“Your research on our business and careful questioning of our partners provided a great marketing plan broad with initiatives, but scalable to match our needs and capacity.”
Mario Wijtman
EVP, XL Construction
“Bruce was a great investment, providing detailed, objective information for making key decisions regarding how we position and deliver our services.”
Alay Yajnik
CEO, Lawyer Business Advantage
“Bruce led us in strategy development that let us reach a new level of clarity and ideas for who we are, what we’re doing, and how we’re going to achieve it.”
Nilofer Merchant
CEO & Founder, Rubicon Consulting
"What Bruce does is original. People don’t talk about Virtuous Cycles of Marketing. . . After a while it gets really easy because it becomes part of the company DNA."
Kevin G. Long
President, Employee Benefits Law Group
"What immediately impressed me is Bruce’s ability to identify the key issues that win business for us."
Bill Woodrow
CEO, Teqfyt
"From the earliest stages of the process, Bruce's insights were invaluable in revising my marketing and sales approaches."
Belle Walker
Founder, Belleview Consulting
"Bruce’s analysis was invaluable for setting marketing goals. He also helped with a master plan to achieve those goals. I cannot praise enough the value of Bruce’s approach and the efficiency of its execution."
Irina Anissimova
Forensic Accountant
"Bruce’s approach is different. It’s customized to his clients, and though it starts with marketing, once implemented, it permeates the entire organization. It’s a deeper, more positive approach."
Gina McGregor
Law Firm Marketing Director
"When we took our new messaging ‘out on the road,’ we definitely had stronger positioning vs. an aggressive competitor. We were able to articulate our benefits with a lot more impact."
Tanya Roberts
VP Marketing, PayCycle
-Jason Wiggam, Wiggam Law
There's less selling when your value is clear
The Challenge: A highly experienced forensic accountant was struggling to find a better way to reach and educate family law attorneys. Many don't understand the value of forensic accounting.
Reverse-Engineering Success: My interviews of family law attorneys revealed that approach was a dead end. Attorneys that don’t understand the value of a forensic accountant were unlikely to change. The real opportunity was with attorneys who understand the value in concept but are uncertain how to respond to client concerns about cost and value.
The Business Result: Thinking like the family law attorneys who understand the value of a forensic accountant led to a new offer. The Initial Consultation is something family law attorneys can recommend without having to ask the client to make a large commitment. The cost is low, but the insights and options discussed are of great value strategically. Clients who will benefit from a forensic accountant see those benefits firsthand while still in the planning phase. Better outcomes and easier to manage cases turned the attorneys into advocates.The right positioning enabled a quick 180
The Challenge: The CEO was under pressure. After taking a significant private equity investment promising growth, he needed to figure out why his slam-dunk product wasn’t selling. Maximizing billings for thin-margin home health agencies navigating complex Medicare rules ought to be an easy sell.
Reverse-Engineering Success: In-depth client interviews revealed a mismatch between actual and assumed buyer persona. Nurses-turned-owners simply don’t think in the same terms as other business owners. To them, patient care trumps efficiency and profits.
With patient care as their driving force, the nurse-owners were wary of the big, profit-driven healthcare companies who put profits ahead of patient care. Nurse-owners didn’t see a difference in priorities; they saw an offense against their values.
The entire company began thinking like nurses: how to operate on thin margins while ensuring their patients get the care they deserve. The company's offerings were re-positioned to support this goal.
The Business Result: The company saw a remarkable and immediate reversal of fortune by thinking like their clients. Growth attracted new investments to launch an acquisition strategy that led to dominating their market. The actual service remained unchanged.
What do you do when 1 partner brings in 80% of new business and competition threatens your specialized niche?
If you are like a lot of law firms, you hire a marketing agency to re-brand your firm and build a modern website.
The agency they hired charged a lot of money but failed to deliver results. The agency focused on why the attorneys THOUGHT they were successful.
I took the opposite approach. I reverse engineered actual relationships with their Best Clients. They learned their secret sauce wasn't their expertise or experience, but attention to solving the client's BUSINESS issues. They now market their legal skills as a VEHICLE for delivering business results.
Thinking like their clients made all the difference.
Revenues are way up. Margins are up. They have more work deep in their sweet spot. And . . . all the senior attorneys now bring in business.
The Challenge: The founder and CEO of an ultra, high-end home automation design/build contractor was having trouble converting a string of industry awards into more booked contracts.
Sales cycles were painfully long. Clients couldn't sign final contracts until build out because audio and video products change so frequently.
Reverse-Engineering Success: I used interviews to reverse engineer their Best Client relationships so the CEO and sales team could think like their clients. Awards care about specific components; Clients care about capabilities. Clients were buying an experience, not the specific speakers or BluRay player.
The Business Result: The sales team started signing binding contracts up to a year sooner -- often before their competitors even knew there was a deal to be had.
Clients love the process. It is built around what they care about.
The Challenge: Executives at a $200M commercial contractor found client nurturing awkward. They were basically geeky engineers who saw business development—they would never, ever say “sales”—as unprofessional.
Reverse-Engineering Success: Client interviews revealed clients admired them as expert problem solvers who found innovative ways to "get it done." Past clients--who as the #1 source of new projects were often future clients--loved hearing stories about projects that stayed on track despite unexpected challenges.
The Business Result: Once the executives shifted their focus from asking for business to sharing stories of success in the face of challenges, they went from twisting arms to get meetings, to having people WANT to talk to them.
They also found clients seeking them out for exactly the types of projects they most wanted. They started ATTRACTING more of their Best Clients.
The Challenge: The software engineers with an innovative SaaS solution could not figure out why their "can't miss" offering was getting no traction.
Reverse-Engineering Success: Client interviews reverse-engineered where they had found client success. It turns out their Best Clients did not think like software engineers. The company's positioning failed to connect with their target market.
The Business Result: Repositioning the firm based on thinking like their clients created a quick 180 requiring no code changes. Within a few years they consolidated their fragmented market and made their investors a ton of money.
The Challenge: The CMO of a decade-old payment app was feeling heat from the Board to enter new markets. Super-sizing the successful small business strategy did not translate to mid-market success. While the target shifted from owners to CFOs, they failed to recognize a different buying dynamic.
Reverse-Engineering Success: Thinking like their customers quickly changed their fortunes. Owners were deeply involved in the purchase decision and wanted the best product. By contrast, CFOs expected the integrator of their accounting platform to provide a solid, dependable solution. System integrators must deliver a no drama solution across many applications, so they sought fewer but closer relationships.
The Business Result: Success came quickly once the marketing and sales strategy refocused on the system integrator as the most critical link in the sale.
The Challenge: The founder and CEO of a 20-year-old marketing consultancy grew concerned when business declined several quarters in a row. His consultants did great work and clients knew it. The challenge was that getting meetings with past clients and new prospects was getting much harder.
Reverse-Engineering Success: The CEO’s problem was he was talking about himself, his firm, and the types of work they liked to do. Clients don't have time for an obvious sales pitch.
Using examples from other professional services firms, I showed the CEO the value of thinking like his clients. He shifted to talking about client results rather than the work he and his team performed.
The Business Result: The results were immediate and dramatic. Clients who hadn't accepted a meeting in over a year, quickly accepted meeting invites. The very next quarter set a record for new business.
The Challenge: The PhDs running an environmental consulting firm knew their market had lots of potential but were stymied at finding new clients. Sales training took away their fear of "sales" but didn't position their firm to win.
Reverse-Engineering Success: I reverse-engineered their secret sauce by interviewing their clients. They operated differently from competitors, providing guidance to the attorneys and insurance company executives who hired them that led to better business decisions. The firm's partners thought everyone did what they did.
The Business Result: With the complete picture they were able to think like their Best Clients and attract more of Best Clients. They scaled the firm by training new staff in the insights that were intuitive to the Partners, but until now unstated.
The Challenge: While some sales reps complained they couldn’t meet quota without steep discounts, others maintained the company was leaving tons of money on the table. Something wasn’t as it seemed.
Reverse-Engineering Success: Customer interviews revealed the company was selling the same offering for two very different applications for different customers in different markets. The second application was below the radar but far more lucrative. The solution was a radical product realignment: two separate products utilizing a common code base.
The Business Result: Two under-performing products became a pair of thriving products once each was “right-priced.” The lower priced offering delivered volume in the company’s traditional markets without undercutting the “insane” margins generated by the higher-priced offering selling for 33X.
