Generating Long-term Profitable Growth
We work with clients to generate double-digit, profitable growth through superior sales and marketing.

Traditional marketing firms focus on selling products. Our focus and success comes from finding and growing crown-jewel customers.

Expertise in Professional Services
Our expertise in relationship marketing has come from working with many of the world’s leading professional service firms, including all Big Four accounting giants – PwC, Deloitte, KPMG and Ernst & Young.

Our professional service clients also include an international who’s who in consulting, legal services, IT, wealth management, engineering and architecture. These include the likes of Connell Mott MacDonald, Tower and Arup.

Areas of Work
We love tackling the big challenges:

• Marketing strategy
• Large sale and deal management
• Value pricing
• Relationship management
• Proposal winning
• New service management
• Sales skill development
• Customer loyalty
• Branding
• Product and service differentiation

Our marketing expertise in building profitable relationships has been recognized by a large cluster of non-professional firms, such as Toyota, Lexus, Kimberly-Clark, GE Capital and Unilever.

Marketing and Sales Know-How
Our client work and research has resulted in a number of best selling books in marketing and sales.

Managing Director, Harry Mills’ book The Rainmaker’s Toolkit was selected by CEO Refresher as one of the top 10 U.S. business books for 2004.

Harry Mills is also a mentor on persuasion for the Harvard Manage/Mentor Program.

Drilling for Diamonds
Drilling for Diamonds is the proprietary label we give to the Mills Group’s 10 step marketing system that helps relationship-focused firms generate sustainable, profitable growth.

Relationship-focused firms enjoy accelerated growth when they focus their marketing energies on their crown-jewel clients. We call these crown-jewel clients Diamonds, Rubies and Opals. Diamonds are the symbol and metaphor for that group of super-profitable clients who love what we do for them, and in exchange reward us with a premium income for the value created so we can continue to grow and prosper.

Hence the name Drilling for Diamonds.

The Ten Steps to Profitable Growth
Each step in Drilling for Diamonds focuses on a high-impact relationship-building driver.

Driver 1: Review: Evaluate the way you find, hold and grow profitable clients. We start by showing firms how to identify the value of their high-value crown-jewel clients.

Driver 2: Revitalization: Rejuvenate your value proposition with new services, sharper differentiation, and premium pricing. Marketing success starts with the creation of a compelling value proposition that allows you to sharply differentiate your services from your rivals and charge the prices you need to prosper.

Driver 3: Retention: Hold onto your existing loyal high-profit clients. You’ll never achieve double-digit, profitable growth until you discover how to retain your high value clients longer.

Driver 4: Reacquisition: Win back your valuable inactive and lost clients. Few service firms have any formal win-back program to recapture lost clients. Yet the odds of successfully selling to a lost client are 1 in 3. Compare that to the odds of selling to a fresh prospect of 1 in 8.

Driver 5: Referrals: Build a referral network to generate low-cost, new business. Everyone knows about referral or word-of-mouth marketing, but few know how to do it well. Referred prospects are the cheapest source of new business.

Driver 6: Regeneration: Target the right markets. Client attrition means you always need to hunt for fresh prospects to regenerate and expand your client base. The key to profitable regeneration is to target and pursue profitable niches and segments where you can become the dominant player or the supplier of first choice.

Driver 7: Rainmaking: Sell more, faster. With client loyalty decreasing, you need superior rainmaking and strategic account management skills to identify and win large profitable new accounts.

Driver 8: Related Sales: Up-sell and cross-sell to increase client share of wallet. The odds of selling to an existing client are better than 1 in 2. So, up-selling and cross-selling to existing clients to increase your share of wallet represents a golden opportunity, which few exploit well.

Driver 9: Reputation Building: Brand your business to attract premium business. A brand attracts and retains clients, simplifies buying decisions, and differentiates the firm from competitors. A powerful brand also adds anything from 20 percent to 300 percent to the price premium you can command.

Driver 10: Reflection: Measure, manage and maximize your performance. How to use a marketing scorecard to stay on track and continue to achieve: higher profits, double-digit growth and better clients.