Originally published on Forbes.com

There are thousands of successful mid-size service firms in the United States today and many more thousands around the globe that know they’ve never achieved their full potential. They come from several different industry verticals including accounting, law, technology consulting, financial services, management consulting, coaching, architecture, engineering and construction, among others.

To me, a successful mid-size service firm has been in business five or more years, has $3 million to $30 million in revenue, 15 to 150 staff members and has a demonstrated history of delivering results that matter to clients. After working with several dozen firms who fit this profile, I’ve come to recognize certain traits:

• While they are often very good at what they do, they are usually not the best-known firm in their industry. They are often a hidden gem.
• Historically, much of their growth has come from client referrals, strategic alliances and acquisition of other firms.
• They are often hesitant to take on too many clients too fast. They want to protect their reputation by ensuring they can serve each client very well.
• Their market share is often a fraction of the available market share, and firm leaders know this.
• Firm leaders have tried a number of strategies over the years to grow, but none of them have produced consistent results or repeatable successes.

I believe there has never been a better time to grow a mid-size service firm. Recently, a confluence of factors has come together to make this the perfect time to pivot away from older strategies that may or may not still work and to adopt more effective strategies. Much of this opportunity has been brought about because of digital disruption, which may be an overused term but means something specific to me that I’d like to share with you.

Focus On The Promise To Ideal Clients

I believe the nature of selling professional services is promise. Because services are an intangible, service buyers are paying for a promise that you can produce an outcome that is meaningful to them.

The first step in growing a service firm is getting clarity around your promise. It should be attractive to your ideal client and speak to what matters to them. This leads to the second step: building an ideal client profile. After serving dozens of service firms, I have come to realize that most of them really don’t understand their ideal client deeply.

A solid ideal client profile contains both demographics and psychographics. Demographics describe the external characteristics of ideal clients — age, race, education, industry, tenure — but psychographics matter far more than demographics.

There are three key psychographics to include in your ideal client profile: top five goals, top five opportunities and top five challenges. A goal is something that the ideal client absolutely must achieve, an opportunity is something they’d like to achieve if time and budget allow, and a challenge is something that blocks them from achieving goals.

Most service organizations build their promise based on their capabilities rather than on the goals, opportunities and challenges of ideal clients. This is actually the reverse of how clients buy services. In every survey we’ve ever conducted, service buyers expect that you have the capabilities to do the job — that is a given. What is in question, in their minds, is whether or not you can help them achieve their specific goals.

If you want to grow your service firm, align your promise to the goals of your ideal client.

The Three Teams

Once you have clarity about your promise and your ideal client, you’ll need to look internally at three crucial teams that have the greatest impact on growth: marketing, business development and delivery.

The strategy is simple. Marketing makes the promise to a pool of prospective ideal clients. Business development applies the promise to each unique opportunity using the consultative sale. The delivery team delivers the promise. If you want to realize consistent and predictable growth, you’ll need to unite these three teams around the promise.

The Digital Disruptors

While the business development and delivery teams are certainly using digital tools today, it’s the marketing function that has likely experienced the greatest disruption which is leading to unprecedented opportunities. The marketing plan of many service firms used to include niche advertising, conferences and seminars, networking at industry events, direct mail, public speaking and a few other tactics. But it was primarily referrals that drove growth.

In today’s digital world, smart marketers are making the promise through digital channels such as content marketing, social media, video, webinars and the like. But what’s changed the most is how service firms go to market and the tools they use to build connections and track results.

I call this the ultimate digital marketing stack and it is best expressed in an equation: CMS + MA + CRM + SMM = success. Content management system (CMS) is the digital tool that allows you to build and manage websites. MA, or marketing automation, is the middleware that tracks and scores the digital footprint of inbound prospects. CRM stands for client relationship manager and SMM stands for social media manager.

To be effective in digital marketing, you need an ecosystem of tools that must be seamlessly integrated and share data. How does this work? Marketers use the CMS to provision new content marketing assets that ideal clients cannot resist. This includes blog posts, ebooks, reports, videos and the like. Marketers use MA platforms to track who is responding, filling out forms, downloading content and viewing web pages and social posts. Marketers use the CRM to share profiles of hot prospects with business development staff and use SMM to broadcast content to the social profiles and networks of their staff.

All of this technology is allowing for the types of connections that simply didn’t exist before. If you want to grow your firm, make the right promises to your prospective ideal clients using the ultimate digital marketing stack.

About The Author

Randy Shattuck is a seasoned entrepreneur who works hand-in-hand with senior leaders of mid-size professional service firms to grow revenues, acquire clients, open new markets, increase profits and effectively position their brands.