In the New Year, resolve to use 11 minutes a day to seriously understand your top clients. The operative word being seriously.

Demonstrating the deepest understanding of your clients’ business is a proven method to win new work and increase client retention. Yet too often we get caught up in everyday tasks and projects. We have so many legitimate reasons to defer the investments needed to truly understand how clients think, make decisions, and where they are headed.

A consistent and systematic 11 minutes a day will transform you into a walking encyclopedia about your client; giving you the ability to approach your client and start a conversation targeted at solving their most pressing (and often undisclosed) issues.

Finding data enabling you to divine insights—and opportunities—others miss takes going beyond visiting company websites, conducting Google searches and setting up client news alerts.

• Listen in on the earnings calls of your top clients
• Read what stock analysts are predicting for your client’s company
• Scour competitor annual reports for their future strategy

These publicly available sources of information often disclose growth strategies, market challenges and financial performance. Your expertise coupled with this knowledge puts you in the unique position of answering your client’s unasked questions:

• What risks am I not considering?
• Are there unexplored opportunities?
• How can we outmaneuver the competition?

Pose the unasked question, and pose the answer with it. Your client receives no value if you think this through to the end and never share it.

And if you can’t possibly find 11 minutes to set aside for your new resolution, break it into 2 5.5-minute segments. What better way to start and end your workday than thinking about your clients’ problems—and how you can help your client solve them.

MBR/JPD

We will be discussing client service opportunities like this and more in our upcoming webinar on January 16 at Noon Eastern. You can learn more or register here.

The post The 11-Minute Resolution appeared first on The BTI Consulting Group.

Closing out the 2013 LMA Annual Conference to a packed room yesterday, panelists from Deloitte Services LLP, Ernst & Young and Thomson Reuters Elite discussed what legal marketers and business developers can learn from their colleagues in consulting, and what they see for the future of professional services marketing and business development. BTI Principal Marcie L. Borgal Shunk moderated the discussion which ranged from client service and client feedback to branding, company culture and big data.

Click here to download a copy of the presentation.

And see the session as it played out live on Twitter. 

The post Leveraging Big 4 Consulting Best Practices to Bolster Your Business Development Strategies appeared first on The BTI Consulting Group.

All too often, people—executives, job hunters, the media and, yes, auditors themselves— collectively refer to the Big 4 as a single entity. Together, they dominate the big firm CPA world, their individual brands subsumed by their reputation as a whole.

Yet, like the superhero team The Fantastic Four, each individual member of the Big 4 has a real set of strengths and weaknesses—their superpowers and their vulnerabilities. For those less familiar with the Big 4, these unique qualities may be invisible—much like the names of the individual members of The Fantastic Four are not likely to roll off the tongue. Yet to those most intimate with the Big 4 firms—their clients—these distinct characteristics burst forth with clarity and precision.

Some of the defining differences between the firms are stark:

• PwC delivers practical perfection with an unwavering commitment to help streamline the audit
• Deloitte embodies a client-centric approach to drive the greatest value of the Big 4
• Ernst & Young deftly maneuvers the audit through problems with exceptional technical skills
• KPMG offers a quality, “no-frills” solution to the audit

Each firm’s unique personality and approach drive different levels of client satisfaction.  Overall, 60% of large companies recommend their Big 4 audit firm. The client satisfaction rate with each Big 4 firm individually ranges from 54% to 67%.

Considering the spread, client service prowess serves as a key source of differentiation among the Big 4.  The firms on the lower end of the range can close the client satisfaction gap by embracing new client thinking about service delivery. This new thinking, according to the research, includes evolving expectations of exactly how the Big 4 firms handle the audit – and their relationships. The standout Big 4 firm will use these redefined expectations to their advantage.  

Financial executives may submit an advanced request for a complimentary Executive Summary. Accounting firms can learn more about BTI’s new research by visiting www.btirankingthebig4.com.

The post Clients Audit the Big 4 – 60% of Clients Happy appeared first on The BTI Consulting Group.