Inspiration Coaching

Business professionals, lawyers, accountants, engineers and others are sometimes viewed as a necessary evil. Each profession has offered a lot of material for jokes and comedians over the years. We have the bottom dwelling lawyers, the charisma by pass, cardigan wearing accountants and the geeky computer dorks to name a few. As well as jokes these professions have something else in common. It is the ability to charge relatively high fees for their services.

Do businesses and individuals get value from these high fees? To answer this question I reviewed the 2008 Beaton Consulting Annual Business and Professions survey. This survey looked at the demographics of the business professions and client perceptions of the value that these professions provided. The professions were:

• Legal
• Accounting
• Actuarial
• Patent and trade mark attorney
• Architecture
• Management Consulting
• IT Services
• Consulting Engineering

The demographic part of the survey found that there are more female lawyers than male lawyers and that females also dominated in the accounting profession. At the other end of the spectrum 82% of consulting engineers are male as are 72% of IT service professionals.

The survey asked clients what they looked for in their professionals that they used. The two keys attributes overall were “proactive innovation” and “excellent service, communication and client focus”. However there were significant differences between how theses were valued in the different professions. “Proactive / innovation” was rated much above the average in the IT services professions while “service, communication and client focus” rated much lower in the IT and consulting engineer’s professions. The Legal and actuarial professions rated very high on this client focus attribute.

The clients were then asked how the professionals performed in providing innovation. In the IT world innovation was valued highly. However. The survey found that the IT profession was a relatively poor performer in delivering innovative solutions. The high performers in providing innovation were the Patent and Trade mark Attorneys and the Legal profession.

In regards to client relationship management the professions are focusing on the following.

• Making Efforts to build personal relationships
• Providing a client relationship contact
• Acting on feedback

The areas of relationship management in which clients indicated there had been the least amount of work were:

• Providing metrics on the service provided
• Identifying opportunities and referring business

Fees were typically viewed as high; however, this did not naturally lead to a perceived deficiency in value provided. It was suggested that fees were only one component that determined overall value. The ones perceived with the highest fees were management consultants, accountants and lawyers. Patent and trade mark attorneys were perceived as having the lowest fees and providing the highest value. However, the IT profession who were ranked second lowest in regards to fees were ranked last in regard to value. Also lawyers who were perceived as charging high fees were also judged as providing a high level of value.

What are some of the take aways from this survey?

• There is a huge opportunity for IT professionals

Unmet demand from clients in regards to innovation

• Lawyers may cost but they are satisfying their client needs
• Patent and Trade Mark Attorneys are potentially exceeding client expectations
• Generally these professions do have a high cost but overall they are delivering value

A message from the survey for the business professionals with a strategy of developing client relationships is that to differentiate yourself from competitors you will need to do more than develop a personal relationship. Referring business and providing metrics are two opportunities to help retain those valuable clients.

As with most business decisions it is important to start with the end in mind when engaging a business professional. This should be communicated to the professional and ideally done in writing before work commences. This will help clarify expectations and keep the professional focussed on solving your issue. This perhaps painful process up front will increase the likelihood of you extracting the value that the professional offers.