Why Your Firm Needs to add SWAT to its Marketing Analysis

Professional services firms, including architects, engineers and contractors have been using the traditional SWOT analysis to create annual marketing plans that are effective in building business.  This article is about adding SWAT to your annual marketing plan. Today your firm needs special weapons and tactics.

What could be more straight forward than analyzing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats? The industry training I provide includes modules on strategic sales and creating strategic marketing plans.  Attendees peel back SWOT and learn to focus on opportunities.  It is easy to leverage strengths and minimize weaknesses but examining opportunities is a more complex process.  By the way, threats are both internal and external. 

Strengths can become threats.  For example, experts in the services you deliver are often placed into the strengths column along with clients who are advocates of your services.  What happens when the expert goes to work for a competitor?  What happens when your best client fires you?

Every annual marketing plan should include a “Contingency Planning” section.  This is the section where you need to be thinking about SWAT.  SWAT stands for special weapons and tactics. 

Here are the strengths listed in most industry marketing plans:

·         Completed projects
·         Client advocates
·         Experts
·         Depth of Staff
·         Financial strength
·         Geographic locations
·         Services
·         Project delivery

If a client fired you because of a project delivery issue or project team conflict, then they are no longer strengths.  You might think this client will not impact the project you are pursuing with another client.  This might have been true 20 years ago, but today with the internet and social media, your chances of pushing this under the rug are nonexistent.  You need special weapons and tactics.  You need to have a contingency plan. This doesn't invalidate the entire plan.  But it should raise a red flag for making modifications. Maybe it is time for SWAT.

You have seen television depictions of SWAT teams in action and find it hard to believe this would be needed to build business in your firm.  Think about what is happening when a SWAT team is called to a crime scene.  Each member of the team has specific responsibilities.  They don’t just jump into a van wearing special uniforms when the call goes out.  You might believe they bring calm to a chaotic situation.

They have spent a lot of time training.  SWAT never finishes training because the real world sometimes presents problems whose answers can’t be found in any textbook. Better said, SWAT’s job is to train today for scenarios and threats that they cannot predict tomorrow.  Your business operates in the same world where textbooks don't contain all the answers and no one can predict what tomorrow will bring.

The first special weapon your firm needs to use is your annual marketing plan with contingencies.  For most firms this isn’t a special weapon because they let it sit on the shelf after it is produced.  They don’t make monthly or quarterly adjustments. 

The next special weapon is market research.  This is where your firm needs to mimic the police SWAT team.  Individuals on your team need to be assigned specific tasks in the area of market research.  Do you provide services to multiple industries?  Then someone needs to be assigned to each one.  Someone should also be given the assignment of researching competitors.   As they gather research, they need to develop tactics that are related to the opportunities that become present.  Opportunities that were not included in the original marketing plan.

The contingency section should also include scenario planning. 

This is where you brainstorm what happens when team experts leave the firm or your best client fires you. As you go through your marketing plan you will discover other areas where scenario planning would be useful.
 Over the years, I have provided a lot of training in the parking industry.  I was at a roundtable discussion once when a real estate developer asked me what would I do when people no longer drove cars. He certainly was a forward thinker.  My reply was that I would not be alive when that day became a reality. As absurd as that question was at the time, it did get me thinking.  This is what the contingency section will do for your firm.  It might be next step in securing new business in a changing world.

 

 

Your firm can delve deeper into all the secret weapons and tactics needed in the 2016 marketplace by contacting me to discuss the in-house training in your next operating budget.