10 Golden Principles of Successful Professional Services

1. Speed

Wilson shares:

First and foremost, we believe that speed is more than a feature. Speed is the most important feature. If your application is slow, people won’t use it.

When my customers surveyed for the quality of my services the recurrent theme is timeliness. The following are common responses to a questions “What influenced your rating the most?”:

• Fast response
• Fast delivery
• Fast results

That’s by design and not by chance. When a customer calls me asking for help, last thing I can think of is telling him “I am avail in 2 weeks, works for you?” The only option for such answer is when I do not want to work for that customer.

When delivering my services I strive to get quick results, even the smallest but very quick. It builds trust, it shows the progress, it reduces the risk of delivering something a customer did not want in first place, it also gets me more confidence. The most important part is that it builds the end result naturally – no one waits impatiently until the end of service. The service results unfold as the service gets delivered.

Respond fast to a challenge, deliver fast results.

2. Instant Utility

Wilson shares:

What this means is the service is instantly useful to you. If you build a service and the user has to spend an [h]our configuring the service, setting it up, importing contacts, doing a lot of data entry, I don’t think people are going to – most people aren’t going to put up with that. The service has to be useful right out of the box.

Yeah, people want instant results, not hype. I mean… doh… Is not it obvious?! Well, it’s not. I witness enough cases when consultants deliver something that’s less than useful. If my service does not bring positive effect early on  chances it won’t be useful anyway. If so, then why bother in first place?

Keep your eye on the prize, end result is what matters, deliver results early.

3. Service is Media

The original principle is “Software is Media”. Wilson shares

…when people use it, they approach your software in the same way they would approach media.
…media companies have a voice. They have an attitude, and a style, and it’s unique. It’s different.
I think software has to feel that way. Your software has to have a personality. People have to feel like they’re consuming media when they consume your software.

I truly believe that professional service as a whole or a single consultant within the same group has to have a personal voice – he must be known for something that makes him to stand out, he must have a well established brand. Best when the brand is Credible, Compelling, and it Connects on personal emotional level.

The way I build my brand is to focus on my strengths and build my expertise.

I see a pattern when folks struggle to score high with customers and peers when they lack either deep knowledge or interpersonal skills.

What’s your brand? What’s your voice? You’re media. Hey, can I stick an AdSense Ad on your back?

4. Less is More

Wilson shares:

These services where you do one little thing, but you do it all the time, and it’s very reinforcing and you get a lot of utility out of it, and it’s quick, easy, and fast, I think tend to do very well and give you the platform to ultimately grow from there.

Al Ries in his epic book The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding says:

Customers want brands that are narrow.

I was testing this approach in consulting during last 6 years – I was focusing on extremely narrow set of services. I was rejecting aggressively anything unrelated. The outcome was that I was able to establish myself as a brand for those services inside the team and with the customers. It helped me to stay busy without spending time on the bench [which is good for consultant] – the pipeline was healthy and the backlog is solid. It still is and grows. I love another quote from the guy in the know. Gerald M. Weinberg puts it very succinctly in his Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully:

The wider your spread the thinner it gets.

5. Make it Programmable

Wilson shares:

…it’s important to make your application programmable, and make it possible that others can build on top of or connect to or add value to, in some way, your web application.

How do you make a consultant programmable? I follow two simple principles to achieve this goal:

1. Services are based on freely available information. Any service I deliver based on freely available information – nothing internal or best kept secret. I also communicate it to the customer – “I will be charging you for free stuff.” In fact I encourage the customer to do it himself – which is perfectly doable. My value here is the experience [interpretation] and timely delivery [immediacy]. So if the customer has plenty time and cares to build his expertise I am totally fine with not getting the gig. In most cases – the customer is happily willing to pay money since he needs timely results from the expert. Why it makes me programmable? Well, when the customer has all the know-how click away from him he is much smarter when he employs me, so he programs me to achieve high impact results even faster.
2. Services are stackable.  My services are very focused. In fact I have built a laser focused portfolio of services. It helps a customer to match my expertise to his needs much betters when he as the list of specific services at his disposal. He programs me to perform what’s needed at max while controlling the costs with well defined expectations. The ability to stack my services in flexible manner empowers the customer. It helps him to program me better.

Are you programmable?

6. Make it Personal

Wilson shares:

You also want to make your application infused with your users’ energy. The more of their data and their personality and energy that they can contribute to your application, the more ownership that they feel of it, and the more likely they are to advocate it and become, in effect, your marketing force..

When I work for a customer I am focusing more on facilitating him to solve the problems on his own. Even when I solve the problem on my own I make sure to transfer the knowledge so that next time he could do it on his own using my approach. If the customer succeeds it makes him feel great about himself and he immediately links it to me. One of my mentors once told me this:

On the team side, one thing I’ve found very helpful is to gently try to find something you can do to help your team members feel good about themselves; that in turn, will make them feel good about you.

Empowering a customer to solve problems makes him feel great about himself, and it makes him feel good about me. I tested it time and again. The outcome? Customers who feel good about me are my raving fans and they loyally recommend me to their friends. When I get a call from a prospect it’s not uncommon to hear “Alik, I got your contact info from a friend. How about to meet and discuss an issue we have with our system?”

7. RESTful

Wilson shares:

…What I mean by this is a bit of a bastardization. What I mean is that the entire application, everything in the application has a URL, and ideally, a very clean and comprehensible URL.
…Google will see that URL, will discover it, and so what it essentially allows is for the web, at large, to discover and get access to your application in very deep ways.

Long story short. Consultant must build his online identity to stay competitive in the services space. The simplest thing any consultant can do so is to create a LinkedIn profile and share insights on Twitter and on professional blog.

Are you RESTful?

8. Discoverability

Wilson shares:

…At its base level, for me, this means search engine optimization. You have to understand search engine optimization and you have to understand the rules; you’ve got to know how to do it. You have to build your application from the ground up to be discovered by Google, and optimized for Google.

If you care about security performance in you web applications built with Microsoft technologies you probably are going to run few searches for these keywords, something like this: asp.net security performance. Run this search and let me know if my name is not on the first page of search results, because if I am not there – I am serious trouble.

Are you discoverable? Do you appear on the first page of Google search results for your keywords?

9. Clean

Wilson shares:

Clean, to me, means that the application cannot be busy on the page. You need to be able to look at it and not be bothered with lots of stuff.

This perfectly applies to my deliverables. almost 100% of my services are backed by a final report documents that outline in details the service I was conducting. While writing my documents I focus extremely on readability and usefulness. If something does not fit into the categories I remove it. That way chances the recommendations documented in the report will be read and even implemented. I keep my docs clean and lean. The anti-pattern on the other side is creating heavy weight reports with ton of pages, massive tables, complex graphics, and prose. That’s proven to be a surefire way to keep such docs dusted on the shelf once they are delivered.

I can remember to work for a customer, a very smart customer. During the kick off meeting he told me: “Do not hand me heavy report in the end. Inspect the system and if everything is fine, just say so. No docs needed.” The other case was that I was limited by a customer to produce report 5 pages or less.

Customers want juice. Be clean and lean.

10. Playful

Wilson shares:

In any case, the ability to play in an application is really important. The game dynamic is what you can use to get users to do what you want.

What has playful has to do with professional services? I guess it’s about having fun. In his book Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully Weinberg writes:

"No Matter how it looks at first, it’s always a people problem."

In my gigs I deal with lots of different people – high ranks to system administrators and developers. I feel satisfied when I deliver the high quality results, but when on top of this I take away with me great interpersonal moments shared during the gig, that’s the best. I guess playful is about having fun and enjoying what you do and by that making others enjoy.

"Success comes from doing what you enjoy. If you don’t enjoy it, how can it be called success?" – David H. Maister, TRUE PROFESSIONALISM

Be playful, be enjoyable.

Practice This – Get Results

1. Be fast – that’s the requirement to stay in the game.
2. Be useful – deliver quick wins in iterations.
3. Be media – broadcast your unique voice, build your brand.
4. Do less – narrow your brand.
5. Be programmable – relevance is king.
6. Make it personal – build your army of raving fans, the ultimate marketing force.
7. Be RESTful – get on Linkedin, Twitter, and personal blog. Share insights, not fluff.
8. Be discoverable – master SEO.
9. Be lean – eliminate waste, avoid distractions, invest less to achieve more.
10. Have fun.

My Related Posts

• Marketing For Consultants
• Consultant Masters His Workflow
• Beat The Competition – Offer Services On Demand
• 5 Stages of Successful Consulting Gig
• Consultant Overcomes Constraints and Reaches the Goal in 5 Steps
• 3 Basic Conditions For Successful Consulting Gig
• Notes From The IT Consultant Book