How Clients Buy

Chapter 10Element 2: I Understand What You DoYou Do What?

Prospective clients may have heard of you but it is possible they still have no idea what you do. To complete the handshake, would-be clients must clearly understand exactly what you do, who you serve, and how you are unique.

Once, professional services firms were called names like “Garcia Tax Preparation,” or “Hanson's Staffing,” but now with the rise of vaguely Latinate, abstract names like “Amised” or “Infomax,” all bets are off on understanding what a firm does from its name. A possible client—someone who would benefit from your expertise—might drive past your gleaming office building, the one with the six-foot-high illuminated sign, for sixteen years straight and have no idea what you do if your name is something generic.

If people recognize the name of your firm but don't understand what you do or who you do it for, the name recognition is of little value.

—Mike Schultz, John E. Doerr, and Lee W. Frederiksen, Professional Services Marketing

Lessons from 55 BC

For Cicero, one of Rome's most famous orators, rhetoric included five canons: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. His De oratore contained practical advice on each. To improve one's memory, he counseled using the method of loci. He illustrated the device by retelling the famous story of Simonides of Ceos.

Simonides was a poet who made his living composing lyric poems for noblemen whose idea of fun was to eat roasted goat, drink red wine, ...