent, and anything above that is exceptional.
Besides receiving phone calls in response to a direct mail campaign, there are other means of measuring the success. For instance, add a Web site address specific to each campaign so that they can go directly to that dedicated landing page. Utilize Web services such as Google Analytics and you can quantify the number of hits your Web site received through the duration of the campaign.
Other ROI measurements include the costs of the campaign and total number of active leads and fees (both year one and annuity) of new engagements. You may have a harder time measuring other important things such as brand awareness and name recognition.
It is also important to review the process for each campaign at the end. Determine what worked well and what improvements could be made.
Jill Eastman is a Marketing Communications Manager with Weaver and Tidwell, L.L.P. Her background is in integrated marketing communications, including direct marketing, niche building, design, electronic media and research. Jill is also a member of the Association for Accounting Marketing ("AAM") and a contributor to the AAM's bi-monthly newsletter MarkeTrends. You can reach Jill at jaeastman@weaverandtidwell.com.
This article courtesy of www.raintoday.com
Don't Lower Your Prices....No Matter What!
RainToday.com recently published its Fees and Pricing Benchmark Report: Consulting Industry 2008 in which they analyzed a ton of data from 645 consultants. There were six price-related topics, all of which are interesting. But one in particular caught my eye: the analysis on discounting.
As the authors point out, discounting is Ground Zero for hypocrisy in pricing. Everyone decries it, yet everyone, (actually, 65%), does it. It reminds me of dieting: "I know I shouldn't, but this one little brownie won't hurt. And I'll get back on the wagon again tomorrow."
Couched this way, the problem of discounting sounds like one of willpower: we all know we should stick to standards and principles, yet we are morally weak at the moment of truth.
I don't think that discounting is a moral problem, however. Instead, it is one of bad thinking. And it centers around two false beliefs:
1. The belief that certain customers are inherently "price buyers"
2. The belief that feeding the price beast will make it go away.
Technically, price is a set amount of money given in exchange for various benefits. But in truth price has no inherent or default meaning. It is a proxy for several different fundamental buyer concerns that are very much tied up with the psychology of the buyer.
What Clients Mean by Price Objections
It seems obvious. A client expresses an objection to a price. They say they want a lower price. Clearly they are concerned about money, value and price. Right? So the only question is, shall we discount, and by how much. Right?
No, and no. Here are four distinct things that buyers are saying when they say they want a lower price. And not one is really about price.
1. Mismatch with expectations: Only experienced buyers do a good job of guesstimating price quotes from professional services firms. They tend to focus on a basic mental model of time vs. rate, and naturally under-estimate each.
(Recall your own shock at first finding out your billing rate as a newcomer; and the shock of industry hires when they first see time estimates for what they thought was just a request for a data-dump from an expert).
Bottom Line: This "objection" isn't an objection at all. It's just the natural human expression of surprise and dismay when we find out our expectations didn't match reality. Discounting just confuses them more, and rewards their delusions for the future.
2. Mismatch with budget: Sometimes buyers just have a limited budget. They feel trapped, and often a little embarrassed that they have asked you to quote into a situation in which they under-budgeted or over which they have no real control. Their natural reaction is to push back, in hopes that you can solve their problem without their having to confess their embarrassing ignorance, or go back to their boss for more money.
Bottom Line: This too is best not seen as an "objection;" it is a simple constraint of the world – budget vs. cost. Again, discounting just confuses the matter, and reinforces the idea that the client can afford to not be open and transparent with you.
3. Mismatch with competitors: Frequently clients faced with competitive bid situations will say, "Company X is cheaper than you by 25% – you need to discount to stay in the game."
Let's assume the claim is true on the face of it. There are two reasons for one firm pricing 20% below another; one is intentionally buying the business, with the intent to raise price later. The other, and most common, is that the client is comparing apples to oranges.
The solution to the first is easy: explain to the client why your competitor's cost structure is virtually identical to yours, and why a 25% discount is inherently unsustainable, thereby showing the client is facing a relationship vs. transaction issue.
If they choose transaction, then be glad your competitor just trashed their bottom line to buy a price-shopping client. They'll eventually be back.
The solution to the second is to have the client carefully compare, component by component, the features of your bid to the features of the competitor's bid.
Most likely, you'll be offering a value-added service that the competitor isn't, and then the client can then pay the higher price for that service or have you drop it from your proposal - have the courage to give your client the data to do the comparison.
Bottom Line: Competitive mismatches aren't really price objections; they are fundamentally rooted in a misunderstanding of either industry economics or project design economics. The answer is not discounting, but education.
4. Mismatch with motivation: Professional services firms suffer disproportionately from the delusion that clients make decisions on purely rational, monetary, statistical criteria. Clients, like everyone (including ourselves) make our decisions with the heart, and justify (rationalize) them with the brain.
A basic human need is to make sure we didn't get a "bad deal." You can give all the "value" data you want, but unless a client feels you are being straight with them and/or they're getting the best possible "deal," they will remain suspicious. When suspicious, our innate tendency is to bargain, to determine some subtle psychological resistance point, just as we would at a bazaar or yard sale.
This behavior has nothing to do with price per se, and everything to do with transparency of your economics and the prices others have gotten from you.
Bottom Line: Not paying attention to motivations leads to discounting, which has the perverse effect of convincing buyers that – aha! – you really were holding out on them! Which leads them not only to haggle again the next time, but to fundamentally mistrust you because you quoted them a price that was an attempt to "get by."
So what's to be done? We all know the answer – don't discount – but we think it's a moral weakness, a failure of principles. It's not. It's a failure of understanding the reason for price objections.
Armed with the truth – that it's not about price, and it never is about price – we can do the right thing: be curious, probe and sensitively get one level deeper when presented with price objections.
Back to RainToday's research report. Why do 65% of consulting firms discount, even when, as the authors point out, the average 11% reductions could go straight to the bottom line?
It is simply fear, fear of losing the deal. Rather than asking curiously, "Please, help me know what's behind that?" we fearfully back off in the face of the client's aggressive tone…and start discounting.
The only reason to discount is to buy your way into a strategically new piece of business. And be careful when you do so, because only certain clients buy that way.
The most tragic result of discounting is not even the lost profit; it is that we confirm the client's suspicion that we are untrustworthy. It leaves the client thinking, like Sir Winston Churchill's apocryphal line, "We have now established what you are. We are merely haggling about the price."
As the authors point out, discounting is Ground Zero for hypocrisy in pricing. Everyone decries it, yet everyone, (actually, 65%), does it. It reminds me of dieting: "I know I shouldn't, but this one little brownie won't hurt. And I'll get back on the wagon again tomorrow."
Couched this way, the problem of discounting sounds like one of willpower: we all know we should stick to standards and principles, yet we are morally weak at the moment of truth.
I don't think that discounting is a moral problem, however. Instead, it is one of bad thinking. And it centers around two false beliefs:
1. The belief that certain customers are inherently "price buyers"
2. The belief that feeding the price beast will make it go away.
Technically, price is a set amount of money given in exchange for various benefits. But in truth price has no inherent or default meaning. It is a proxy for several different fundamental buyer concerns that are very much tied up with the psychology of the buyer.
What Clients Mean by Price Objections
It seems obvious. A client expresses an objection to a price. They say they want a lower price. Clearly they are concerned about money, value and price. Right? So the only question is, shall we discount, and by how much. Right?
No, and no. Here are four distinct things that buyers are saying when they say they want a lower price. And not one is really about price.
1. Mismatch with expectations: Only experienced buyers do a good job of guesstimating price quotes from professional services firms. They tend to focus on a basic mental model of time vs. rate, and naturally under-estimate each.
(Recall your own shock at first finding out your billing rate as a newcomer; and the shock of industry hires when they first see time estimates for what they thought was just a request for a data-dump from an expert).
Bottom Line: This "objection" isn't an objection at all. It's just the natural human expression of surprise and dismay when we find out our expectations didn't match reality. Discounting just confuses them more, and rewards their delusions for the future.
2. Mismatch with budget: Sometimes buyers just have a limited budget. They feel trapped, and often a little embarrassed that they have asked you to quote into a situation in which they under-budgeted or over which they have no real control. Their natural reaction is to push back, in hopes that you can solve their problem without their having to confess their embarrassing ignorance, or go back to their boss for more money.
Bottom Line: This too is best not seen as an "objection;" it is a simple constraint of the world – budget vs. cost. Again, discounting just confuses the matter, and reinforces the idea that the client can afford to not be open and transparent with you.
3. Mismatch with competitors: Frequently clients faced with competitive bid situations will say, "Company X is cheaper than you by 25% – you need to discount to stay in the game."
Let's assume the claim is true on the face of it. There are two reasons for one firm pricing 20% below another; one is intentionally buying the business, with the intent to raise price later. The other, and most common, is that the client is comparing apples to oranges.
The solution to the first is easy: explain to the client why your competitor's cost structure is virtually identical to yours, and why a 25% discount is inherently unsustainable, thereby showing the client is facing a relationship vs. transaction issue.
If they choose transaction, then be glad your competitor just trashed their bottom line to buy a price-shopping client. They'll eventually be back.
The solution to the second is to have the client carefully compare, component by component, the features of your bid to the features of the competitor's bid.
Most likely, you'll be offering a value-added service that the competitor isn't, and then the client can then pay the higher price for that service or have you drop it from your proposal - have the courage to give your client the data to do the comparison.
Bottom Line: Competitive mismatches aren't really price objections; they are fundamentally rooted in a misunderstanding of either industry economics or project design economics. The answer is not discounting, but education.
4. Mismatch with motivation: Professional services firms suffer disproportionately from the delusion that clients make decisions on purely rational, monetary, statistical criteria. Clients, like everyone (including ourselves) make our decisions with the heart, and justify (rationalize) them with the brain.
A basic human need is to make sure we didn't get a "bad deal." You can give all the "value" data you want, but unless a client feels you are being straight with them and/or they're getting the best possible "deal," they will remain suspicious. When suspicious, our innate tendency is to bargain, to determine some subtle psychological resistance point, just as we would at a bazaar or yard sale.
This behavior has nothing to do with price per se, and everything to do with transparency of your economics and the prices others have gotten from you.
Bottom Line: Not paying attention to motivations leads to discounting, which has the perverse effect of convincing buyers that – aha! – you really were holding out on them! Which leads them not only to haggle again the next time, but to fundamentally mistrust you because you quoted them a price that was an attempt to "get by."
So what's to be done? We all know the answer – don't discount – but we think it's a moral weakness, a failure of principles. It's not. It's a failure of understanding the reason for price objections.
Armed with the truth – that it's not about price, and it never is about price – we can do the right thing: be curious, probe and sensitively get one level deeper when presented with price objections.
Back to RainToday's research report. Why do 65% of consulting firms discount, even when, as the authors point out, the average 11% reductions could go straight to the bottom line?
It is simply fear, fear of losing the deal. Rather than asking curiously, "Please, help me know what's behind that?" we fearfully back off in the face of the client's aggressive tone…and start discounting.
The only reason to discount is to buy your way into a strategically new piece of business. And be careful when you do so, because only certain clients buy that way.
The most tragic result of discounting is not even the lost profit; it is that we confirm the client's suspicion that we are untrustworthy. It leaves the client thinking, like Sir Winston Churchill's apocryphal line, "We have now established what you are. We are merely haggling about the price."
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