The Launch Doctor - Email Newsletter

Hello fellow launchers, and welcome to this month’s edition of The Launch Pad Newsletter.

Just in time for summer reading, June’s newsletter is about launching services. Laptops on the beach, anyone?
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Feedback and questions are welcome. Send to: ckitcho@launchdoctor.com (note: This Opt-In email newsletter is sent monthly. If at any time you wish to Opt-Out from the distribution list, reply to this email requesting removal. Your name will be removed immediately.)
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The Launch Pad
June 2003
CAN WE GET SOME SERVICE HERE?

Many people claim that launching a product is a lot easier than a launching a service, because a product is something that you can see and demonstrate. Services are not products. You can’t touch them, display them, put them in a shrink-wrapped package, fling them across the room, or sell them in a garage sale. They have no smell, taste, shape or color.

The same basic principles of product launch apply to launching a service. You still have to know your customer and your market, you must have a strategy that will give you competitive advantage, you must have positioning and messages and effective marketing programs. However, there are some differences.

To give you some perspective, let’s pretend you’re the customer and I provide services. You need to be able to find me first so that you can put me on your distribution list for a “request for proposal” or just be on your qualified vendor list. Then, when you have a hot project that’s in the eleventh hour, that’s when you get your little RFP together or consult your vendor list. You want someone with extensive and exclusive and current experience (translation: last week) in providing that exact same service (but no more) for the exact same type of company in the exact same industry, for one of your closest competitors, while producing the ultimate results: 30% cost savings, 20% more profit, happier customers, and 20% more market share. Oh, and you don’t want to pay me very much. Welcome to the world of marketing a service! Lots of competition, lots of sales objections, long sales cycle, and difficult to enter a market until you have some solid references that were willing to take a chance on you and your company.

Concept to Launch in 60 Seconds
Okay, here is the good news; let’s get this over with. The best thing about launching a service is that there is little to no development cycle involved. You don’t have to put up with those testy little engineers delaying release yet another month. As long as your services are packaged into a “service offering”, and the people providing the service are trained and available, you’re good to go.

Time and Money
Providing a service means that you are selling time: either that of your employees or that of your fixed assets (such as cellular telephone service). Because your customer is paying you by the project or the hour, it’s important that you have a realistic view of how long a project will take. They want to make sure that their getting the most out of every hour that they pay for. Some of those hours they don’t pay for: preparing a proposal can take many hours or weeks and is done on your nickel, not the customer’s. You must also have an excellent reputation for efficiency; it’s critical to draw attention to reference accounts that were done on time or ahead of schedule. Use it as a key marketing message.

Gurus, Experts, and Geeks
When you are packaging people as your service offering, it’s experience that counts. You must find and highlight the very detailed and specific technical and business experience of the key people on your team. In other words, that quirky little person by the fax machine may suddenly be elevated to a throne on paper, with their eminent breadth of skills cut and pasted to form a masterpiece. Without outright lying (which is definitely NOT advisable), you need to make the best of your people’s experience and how it will be used to solve all your customer’s problems. And you need to have the right words in those resumes that will match what is in your customer’s RFP.

Featureless in Seattle
When it comes to marketing a service, it’s a little more difficult to describe than a product. Rather than speeds or size or compatibility, you have actions and tasks and expertise. However, just as with a product, you must describe what value those services will bring to the customer. Will it save them time or money? Will it make them compete more effectively? Will it result in higher quality or better customer satisfaction for their own customers? Without something tangible, you have to be a pretty good talker to explain to a potential customer what your service is. It requires precise and targeted communication.

Services with a Smile
The customer relationship is critical to selling a service. First you must build trust. Then you must make sure that the people who will be delivering the service will be compatible with the customer organization. And then you must deliver the service on time, within budget, and with the highest levels of quality. You must make your customer smile from beginning to end. And you want the kind of relationship where your customer needs you, your expertise, your guidance, and your company.

Word of Mouth
For new customers, it is critical to have reference accounts or customers who have used your services before. If you are entering a new market, it’s even more critical to have references from other markets as well. A great marketing tool for selling services is the “customer success story” that delineates projects, tasks, and benefits to the customer.
Competitors get Personal
The sales cycle for services usually involves a proposal phase, during which companies submit competitive bids. Marketing continues through the proposal phase, and even the wording of the proposal is critical and must be compatible with strategy and key messages of your company and the services you offer.

Quick and Quirky Example
You are the marketing director for an event and seminar planning company, and you are launching a new service to manage technology trade shows. You have an opportunity to submit a proposal to your first customer within two months, so you want to have your service launched by then.

Your team who will be providing the new service is made up of four people who have worked together “virtually” on seminars and catered corporate parties, and also two people who have been hired who have trade show experience. Your virtual team has done many projects together in almost every type of technology company. One of your new hires managed trade shows in the food industry, with his claim to fame being the coordination of the national potato growers’ annual get-together known as the “SpudFest”. The other new hire has done technology trade shows, but only for state and federal governments. The challenge is to leverage the collective expertise and to make a credible case for trade show management services.

To build awareness, you decide to add a major section to the corporate website, to send out press releases to major technology professional organizations, and a couple of technology magazines. To submit a proposal to the upcoming customer, you need to present a case to manage a regional tradeshow for data storage devices. Here are the things you should do in each phase:

AWARENESS:
-Develop customer success stories from several technology customers for whom your company did seminars; post them on your website
-Hunt down, bribe and otherwise line up past customers who will serve as reference accounts for all services (seminars, events, and customers of your new hires who can vouch for their track record with trade shows). Make sure you know what they’re going to say!
-Compile the numbers on the collective trade show experience of your staff (5000 potato growers attended the show, etc.)
-Compile the numbers on the technology and industry expertise of all of your staff (electronic games, airbag sensors, potatoes, wireless technologies for the government that you can’t ever talk about in this lifetime or the next two lifetimes, etc.)
-Write press releases and web content that lists the size of trade shows you’ve handled, the technologies that you’ve worked with in all of your business, and the business benefits your customers have received from your work

PROPOSAL:
-Hope and pray that someone on your staff has some familiarity with the data storage industry
-If not, find another virtual team member who does and make them an offer they can’t refuse
-Assign a marketing/sales team to make contact with the customer to set up an initial meeting to discuss capabilities. Make sure they take those nice little success stories with them and have them handy at all times. They should be able to recite your value-added benefits in their sleep.
-Throughout the proposal phase, try to find out more about the competitors and how the customer will make the decision. This is called fact-finding. If you can’t find facts, go for at least some gossip, hints, rumors or innuendos.
-Refine your pitch to put your company in the best possible position
-If you don’t get the project, be nice to them anyway! You may get another opportunity in the future.

And there you have it, a glimpse into launching a service.

May your customers be needy and your services be speedy!

Catherine Kitcho
The Launch Doctor