According to Client at the Core: Marketing and Managing Today's Professional Services Firm, when examining and implementing the concept of client-centric marketing it is key to consider the major affect the corporate scandals of 2002 and 2003 had on professional services. Due to these high-profile scandals, accounting professionals in particular have new hurdles to jump -- from regulatory requirements such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to simply regaining client trust. 

To create a client-centric firm, Marcus and Aquila tell firms to first identify their market, then build the practice and skills around those clients' needs. They also suggest building a marketing culture that makes marketing an integral part of practice management -- and in which all employees understand and participate.

"Real marketing deals with understanding client needs, developing systems to service clients and training staff and partners -- not just sending out a newsletter or brochure," says Aquila.

The authors explain "what a client really wants" in today's environment:

• Because clients are more sophisticated in the ways of the law and accounting, they no longer accept the advice of the professional without questioning, challenging, demanding more reasoning and detail.
  
  
• Because of the complexity of business today, clients demand that their professionals know more about the clients' business and industry than ever before.
  
  
• Professional services always function best when trust is at the heart of the relationship, but the corporate scandals of recent years have eroded that trust. That trust must now be regenerated. "The key to professional success," notes David Maister and his coauthors in their book, The Trusted Advisor, "is the ability to earn the trust and confidence of clients. Creating trust is what earns the right to influence clients; trust is also at the root of client satisfaction and loyalty." And, note the authors, the workings of trust are more important in the new economy than in the old.
  
  
• Where once the narrow structures of a profession were sufficient to serve clients, clients now demand a broader spectrum of capabilities. The more broadly educated and well-rounded professional is the one with the greater advantage in meeting the needs of today's clients. Clients demand that lawyers know more about the law and accountants know more than the basic skills of accounting.
  
  
• For the professional, competition is now a fact of life. Clients understand that there are many qualified professionals in each discipline -- that they have a choice. It falls to the lawyer and the accountant to attempt to influence that choice -- to demonstrate a firm's capabilities as better than those of the competitors'. In other words, to market better.
  
  
• Sophisticated clients know the difference between marketing and professional services delivery. While clients have always enjoyed the fuzzy warmth of client relations, today's client wants -- needs -- more service solutions to go with that warmth.

-- Client at the Core. 2004 John Wiley & Sons. Excerpted with permission.

Marcus believes that "in the new regulatory environment, the client-centric firm is the one that will thrive ... Competition is now a fact of life, and the firm that doesn't know how to compete will ultimately lose out to the firm that does."

He adds: "Ultimately, the firm of the future will be shaped by the needs of the clientele, not by the profession itself."

Client at the Core is available for purchase today. Read more excerpts here and save 20% upon checkout with promo code W5559.