Consultants Edwin Hastings and Robert Buday explain how consulting firms are losing potential clients by implementing Web sites that hide their companies' expertise.
In an initial meeting with a potential client, would you begin the discussion by giving him a vague description of your firm? Or would you perhaps instead begin by running down a list of your multinational offices and the senior partners who occupy them? And while you're at it, why not mention a few of their hobbies (e.g., "Ned enjoys take-no-prisoner Yahtzee")?
Not if you wanted the meeting to generate interest in your services. To get the discussion going, you might quickly describe your firm — although clearly, not vaguely — and then dive into the specific reason they asked for the meeting. That way, you could hear more about their issue and shape your comments about how your firm would address it. If your insights about their problem and how to solve it resonated, they might well ask for a proposal. And with a great proposal, you'd be off to the races.
Common sense, of course. Yet common sense doesn't seem to apply to the way many — perhaps most — consulting and other professional services Web sites are organized. Our recent study of professional services Web sites found that most are not organized in a way that effectively introduces their firms to prospective clients — that is, by helping a prospect to quickly determine whether the firm has the deep expertise and experience to solve his particular problem.
Most of the sites we studied were organized not by the types of client problems they solved. Instead, they were organized by their office structure, list of partners, articles and books written, and sometimes client projects. And while most sites offered practice areas or service lines, their descriptions of their practices and services often left it unclear exactly what client problems they addressed — e.g., say, the high turnover of valuable customers or less-than-effective marketing that a consulting firm would be hired to improve; the intellectual property theft or unfair termination suits that a law firm would answer; or the annual audits or Sarbanes-Oxley compliance that an accounting firm would conduct.
This is a problem because potential clients are increasingly learning about a professional services firm for the first time not in a meeting. Instead, they are being introduced to professional services firms through their Web sites. After evaluating 80 large U.S. professional services firms' Web sites and surveying marketing professionals at 37 others (29 of which were consulting or IT services firms), we came to this inescapable conclusion: Most of their Web sites do not connect well with an executive in search of specific professional expertise. By this, we mean that the Web site didn't let the executive quickly understand whether the firm could solve his problem and had the deep expertise and experience to do so. And this was the case across all four professional services sectors: consulting, IT services, legal, and accounting.
We believe that there is a good explanation for this: It's that their design philosophy was based on a time when a firm's Web site was the last thing a potential client would look at after talking with a professional services firm. Like the brochure that a consultant would hand out or mail to the prospect after the initial meeting concluded, the Web site was a "fulfillment" device — a leave-behind to help the prospect remember important points made in the meeting and to reinforce the quality and strength of the firm.
Well, those times are over. For many buyers of consulting and other professional services, the Web is now the first place they go to find expertise. As a result, consulting firm Web sites must be designed, organized, and written in ways that — just like an introductory sales meeting — enable the discussion to be crafted around the prospect's problems, not the consulting firm's organizational structure. In this article, we'll discuss our research findings. We'll explain a radically different way for consulting firms to organize their Web sites: by what we call the "client-in" rather than the "professional services firm–out." This does not mean that consulting Web sites must be designed to make the sale. We can't ever imagine prospective clients buying your services without meeting you first. But while your Web site doesn't have to make a sale, it should be able to sell a meeting. To do so, consulting firm Web sites must be organized far differently than most are today.
Shopping for Expertise Moves Online
More and more, the Web is where buyers of consulting services begin — not end — their search for a consulting firm. Even four years ago, executives were spending twice as much time on the Web as with the next leading media (TV), according to a Forbes magazine survey. In 1995, only about 15 percent of the U.S. adult population used the Internet, according to the Pew Internet Survey. By April of this year, that percentage was 73 percent — and 91 percent for adults with annual household incomes greater than $75,000. No doubt the percentage is higher for the corporate executives who buy consulting services.
It's easy to understand why the Web has become a great way to shop for consulting advice. Search engines like Google make it painless to identify dozens, sometimes hundreds, of consultants on a specific issue from around the world. A search, for instance, on a somewhat arcane corner of the consulting world, organizational design consulting, generates 381 listings, many of them consultancies. It is easy to forget how difficult it used to be just 10 years ago to gather such information. Before the Web, getting names of potential advisers could take days or weeks and great expense. One study put the average cost of identifying consulting firms at $63,000.
Now, prospects increasingly find you through your Web site. Not that consulting firms have been in the dark about this. We know of consulting firms spending several hundreds of thousands of dollars to update their Web sites. In fact, professional services firms' spending on Web sites and online marketing has soared, carving out 15 percent of their marketing budgets in 2005, according to a Forrester Research study. That was more than they spent on PR, newspaper and trade magazine advertising, custom publications, or newsletters.
When an executive finds your Web site (or has a new MBA doing the Web surfing), he usually has a very specific problem to solve and he wants to quickly understand if you can solve it. He is looking at your site — and your competitors' — to determine whether you should make his short list. But, in many cases, he is likely to be disappointed in what he finds, if our online survey of 29 consulting and IT services companies is any indication. While 79 percent said that it was important to present on their Web sites the general types of business problems they solve, a much smaller percentage (28 percent) said that their Web sites were very good at it. And only 10 percent said that their sites were very good at showing why their services were unique and superior. It's no wonder, then, that only about one-third (34 percent) said that their Web site was a good or great lead generator for their service lines.
Our own evaluations of professional services Web sites found that the firms we surveyed were not too harsh in their self-criticism. In rating the Web sites of 80 of the largest professional services firms on how well their home pages explained what core business problems they solved (on a scale of 0 to 5), the average score across all four sectors was a very poor 1.5. Consulting (3.3) and IT services firms (3.7) did far better in articulating what core business problems they addressed than did their counterparts in law (0) and accounting firms (0.6).
The Fix: Organizing the Consulting Web Site by Client Problem
Consumers looking for healthcare advice have flocked to the Web. Sites like WebMD.com have captured significant interest, with nearly 100 million American adults using such sites as of 2004. More healthcare Web site viewers look for information on a specific disease than they do for any other information on those sites.
In a similar way, we believe that the majority of viewers of consulting Web sites go to the sites looking for the business equivalent of consumer diseases: their company's specific business problem. Given that prospective clients come to a consulting firm Web site with a specific problem in mind, to best connect with prospects these Web sites should organize themselves by those client problems. This means, at the least, mentioning on the home page the core business problems that the consultancy addresses.
This is the beginning of what we call a Web site organized by the "client-in" rather than the "firm-out." It is the first of three aspects of creating a client-in site: introduction, education, and connection. We explore each facet below and provide examples of exemplary sites from our reviews.
Introduction
Organizing the professional services Web site begins with introducing your firm through the mind-set of potential clients, not your consultants. It means devoting your home page to the core issues of your clients that you address (in the terms they use to describe them, not yours) — not your firm's slogans, service mix, latest book, or seminar. If your site is one of dozens that a prospect looks at in coming up with his short list, it must quickly communicate that "we solve your problem." A strong example of this is the Web site of Watson Wyatt Worldwide (www.watsonwyatt.com), the HR and benefits consulting firm (which finished first in our ranking of 20 large consulting firm Web sites and had the highest score across all 80 sites). Its home page has a tab titled "business issues" that when pulled down presents four areas: cost of employment, globalization, governance and risk management, and productivity. Clicking on any one of them leads to additional pages with more details on how the firm addresses these four core client problems.
Education
After your Web site connects with your target clients' problems, you must demonstrate that your firm has superior expertise to solve them. This is what we refer to as the educational dimension of a professional services Web site, one that is critical to generating leads. How does a professional services firm demonstrate on its Web site that it possesses superior expertise? It comes down to two elements: the written presentation of your knowledge on a client issue and how to solve it (i.e., well-developed points of view on the problem and solution) and your proof that your ideas work (i.e., case studies on your work with clients that reveal the operational and financial improvements you have made).
The consulting section of the firm Gallup (http://consulting.gallup.com) does a good job of educating potential consulting clients about its expertise. Within each practice section, the firm provides downloads or links to articles, seminars, and conferences relevant to that practice. The section for Gallup's "customer engagement" practice has 15 client case studies, many of them disclosing bottom-line results.
Most of the professional services Web sites we reviewed did not organize their articles, seminar information, books, client case studies, and other problem-specific content within the relevant service line. Instead, we usually found this content in sections listed on the home page for "Client Work," "Publications," "Seminars," and the like. We don't argue with listing and organizing such content this way. But the content should also be organized under the appropriate service line pages on the site. Unlike a printed brochure, a Web site enables you to present information in multiple ways and in multiple places.
Connection
Once a professional services Web site convinces an executive that he should consider purchasing its services, the executive will then want to talk to the firm's experts who can solve his problem — especially those who posted articles that intrigued him. But most consulting and IT services Web sites fall short here. In our evaluations of the 20 consulting and 20 IT services sites, we gave consulting firms a mediocre grade of 2.0 (scale of 0 to 5) for providing contact information on specific individuals. IT services firms were far worse: 0.3. In contrast, law firm Web sites almost always made it easy for Web viewers to contact specific attorneys (we gave their sites a 4.8 on this measure).
The Chicago-based financial and operations consulting firm Huron Consulting Group Inc. (huronconsultinggroup.com) makes it easy for Web viewers to connect with the experts they need in the firm. Many of Huron's consultants are listed within its service line pages, along with their pictures, direct phone numbers, fax numbers, and e-mail and land mail addresses. Visitors can also download the "VCard" of a Huron consultant, which electronically places the consultant's business cards in the prospect's Microsoft Office software.
Snaring Prospects on the Web
As executives make the Web their tool of choice for finding professional advisers, consulting and other professional services firms must reconsider their Web sites. They must decide whether their sites are organized to please the firm's professionals or to capture the interest of their prospects. Web sites that let potential clients quickly determine whether a consulting firm has the specific expertise they are looking for, unique insights and approaches, client success stories that validate the effectiveness of its approaches, and ways to get directly in touch with the right experts will generate far more business leads than Web sites organized to serve a different master. While they are not likely to move Web viewers to buy services right there and then, they will go a long way toward getting prospects to buy a sales meeting.
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