Only a few prospects are looking at any time. Make sure they are aware of you.

In IP, most client-provider relationships are enduring and stable. This is not a hook-up culture: clients who are content with their professional advisors do not shop around.

In addition, the few real prospects – the new clients who do not have an incumbent provider and the few disgruntled clients looking to change provider – only remain prospects for a short period of time. Once they find a good provider, they stop looking at others.

Put another way, ‘the window of consideration’ is only open for most prospects occasionally and for a brief period of time.  After ‘the moment of selection’ the window closes, often for a long time.

IP marketing therefore must focus on ‘awareness by the real prospects during their window of consideration’. This is the central challenge of IP marketing: making sure that the right prospects are aware of you during the very brief period when they are looking at various providers.

Clients rule

This process for selecting an IP provider is entirely driven by the client:

• The client chooses when to open the window of consideration;
• The client chooses which providers to consider; and,
• The client selects their IP provider.

Most IP mandates are granted without any formal procurement process. This is not a world dominated by Requests-for-Proposals, and even when RFPs are used, most of the time the client pre-selects the people who are invited to respond. Similarly, because mandates are generally indefinite until terminated, it is impossible to know which clients served by your competitors might be considering changing providers. Often, you do not even know if you are being considered by a prospect – and unless you win the mandate, you may never know that you were considered. Frequently the first you hear of a mandate is when you are contacted by the client, who has already selected you.

Awareness & Selection

To make your marketing work, you need to focus on awareness and selection.

Awareness: How do you ensure that prospects are aware of you when it comes time for them to look for an IP provider?

Selection: how do you help prospects evaluate and choose you even if you never even know that you are being considered by them?

In the next few posts, I will provide some specific ideas about improving your marketing on both of these issues.

Neil

The post The window of consideration: awareness before selection appeared first on Miltons IP.

We need to stop ‘spraying and praying’ and focus our energies on real prospects, and to do that, we need to get smarter at identifying potential prospects and distinguishing them from the great mass of potential clients.

Almost everywhere in the world, the practice of IP is now a mature and competitive field (even the “Chinese gold rush” has abated).  As a result, the vast majority of consumers of IP services (clients – the people who hire us) already have an existing provider in our market.  That means that the number of prospects at any given time is actually quite small.

The only real prospects are:

a)      New entrants – people who do not have an incumbent provider and now have a need for IP services in your market; and

b)      Disgruntled clients.

Who is a new entrant?

The answer depends on your market.  In patents, it is often start-ups.  In trademarks, it is often foreign firms looking to enter your domestic market.  In litigation, sometimes a big new file is a reason for a client to look around, but smaller more routine litigation will usually stay with the incumbent provider.  And every so often, a conflict forces a client to try new counsel.

Clients are loyal.

As for existing clients, only the very disgruntled are real prospects.  Unless a client is really unhappy with their existing provider, it is not likely that they will change provider.   Better the devil you know.  For most clients, changing providers is risky, difficult and requires real effort to find a new provider, justify the change, and then effect it.   Very few clients change providers on a whim.  For most, only if they are really unhappy do they change from an existing provider.   Put another way, it is understandable why clients can be quite loyal to a moderately competent provider even if that incumbent is neither great nor cheap.

Stop trying to meet everyone.

If you are in a competitive market where many of your competitors are competent and cost-competitive with your services, it makes no sense to expend a lot of energy trying to induce these clients to try your firm.  Most of them will not even notice you.  So the next time you are at INTA, remember – most people that you meet randomly are not real prospects – they already have a provider in your market and it is very unlikely that they are going to switch.  And of course, this means you should probably not be hosting people at receptions who are not existing clients or real prospects.

Price does not cause disgruntled clients.  Price magnifies unhappiness.

Small firms often over-estimate the importance of cost in trying to get clients to move from their incumbent provider.  Value is very important for winning new mandates, but in terms of what actually motivates a client to look for a new provider, cost is rarely the reason.  Very few good clients first think about changing providers because of money.  In fact, if the service is decent, most clients rarely analyse what they are being charged, and will stay blissfully unaware of how much they could save with a more competitive provider.  What is much more common is that a client becomes dissatisfied with the service that they are receiving; then, when they start to consider alternative providers they suddenly become much sensitive to the prices after years of ignoring them.  If they then realize that they were being over-charged for this weak service, then for certain they will move: price has magnified unhappiness.  Price and value then become very important considerations for the client when choosing a new provider, but service, not price, was what motivated the search in the first place.

Conclusion.

Obviously, it is much easier said than done, but this means that for successful IP marketing, the first challenge is to focus on real prospects.  To do this, we must find new entrants and existing clients disgruntled with the service they are receiving (not the price they are paying).

Neil

The post Focus on the real prospects. appeared first on Miltons IP.

As IP practitioners, obviously we “sell” intellectual property services.  That is what clients ultimately buy from us: services related to patents, trademarks, copyrights and designs, whether it is related to acquisition of rights (drafting, filing and prosecuting), enforcement of rights and dispute resolution (litigation), or ownership (buying, selling and licensing IP).

But when it comes to business development, this far too simplistic.

Business development in IP is the process of selling trust – we pitch the client on why they should entrust something to us and we need to get the client to buy-in and trust us first before they hire us; if they do not trust us, they will certainly never engage us.

There are many other practitioners who provide similar services, and they are just a Google search away.  One of the key reasons that clients stick with their existing providers so often is that it is easier to ‘trust the devil that they know’ than to gamble on an unknown.  If you want to win more work, you have to overcome the fear and skepticism of the prospect and get them to buy-in to trusting you.

Client trust depends on 4 key components (which I call the four legs on the stool of client trust):

• Expertise. Can I trust you to have the expertise required to address my problem?

(Note that part of being an expert is providing clear advice and recommendations that the client can understand, act on, and provide instructions in response to).  By definition IP is fairly complex, so expertise is hugely important.  Without expertise, a client will not trust you with their IP needs.  But, there is more to sell to get them to trust you than just expertise – don’t make the mistake of assuming that expertise is all that you need to sell to establish trust.

• Attention. Can I trust you to give my file the attention it requires?You may be an e xpert, but if you do not pay attention, your expertise does me no good. This is a surprisingly common problem in law, so make sure that in your business development you properly convey how you will ensure that the client gets proper attention.
• Timeliness. Can I trust that you get the work done on time?  Ideally, you will deliver consistent with the reasonable deadline we have agreed on in advance and it will not be a last minute rush (see attention, above).
• Cost.  Can I trust that your fees will be reasonable?  Can I trust you to stick to the budget we agreed to?  (Note the importance of cost certainty, especially for clients who have to report to many stakeholders and budgeting requirements.  Nothing hurts a client relationship like billing surprises.)

The key challenge of new business development in IP is to successfully address all four of these questions, before you get hired.

Do not ignore the 4 components of client trust.  Whether these questions actually come up or not for discussion or not with a prospect or existing client, and whether the client consciously averts to them or not, subconsciously these are always key issues of concern for prospective clients.  If you want to win at business development, your job is to proactively address all 4 of them.

In the next posts, the indirect ways of establishing trust: content marketing and social proof.

The post What we need to sell appeared first on Miltons IP.

Indirect proof: content marketing and social proof. As much as you may want to ‘sell trust’, you cannot force people to trust you. You have to earn it. And, until they are a client, you can only demonstrate indirectly to them that you are worthy of trust.

While the focus here is on new prospects, don’t take clients for granted: make sure that you keep addressing the 4 trust questions with existing clients.

Most of your revenue in the next 12 months will come from people who are already clients. The number one priority, bar none, of business development is “make sure existing clients keep requesting more work”.

All clients have a choice of provider, and many of them already have multiple providers who provide similar services. To ensure that you maintain (and ideally grow) your share of your client’s requirements, you need to ensure that the work that you are delivering – and the manner that you deliver it – continues to address all 4 of the client trust questions. Do not take existing clients for granted, and in particular don’t assume that what you are doing for them addresses all four of the questions, and that it is clear to the client that you continue to answer all four of the questions (doing great work, and being seen to do great work are two different things). Make sure that you are providing demonstrative proof for your clients that continually answers the four questions.

Content Marketing

Answering the four questions for folks who are prospective clients requires some effort and creativity. Clearly, you cannot provide demonstrative proof because they are not yet a client.

As a result, we need to rely on indirect proof to establish the level of trust necessary to get an engagement. Indirect proof rests on two things: content marketing and social proof.

Content marketing is simply marketing that is premised upon providing useful information (“content”) to prospects for free.

The tried and true approach of writing papers and giving talks is a classic example of content marketing. However, it is important to remember that delivering papers and giving talks to other attorneys is just one form of content marketing and it is distributed through only one distribution channel to one [narrow] set of potential referral sources.

For best results:

• Segment your potential audience.  Communicate clearly to each segment in language appropriate for them.  Different audiences want different information at different levels of sophistication.  Domestic clients need different information from foreign associates.  I am amazed at how few IP firms have implemented basic marketing segmentation. If you have more than one type of client, you likely need more than one type of newsletter. This is very basic, very important, and far too often ignored.
• Expertise is more than just knowing the law. Always avoid jargon and be as clear as possible. Part of expertise is clear, effective communication. Make sure that your marketing materials demonstrate this form of expertise.
• There is more to trust than just expertise. There are four client trust questions. Make sure that your content marketing addresses all four of them. Far too many IP practitioners focus on proving their expertise, and forget entirely about providing answers about attention, timelines and cost.
• Use different modes of communication.  Different folks consume information differently – even the same people consume information differently at different times.  Accordingly, you should use a full range of communication methods: text, video, webinars, in-person presentations. Similarly, use different channels. If you give a presentation to a Bar association, give it again as a webinar and online video, and make the paper available online. Not everyone what wants to know about a subject can or will attend the Bar association meeting that you talked at, and if you went to all of the trouble of preparing a good paper you should make it available as broadly as possible.
• Communicate frequently in small bites. People are busy and attention spans are short. Content marketing is about informing (and entertaining) the reader, not vanity publication for lawyers. If people don’t read your newsletter, it is not working.
• Make your marketing entertaining if you possibly can. While it is important to be professional and accurate, entertaining is always better than boring.
• Provide genuinely useful information.  Do not make it a sales pitch.

A lot of lawyers have the mis-guided notion that if they give away information for free that they are shooting themselves in the foot. That is wrong-headed.  In the law business, there is no point trying to be a gate-keeper for information. The web has been a game changer for content marketing in that it makes it possible to provide massive amounts of valuable content for free to any and all without any additional cost to the provider of the information.  Prospects can review your content online 24/7 when they want the information.  Good prospects (people who want advice and are willing to pay for it) will then get in touch with you to engage you. Bad prospects (people who want everything for free) did not cost you anything.

Social proof.

The other crucial form of indirect proof is social proof. People make many important trust decisions by looking at what other people have done or said. If prospects are unable to determine whether to trust you based on direct evidence (as they have not yet seen your work in action), they decide whether to hire you based on what other people say about working with you. In the IP business, there are two crucial sources of social proof:

• Existing clients. Prospects gain social proof from your existing clients in the form of testimonials or referrals, and sometimes just by virtue of the fact that it is a matter of public record who you act for. “If they are good enough for [Recognizable Client], then they are good enough for us”. In the IP business, this can be very effective.
• Referrals from non-clients.  Prospects can gain social proof that they should entrust work to you from other people in their network of trust. However, a key aspect of these referrals is that the referring party likely has not direct experience as a client of yours. Referrals from other attorneys who are not IP practitioners, and all sorts of other professionals are often of this type. Referrals from non-clients are particularly important in the IP business.

There are some things that you can do to improve the chances of your prospects receiving compelling social proof.

First, make it easy for prospects to find your social proof. Do not hide it. Make sure that they can find out more about your existing clients and places whether their referral network may overlap with yours. If you have testimonials, share them. If you have proof of your expertise, share it.

Second, make it compelling. Make sure that your social proof addresses all four of the key trust questions. It is very important to address the issue of expertise, but do not stop there – make sure that your social proof also addresses the other three questions.

Third, pay attention to the referral network. First, you need to grow it. It seems simple, but obviously you cannot get referrals from people who are not aware of you.  And, you need to be top of mind when the prospect asks them, so frequent communication is very important.  Second, you need to prove to the referral source why they should trust you.  How can they be confident the you deserve their trust? If a referral source is referring a client of theirs to you, they are entrusting you with one of their most valuable assets.  If the prospective client has 4 trust questions, the referral source indirectly has all four of the same concerns, magnified.  Once again, we come back to trust, but in this case it is selling trust not to prospects directly but to referral source. Make sure that you make it possible for your people who might refer work to you to gain comfort around each of the four client trust questions. Referral sources clearly need to know that you are an expert, and beyond that, you can help yourself by helping them be comfortable on the issues of attention, timelines and budget.

For both proving trust and staying top of mind for possible referral sources, “givers gain“: one of the most effective things that you can do is to do useful things for people in your referral network.  In particular, it is extremely important to give them useful information that they can use (back to content marketing, but with a twist).  Also, ideally, help them with their marketing and outreach challenges – not yours, theirs. Simply saying to people, “I am a patent attorney, please send me work” is not nearly as effective as saying “I am a patent attorney. Maybe I can help you with your marketing.”

And this is where Intellectual Property Law For Dummies comes in – it is a truly excellent tool for helping your referral network.  More in the next post.

Neil

The post Establishing trust appeared first on Miltons IP.

An excellent tool for:

• education & outreach
• marketing
• generating referrals

“Quite possibly the best marketing tool available for IP practitioners.”

Education and Outreach

Intellectual Property Law For Dummies is a great education and outreach tool.

There is a great public appetite for information about intellectual property. Most people have heard of IP (patents especially) but very few people know even the most basics things about it. If you have a mandate to support and encourage entrepreneurship and innovation you will find the book extremely helpful and cost-effective. It is a short, accessible, and effective introduction to the fundamentals of IP. For instance, the book is an excellent compliment to seminars on the basics of IP – whether your audience is students or CEOs.

Users who find it effective include:

• Economic development agencies with a mandate to support entrepreneurship and innovation
• Incubators & accelerators
• Technology transfer officers
• In-house counsel conducting training

Marketing and business development

The book is also an extremely useful marketing and business development tool for a wide range of users. Some of the reasons that the book is so effective include:

• They get noticed.
• They are light and easy to store, ship and distribute.
• People do not throw books out. They truly have a long ‘shelf life”.
• They are easy to find when needed – the For Dummies brand is one of the most recognizable brands in publishing in the world, and for a field like IP where someone may not have a need ‘right away’ a long lasting, easy to find, marketing product is very important. Your contact information can then be found readily, when it is needed
• They are great conversation starters.
• They are very cost-effective.

Some of the people who can use these most effectively for business development purposes include:

• IP attorneys
• Corporate attorneys
• Technology transfer officers
• Economic development officers

Use them to generate referrals

Of particular note for IP practitioners is the value of these books as an excellent tool for engaging with your referral network. If you want referrals, it really helps if you start by giving folks something that helps them. Asking is a poor way to start; giving is a better way to start a relationship.  “Giver’s gain” is a great mantra.  However, that is hard in IP – what do we have to give away to start the relationship?

If you want high quality referrals, help your referral network educate and triage clients about the basics of IP – you get more referrals from folks who actually need your services. If you give someone books which they in turn use to support their education, outreach and marketing initiatives, you really gain that person’s attention and their thanks, and thanks leads to referrals. We strongly recommend that you try giving the books in bulk to in-house attorneys, corporate attorneys and technology transfer officers for their use as they see fit.  No strings attached, ‘I thought these might help you’ is by far the best way to go. This is our favorite way to use the book because of the leverage it provides: less time, less money, better quality referrals.

Information on ordering the books is found here.

Neil

How to use IP For Dummies for marketing your practice

The post Using IP for Dummies appeared first on Miltons IP.

A crucial component of a functioning tax system is that it should establish a level playing field, and should not arbitrarily pick “winners and losers”. I happen to believe that the tax system should rarely be used to drive policy, but that is obviously a minority view. But a tax system that perversely favours some over others for no policy reason at all is clearly flawed.

Our HST system is trapped in 19th century mercantile thinking and is such a flawed system. We levy HST on services provided by Canadians for Canadians, but we do not levy HST on the same services if they are provided by “non-Canadians” for Canadians. It defies belief that Google can direct Canadian search queries to google.ca instead of google.com, while at the same time evading any responsibility to levy HST on its advertising (the real service it sells and thus its core business, not the free service it provides to support its advertising business), while domestic advertisers must charge and remit HST is ridiculous. It is also an instance of massive tax leakage.

Google, Netflix, Amazon … the list goes on. They must be forced to levy HST on the services that they provide to Canadians – otherwise, they gain an enormous (i.e. roughly 13%) advantage over Canadian competitors for no reason, all to the detriment of Canadian companies and Canadian taxpayers.

Neil

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If you want to move the needle with economic development, it is services that matter the most. Manufacturing and resource extraction may be easy, but they are not the core of a first world economy. The challenge – and it is a very serious one – is that to improve standards of living, we must figure out how to improve productivity in services. Services make up >75% of the economy, and yet, most are still conducted much as they were a century ago. Think of education or health care or accounting – are they really ‘more efficient’ or delivered differently than 100 years ago? In the main, they are still the same services delivered the same way. This must change if we are to create wealth and grow GDP per capita in the years ahead.

Neil

The post Services matter more than manufacturing if you want to improve productivity and growth appeared first on Miltons IP.

There were no great bargains to be had in Target’s unfortunate foray into Canada. What happened to Target with trademarks is particularly illustrative of how a cross-border move can go badly.  Put simply, Target came to Canada with much fanfare, lost approximately $7B US, and now two years later, Target is retreating via a messy bankruptcy of their Canadian subsidiary.

Target’s woes included substantial trademark difficulties.  When it came to Canada, it was confronted with a prior registration for TARGET for use in association with clothing retail stores.  Clearly this presented a problem.  Target challenged the prior registration but did not succeed in expunging it, and ultimately ended up purchasing the prior registration.  The value of the transaction has not been disclosed but is estimated to be in the “8 figures”.

In fairness to Target, the prior registration was longstanding and there had been sufficient use by the owner that it was not amenable to expungement.  Accordingly, Target really faced a situation with no pretty outcomes, but certainly their bargaining power could not have been improved by the fact that the issue was not resolved until just prior to opening of the stores.

However, as a general rule, with some advance planning, smart, frugal companies can get a much better result at remarkably low cost.  In particular, companies considering a cross-border expansion should rush to file trademark applications in Canada based on ‘proposed use’ (equivalent to ‘intent to use’ in the US)

Because the government fees for filing a Canadian trademark application are only $250 regardless of how many classes of goods or services are claimed in the application, and because it is straightforward to keep an “intent to use” application alive for four years or more, $2000 buys a very effective form of insurance for applicants who may want to enter the Canadian market in the future.

I admit that the Target story is actually not a perfect illustration of the value of proposed use applications in Canada (because of the clear prior registration they confronted), but because they have made such an ugly mess of their entire ‘Canadian adventure’ I don’t mind using them as a good example of imperfect trademark practices.

Neil

The post Target’s trademark miss appeared first on Miltons IP.

In the spirit of the season, a Rant and best wishes.

Happy Festivus, and All the Best for 2015.

Neil

The post Seasonal Rant appeared first on Miltons IP.

Zero to One by Peter Thiel.

Peter Thiel was one of the co-founders of PayPal (along with a ridiculous number of other very successful folks including Elon Musk of Telsa and SpaceX fame, and Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn). Much of his early ranting was of the ‘libertarian loonie’ variety (everything would be better if there were no government), which is a sentiment I think only someone who is rich, young and utterly devoid of empathy and introspection can truly ascribe to. However, perhaps with age comes wisdom, because this is an excellent little book. It is short, pithy, and insightful. I strongly recommend it.

Most books on entrepreneurship and technology start ups are not worth the paper they are written on. This one is worth paying for the hardcover version.

Two thoughts in the book stand out. The first is that when there is perfect competition, marginal profit is zero. As an entrepreneur you must look for a niche where there is less than perfect competition, and thus try to capture some form of ‘monopoly’ profit. I have made this mistake myself several times – looking a large markets with large numbers of incumbents and assuming that I because we had a better offering, we would grow quickly. Instead, I should have understood from the level of competition that marginal profits for the incumbents were low – and that this should be a clear warning to me to ensure that I had something radically different and better to have strong margins. Something that is just a bit better will not have the margins to support the sustained and expensive effort of building market share.

The second, and related, point, is that you should start by trying to dominate a modest niche – and after you have done that successfully, you should find an adjacent niche and dominate it. This is a very apt point, and in direct conflict with the usual “advice” that you should target a massive total addressable market from the get go. It is, in fact, in direct conflict with the usual VC metric of looking for a company that from the get go can scale to be “a $100M business in a $1B space”. Of course, it helps if there are obvious adjacent niches that you can transition into readily after your first success – but that is a far cry from the target being one large market.

When you put the two together, a good start up will be very focused on a small identifiable niche and will have very strong margins early on, and thus will rapidly start generating cashflow from which to fund its growth.

Happy reading.

Neil

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