Professional Services Marketing: How the Best Firms Build Premier Brands, Thriving Lead Generation Engines, and Cultures of Business Development Success Hardcover – June 4, 2013

Mike and John have created a recipe card to follow all the way to success.Their book is masterfully organized to show you how to determine your brand attributes and succinctly defines how to communicate your brand to your target market. Your brand message needs to resonate, differentiate, and the often missed, substantiate your firm in the overcrowded marketplace. This book is now front and center of my 2010 Marcom plan and gives me the confidence to invest heavily into building our brand.I've hired and worked with marketing consultants, I have a BS degree in marketing and I have shelves of marketing, branding and postioning books. This book is now my one source of information.Mike and John's book is meant for any professional that takes their marketing seriously and wants to get ahead of their competition. For me, the most valuable lesson was understanding the importance of substantiating your brand through thought leadership. Mike and John speak with authority and give examples after examples of how professional service firms have grown their firm from mediocrity to industry leaders.I wrote this review because I believe in this book. Buy it, unless you're an IT consultant, in which case I'll use it to clobber you in the marketplace. :)

This is an excellent book about focusing on what matters in branding and lead generation. Like most business books, it's not rocket science, but it's a nice refresher and helps simplify the things all professional services professionals know we should be doing, but rarely take the time to do well. I've send numerous copies to students, friends and clients.

This is a how to that isn't written as a how to. It was required for a class, but is a good resource for anyone who's looking for ways to market services. It presented more as a case study with chapters providing insights from industry leaders as well as from consensus that the authors have come to.

This book has got the goods on everything you need to move your firm ahead: the very best know-how from two of the very best practitioners and biz thought leaders on the essentials of professional success, steeped in vital topics like branding (all facets), lead generation, setting fees & prices, ID'ing your "key brand attributes," intellectual capital, relationship nurturing, "bad marketing advice," targeting, passion and much, much, much more. The writing itself sets the correct tone, one all too typically forgotten (or ignored) by even seasoned entrepreneurs. Chapter 6 is an example: "Don't Worry About Your Competition... Let Them Worry About YOU!"To skip thru common business blunders and get right to the core of your business value and success, open the pages of this book and get going. Recession or not, as author of a similar book, I can personally attest that this knowledge gem by Schultz and Doerr can empower you to leave loserville far behind.

Having had access to extensive research, best practices reports and services marketing associations, I wanted to share that I've found the book, so far, extremely vague, light, obvious while painfully salesy about the authors' own services. I am now reading about the diatribe on pricing. Having read and witnesses this debate for years, I can guarantee the writers do not have the necessary experience to provide solid advise to medium/large marketeers.If you have no experience at all, the book might be helpful even if not well researched or solid. Be careful! If you are more experienced, the advise will be too generic. May still be interesting. Might have one or two ideas that are overlooked. So far, I didn't find anything useful, and to this point, I would not recommend this book to a friend, only to a competitor.I will keep reading, and pray no more advertorials from the writers surface, as it's becoming irritating. In any case, I'd be very alert, and am very tempted to put this down. The marketing planning section was really a waste of time, even when it's so short as to take 10 min to read. So far, awful. What mislead me was the David Maister endorsement.I'll keep on reading and if my view changes, I'll make it a duty to come back and do justice. I give it two stars, not one, because it's still a good resource for someone with no experience at all that doesn't connect marketing with revenue. The book does argue that doesn't pay off, and it's right, plus shows some generic metrics (and then tries to sell you an Excel spreadsheet!)--UPDATED--I kept on reading, and it got reasonably interesting. It touches on some preconceptions and offers the reader to question conventional wisdom. It presents a branding progression map, it creates a simple framework to built different branding elements that, per se, are interesting and can be used to break down and combine the effort in a more directed, logical way. Overall, being optimistic this part is 4 stars to me (2 stars for the first chapters, 4 for the ones up to chapter 14 = 3 stars). It still lacks in specificity, but generates new thinking and helps revisit important assumptions that may be fruitful. I will update this if anything else changes. Also, the amount of self-promotion drops to nearly zero, which was a blessing.

I have been reading John Doerr and Mike Schultz's book on marketing for professional firms and it has me as captivated as a John Grisham mystery.The strategy development and tactics the authors suggest are based on real experiences from a lifetime of consulting with firms that have turned their astute advice into better client relations, more business and profit. I have implemented many of their recommendations and won new and more profitable US and overseas contracts for my Public Relations Firm as a result.This is it -- a business book that works!If you don't read a single business book this year, read this one... as far I am concerned, this is the business book of the decade.Dick Pirozzolo, APRCEO Pirozzolo Company Public RelationsCo-Author The Timberframe Way and Timberframe Interiors