Professional Services Marketing

How the Best Firms Build Premier Brands, Thriving Lead Generation Engines, and Cultures of Business Development Success

By: Mike Schultz, John Doerr

Narrated by: Joe Barrett

Evolve your work strategy and thrive in today's high-pressure economy.

As Darwin famously observed, the beaks of each generation of Galapagos Island finches change to accommodate shifting food resources, allowing the birds to survive by adapting their capabilities to the new environment. Today's business people should take note: In the post-crisis economy, traditional career strategies spell professional extinction, but the fluid new "gig economy" offers tremendous potential for anyone willing to adapt. Based on her popular blog and drawing on her leadership development experience, Nacie Carson explains what it takes to make it in today's world of work.

• Outlines and explains five steps for ensuring professional success: adopt a gig mindset; identify your value; cultivate your skills; nurture your social network; and harness your entrepreneurial energy
• Builds on Carson's experience as a popular blogger on Portfolio.com and author of the popular website The Life Uncommon (thelifeuncommon.net)
• Features a foreword from Craigslist founder Craig Newmark

The Finch Effect offers the information professionals need to earn big, achieve their potential, and remain at the top of the work food chain.

©2009 Mike Schultz and John Doerr (P)2009 Audible, Inc.

Excellent and Current Marketing Advice

I run a mid sized, successful marketing firm for service businesses. This book is extremely well written and offers outstanding advice to owners of business service firms. I found the information to be well up to date with current thinking and practice.

The frustrating thing about the subject and the book reflects this is the lack of commitment and follow through regarding marketing by senior management. My firm has never worked with a Fortune 500 firm, our clients are much smaller and in one industry (construction) but we have never once had a client that embraces all that marketing can do and commits themselves long term to success with marketing. The budgets spent by every firm we represent are woefully below what really is needed to break through the noise - get noticed and stay noticed.

We can prove that higher expenditures are and will be beneficial as part of a enterprise wide commitment to marketing but everybody inevitably gets busy, focus on the short term success that marketing brings and then pulls back. We would love for clients to stay the course and keep pushing but the time demands of understanding and supporting a broad based marketing effort is just too complex and it always stops like a wave crashing on the beach and is not followed through. The willingness to understand that initial success is the first wave of ongoing growth fades as people and productive resources get backlogs. They don't believe the gains are real and long lived and rarely staff up and expand as really needed and bizarrely (to our thinking) cut marketing until they work their way out of the backlog.

I understand that many business owners want to achieve and stay at a certain size, and that explains some of this but the issue is you not only have to commit to marketing, you have build your business processes and mindset around marketing if you want to get to the top. Having a great website. Slowdowns in expenditure are fine to regroup and build resources but real marketing effort should never, ever stop.