Are professional advisers like nerds?

Peter Thiel co-founded PayPal and Palentir. In 2014 he wrote a book Zero to One which is about how to build for success. In Chapter 11 he focuses on the misconception of many nerds in Silicon Valley. If their product is brilliant, they assume an audience will want it. The title of this chapter is ‘If You Build It, Will They Come?’. The answer is No!

He says, ‘People overestimate the relative difficulty of science, because the challenges of those fields are obvious. What nerds miss is ‘that it takes hard work to’ sell and even harder to ‘make sales look easy’. 

Silicon Valley nerds and professional advisers share a similar perspective in this respect. Professional advisers believe that their superior expertise will be recognised and clients will seek them out as a result. The reality could not be further from the truth. 

Eighty-five per cent of all clients believe that advisers in the same field have the same degree of expertise. They choose their advisers not for their superior knowledge, but for other reasons, such as ‘branding’, social proof, and recommendations. 

Most professional advisers find it hard to accept that these three attributes are techniques of persuasion or ‘selling’, not technical competence.

Most professional advisers have a marketing department or hire a marketing agency to promote their brand, but often underestimate the importance of this function. Most professional advisers are satisfied when they can say they are in the ‘top twenty’ by size or revenue, but this is not a brand - it is just big.

A Volvo car is known for its reliability and safety, a Ferrari is loud and sexy, a Mini is nippy and fun. These cars have a ‘personality’ they are not all things to all people, because different people look for different things. Each type of car attracts a certain type of customer who is looking for specific attributes. There are not many professional advisers, who have a recognisable brand. 

MacFarlanes is one which is known for attracting entrepreneurs such as Richard Branson first through his personal legal work and then working for his numerous and profitable start up businesses, which eventually led to working for Virgin. It is hardly surprising, therefore that MacFarlanes is one of the most profitable UK law firms!

When I was at Simmons & Simmons, I was successful by adopting a similar approach, but unlike MacFarlanes it did not become the central brand of the firm.

Clients cannot evaluate the proficiency of an adviser because they are not experts in that field. Psychology teaches us that when someone has to choose between two advisers without any apparent difference between them, they will look for ‘social proofing’ or a third-party endorsement.

Once again, the power of ‘social proofing’ is often overlooked by professional advisers. Clients are not regularly asked for their feedback. Feedback is of vital importance. Client feedback directly informs the professional adviser on how to improve their service, while also providing an opportunity to obtain satisfied client quotes - invaluable social proof. 

Another valuable social proof is winning awards.

Sadly, most satisfied client quotes are hidden in a brochure which is filed in the bin, and awards are hung in the client reception. Social proofing needs to be published to prospective clients, not just existing clients.

The third technique is recommendation, and here it gets hard. Richard Slater, a partner in the Simmons & Simmons company commercial group approached me over lunch one day in the partners’ dining room.  ‘Caroline, I don’t know what you do for your client, but I want to introduce you to a client of mine who is about to sell his company for many hundreds of millions, and it would be good for you to meet!’. I had been having lunch with Richard for years. Yet, over all this time I had never found the opportunity to tell him what I did for my clients because no one likes to sit next to anyone over lunch who is ‘selling’ their services - it is called the disgust of ‘product push’ or the ‘innate fear of the influence of strangers’.

As a psychologist and leading lawyer in a City Law firm, I set up Caroline’s Club to teach professional advisers not only how to side-step the disgust of ‘product pushing’ through tried and tested psychological techniques but also to give them the tools they need to promote their services on a digital platform designed specifically to host, share and link their most engaging marketing material to their profile and then how to use simple mini events to win business strategically - a rifle shot at business development rather than a shotgun in a blizzard.

In Chapter 11 Peter talks about Viral Marketing. This is when ‘every new user leads to more than one additional user to achieve a chain reaction of exponential growth’. 

Through our Caroline’s Club mini events, which you host with colleagues in your own organisation called Marketing Clusters and with professional service providers from outside your organisation, through Marketing Pods - you can achieve Viral Marketing and exponential growth. As Peter Thiel says about Viral Marketing ‘This isn’t just cheap - it’s fast too’.

At the end of each mini-event you will have a recording which you can upload onto our digital platform and share with colleagues, contacts and clients. You can also link it to a QR code - so much more than a business card!

Like the nerds in Silicon Valley - those like Peter Thiel who know the value of a good distribution methodology - will be king - similarly, those professional advisers who adopt an effective distribution methodology will be like the man with one eye in a world of the blind - they will be kings. 

If you would like to find out more, we have a thirty-minute presentation to share with you. Call me on 07979 188 288 or leave a message.