Know-How Exchange : Strategy

It has been said, "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

If this were my project, I would begin by surveying Accountants who are happy with their current partnership arrangements, to understand how they are benefited by the arrangement.

In selecting targets for such contacts, I feel it is best to select people you have zero chance of ever doing business with. For example, you might talk to retired accountants, or accounts in a very different geography the new service. Otherwise, people think you're being sneaky, only pretending to survey them when you are really trying to sell them.

I'm not saying that's the best way, just what I would do. Good luck

Pointer on how to tackle it:

Develop a great questionnaire and conduct semi-structured interviews with folks in your target audience. Ask smart high-gain questions, or pay a professional to do it. Then analyze findings to develop a path-forward approach.

In the simplest terms:

VMOSA? Only if you want to be at it all year. Do you?

For 1) Write out the positioning statement in triple line spacing, no, make that quintuple line spacing, and then scribble what the value propositions in it actually are.

Then look at the offerings for a bunch of (Say about 15-20 selected at random) accountants are from their websites. Note the weaknesses of their web offerings as you go along.

Lastly, match the offerings of the accountants with your own positioning and do a match test. Match where the two align and match where they do not even come together. Not these. You might be able to help the latter and use the information in the former to complete your work.

2) The key objective would be to be as numerically and positively orientated as possible. Avoid generalizations or opinion. Distill facts and work on your statistics rather than polishing your words. Every point on the position statement will have something which is measurable. Measure it.

To test the ideas of being able to measure something, Mike's idea of a survey is a good one. Go for the quantifiable points only and avoid opinion. Use SurveyMonkey for a free survey platform and hone your questions with a statistician so that when you come to analyze it you can derive some numbers with real meaning behind them.

Surveys: I always survey people who want to be surveyed and thus achieve about 30% response rates. I cannot imagine that accountants will want to be surveyed by email, so you might need to send out 10,000 surveys to get 100 answers. (1% is about the number in this market)

LInkedIn. Get a premium account and preferably sales navigator. Search for accountants and you will get 3,397,067 records displayed. Use your client's position statement to whittle that lot down to about 3,000-6000 and get to know them by sending a polite note of introduction explaining what you are doing. Don't ask them to do anything apart from to get them to tell you a bit about their practice. You can automate and personalize this bit.To make sense of the answers ask about 5-6 questions, numbered which relate to the original position statement.

Delete those who tell you to piss off.

Go back to those who respond and ask them if they will complete a short survey to help you to develop an offering which would be of use to accountants. Stress that you will not be coming back to sell to them if you want to raise the number of responses. Link it to the survey you have constructed. Decide if you want the survey to be anonymized or to be with names (For leads). It doesn't really matter as you can always trace back who did what if you want to.

If you do trace things back without asking, why not sell your data to The Trump Campaign for a lot of money and join Cambridge Analytica in the halls of fame.

Analyse the answers and then decide what your strategy will be. I cannot advise on that because I would need to know the responses before deciding which of about 14 ways to go.

3) 30-day plan: Conceive the damned thing. 60-day plan: Execute the Development of the contacts for the survey and then the sending of the survey. 90 Day plan: Spend some real time on data analytics. If you are no good at this then get someone in. The last thing you need is to be doing sums when you should be doing maths. 120-day plan: Analyse what the interpretations of the data are, match it to your original positioning statement and write a new one.

I was hesitant in answering this because as Mike has already pointed out, scoping it is probably about a 20-day piece of consultancy work at a high level.

If the work is important and you want to get it right, I would seriously consider getting in such as his firm's help. This is a huge undertaking.