By Grant Butler, Editor Group. The ICON community pulled off another great event, with more than 200 members and friends coming together for the annual Australia & New Zealand conference at the Sheraton on the Park hotel in Sydney on 18–20 October 2017. The theme was i+U+WE Connect.

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Top tips from the 2017 ICON Australia & New Zealand conference
By Grant Butler, Editor Group
The ICON community pulled off another great event, with more than 200 members and friends coming
together for the annual Australia & New Zealand conference at the Sheraton on the Park hotel in Sydney
on 18–20 October. The theme was i+U+WE Connect.
This article captures key takeaways and offers links for further reading. The tips are to:
• Expect strong business conditions
• Get the client service basics right
• Update your sales pitch
• Become data-driven
• Leverage your librarians
• Manage by generation
• Stay calm in a crisis
• Get ready for everything to change
• But understand that humans will still be very human
• Don’t forget to smile!
As always, we’d welcome your comments or additions here or via the ICON APAC LinkedIn forum.

2. 1. Expect strong business conditions
First, the good news. According to Sue Kench, Global Managing Partner at the law firm King & Wood
Mallesons, the global economy is gaining speed. Even better, Australian law and other professional firms
are regarded as being highly competitive internationally.
Some of the big drivers of growth in the coming years will be the rise of China and India; the recovery of
large markets that are overcoming challenges, such as Brazil; and especially the resurgence of the United
States.
“The economy in the US is just incredibly powerful, and those strong US firms are doing incredibly well,”
Kench said. “It took them a while to get through the GFC, but they’re back.”
2. Get the client service basics right
There are always many words at a conference but a clear message from the forum was that if you want to
win in the B2B services market, it still pays to get the basics right. Paul Hugh-Jones, Partner at Beaton
Research + Consulting, explained that the winners of his firm’s annual Client Choice awards were
consistently good at being reliable, easy to do business with and caring about others.
Those top performers also had the right technical expertise, kept costs under control, understood their
clients’ businesses, documented their work and processes well, and made their top team members
available. Interestingly though, clients were less fussed about friendliness, responsiveness or innovation.
Those were all good to have, but not key drivers of success in Beaton’s awards.
What engineering clients care about, according to Beaton’s research
Hugh-Jones’ comments were backed up by an interview between Jason Steinberg, GHD’s Global Client
Relationship Manager, and Christophe Kowalczyk, the Engineering Director at ACCIONA Infrastructure.
Kowalczyk said that, as a client, he valued service providers that were highly reliable, provided a single
point of contact, communicated succinctly and flagged any issues early. He added that he was happy to
provide debriefs after major projects and to groups that lost tenders with his business – and even to those
who won. However, he noted that few took up the opportunity.
3. Update your sales pitch
If you’re still relying on consultative selling – interrogating clients until they reveal ‘what keeps them up at
night’ then positioning your services as the solution to their problems – you’re out of date. According to
Jason Murray, APAC Practice Director with the sales training business RAIN Group, clients have moved
on. Worse, they’re sick of exploring their problems, so the strategy can backfire.

3. Instead, today’s top salespeople focus on achieving three things. The first is to resonate, which means
demonstrating enough subject matter expertise and understanding of the client’s issues to show they
understand their needs. Top salespeople are also shifting from seeking to fix clients’ pain points to learning
about their aspirations, and to co-creating solutions with clients to secure their engagement.
Top sellers then work to introduce their organisations in detail and to differentiate them sufficiently from the
competition to ensure they’re seen as the best option. Third, they seek to convince the client that their firm
is the ideal choice and can deliver. A key technique is to wrap the pitch in memorable and emotive stories.
“Facts tell, stories sell,” said Murray.
Recipe for success, from RAIN Group’s Jason Murray
Fellow sales trainer Wayne Stewart, from Monte Rosa, added it’s vital to go beyond writing up your value
proposition and assembling evidence to support each point. This regularly fails, he said, because firms’
value propositions were often strikingly similar. Also, in small markets like Australia and New Zealand, firms
often list participation in the same signature projects or the same clients in pitches.
Stewart added that the battle for a client is typically won or lost before a tender is even issued. So too is the
client’s procurement strategy. The reason is that buyer organisations typically map potential suppliers on a
chart with risk of supply on one axis and relative spend on another. Where suppliers aren’t perceived to be
critical to a process and the proposed spending is low, the buyer will regard all comers as much the same
and make them compete on price. The better scenario is to be seen as being critical to the buyer’s success
and a major expenditure item. Under those conditions, your firm will be regarded as strategic, and
procurement will focus more on your unique selling points.
Wayne Stewart says success lies in positioning your firm in the right quadrants early

4. 4. Become data-driven
Also on the theme of sales effectiveness, US-based speaker Tim Corcoran urged delegates to become
data-driven marketers and business development (BD) professionals.
He also said it was essential for firms to have comprehensive and strategic BD plans rather than engaging
in “random acts of marketing” spanning brochures, events and websites – or worse, selling via “random
acts of lunch”. As Corcoran put it in a suggested tweet for the audience to share, “Unsophisticated
marketers pursue random acts of marketing. Professional marketers execute a marketing strategy”.
Having a plan and having the data to argue for your plan was essential because marketing and BD teams
don’t own the businesses they work within, and because “there’s never enough time to review all of the
stupid decisions” put to them by the partners that do, he added.
Corcoran is the founder of Corcoran Consulting and a former President of the Legal Marketing Association
in the US. He also runs a blog on the business of law. He said there were two key components to
developing a sound strategic plan.
The first component is to clearly identify your firm’s current revenue sources by both service line and
specific offerings, and then set realistic targets by service line and offering to build total targets for the year
ahead or longer. This process should also identify gaps between your total target and the capacity of
existing business groups to deliver the desired result.
These forecasts should be based on quality data. This is instead of setting an arbitrary figure such as 10%
growth for the entire firm, which could be too high for some groups and too low for others, depending on
factors ranging from market demand to delivery capacity. Similarly, cost cuts or spending decisions should
also be tailored by group rather than firm-wide.
Growth targets should be built on a realistic and specific to practice groups

5. The second component to being strategic is being able to welcome the word ‘no’. While professionals such
as accountants, engineers and lawyers hate to fail, professional BD people know that selling involves
starting with multiple prospects, having plenty of conversations that end with a ‘no’, and then arriving at a
small number of high-quality deals. They also know up front how many deals they need to win, and at what
value, to meet the firm’s overall business objectives for a given period.
Other tips for BD and marketing leaders included asking for the firm’s financials (or befriending those in its
finance department so they can get financials and other data directly); allocating effort where it’s most
needed, rather than to the already large groups that tend to ask loudest; and learning to spot underutilised
professionals and teams, then structuring deals to improve their volume.
5. Leverage your librarians
Libraries are being used as secret business development weapons by some of the top law firms in Australia
and New Zealand.
Sarah Chisman-Duffy, Head of Client Engagement with Corrs Chambers Westgarth, and Matthew Jones,
who leads the Knowledge and Research group at Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF), revealed that their firms
have been dismantling the traditional walls between their law libraries and their BD and marketing teams.
Under the moniker of ‘collaborative intelligence’, these firms are applying the intellectual firepower of
librarians and other researchers to help their professionals win work by developing a deeper understanding
of their clients’ and prospects’ businesses, markets and competitors.
Alison Nussbaum from Manzama led the CI session and offered these extra insights from Tilt
“We do know that what clients value and what drives brand awareness, consideration, satisfaction and
advocacy, actually revolves around a true understanding of a clients’ business and industry,” said Chisman-
Duffy, arguing that her team’s work therefore directly impacts the firm’s performance.
Some of the topics researchers are being asked to explore include artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain and
driverless vehicles. Professionals are looking to their research teams not just for facts and figures, but also
insights they can take to clients to demonstrate expertise and start conversations.

6. HSF appears to have gone furthest and co-locates its law library and BD teams, while the teams at Corrs
remain separate but are working on ways to collaborate and reduce duplicated effort. Jones said: “My brief
has been to move the team away – or help them evolve – from being a fairly traditional law firm library to
more of what we would call collaborative intelligence, working more closely with business development.”
When asked about lessons learnt, the speakers noted that aligning or merging research and BD teams was
both a structural and cultural challenge. This meant it was important to move slowly and ensure there was
plenty of time for people to talk, discover areas for collaboration and gain trust.
6. Manage by generation
We’re often told not to generalise, but according to HR consultant Avril Henry, it can pay dividends when it
comes to understanding workforces. Henry discussed workers by generations – generations Z, Y and X, as
well as Baby Boomers and Veterans – and said it was vital to understand that people’s desires,
expectations and behaviours are significantly shaped by the world they grew up in.
For instance, Boomers tend to hold long-term loyalties to jobs and professions. They also define
themselves, and everyone else, by “what they do”. Gen X and Gen Y, on the other hand, have grown up
watching their loyal parents and grandparents be restructured and retrenched so many times they can’t
quite understand why anyone would hitch their career or identity to either a job or a profession. This, in
turn, shapes everything from their workplace behaviours to preferred small-talk topics.
Groups such as Gen Y also tend to have different but clear priorities. For instance, they are high on
authenticity (meaning they come across the same on both their personal and professional social feeds) and
will often leave the office at 5 pm because they “have a life”. Yet they are also intensely loyal to their
workplace teams. Henry believes this is because many younger employees lack extended families, which
means they place relatively more value on belonging to a group at work.
The upshot for managers is to carefully consider what age groups they employ and consider whether their
firm structures, policies and culture are helping or hindering them in gaining engagement and performance
from their people. Henry emphasised the importance of culture, saying, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast
every day, because culture gives people a space to excel.”
7. Stay calm in a crisis
If you listen to radio in Sydney, it’s hard to get through a week without hearing the name of the law firm
Maurice Blackburn. With the slogan of ‘We fight for fair’, the firm is usually pursuing a compensation or
personal injury claim on behalf of a client – or a class action on behalf of many.
In May 2015, the firm itself was the victim of a slanderous attack when someone stole the identity of its
high-profile lawyer Josh Bornstein and published extreme anti-Jewish content online. The firm’s National
Media Manager Jade Thompson discussed the crisis and shared the following advice to help any firm
grapple with a similar situation:
1. Know your reputation and brand. Many organisations come unstuck in the media because they
don’t have a clear identity and do things customers find inconsistent with their brands.
2. Understand the issue. Gather facts, work out where the crisis might lead and understand the
complexity of the issues involved.
3. Respond once and do it right. In an environment of 24-hour news and numerous micro news sites
such as blogs, it’s important to respond comprehensively and consistently.
4. Manage as a team. Firms should have a clear internal structure for dealing with crises and ensure
that senior people are media trained.
5. Engage all stakeholders. Through the Bornstein crisis and other situations, Maurice Blackburn has
realised that it’s important to contact key stakeholders directly as well as through the media.
6. Review, reflect and respond. Debrief and learn after a crisis has passed to ensure you’re better
prepared for next time. This can include running scenarios then documenting plans.

7. 8. Get ready for everything to change …
Now, the bad news. “All of these communications jobs you currently do are going to be taken over by
machines,” said Melissa Kaplan, Chief Digital Advisor at Microsoft Australia.
Kaplan’s argument is that the rapid development of AI will see the process of crafting communications
material and distributing it to clients and others become automated. Moreover, communications such as
client news updates will be more and more customised for the recipient in the same way that Spotify, Netflix
and Amazon are already so good at learning what music, videos or goods you might be interested in then
giving you a personalised service.
Communications will also become more immersive as augmented and virtual reality become mainstream.
We may even get to the point where whole presentations can be delivered by synthetic experts. If you think
that sounds unlikely, watch this Investec ad and appreciate that none of the people or voices are real – they
have all been generated by algorithms using raw data.
So, what should you do? The advice is to appreciate that even communications jobs are going to be
automated by technology and work out what higher ground you’re going to move to. According to Kaplan,
the basic split is that communications professionals will set the strategies, design the systems and define
the virtual personalities that are used to drive communications. The actual communications themselves will
be created by data scientists, who stand to become tomorrow’s content specialists.
Will a robot take your job? Yes, but there’s hope says Kaplan
9. … but understand that humans will still be very human
Towards the end of the conference, a panel of chief marketing officers acknowledged that rapid
technological change was underway but said they felt much wouldn’t change.
Murray Prior from King & Wood Mallesons said, “Technology is absolutely key and we will need new people
with new skills to help firms with that, but at the same time, these are people businesses with relationships,
and so people will always need to have that strong orientation. So, my strong view is that this is an ‘and’ not
an ‘or’.” Kersten Norlin from DibbsBarker firmly agreed.
Danielle Bond from Aurecon was more challenging, saying that members should expect to see their jobs
change radically within three years. “I think that the job we’re doing today will be very different by 2020 …
and the sort of people in this room may well be very different people,” she said. Bond added that the people
at ICON’s 2020 conference were likely to be highly creative and include game designers, design thinkers
and experts in changing analogue services to digital processes.

8. Fraser McNaughton from Grant Thornton and John Clay from Arup agreed their firms would continue to
introduce and exploit big data and marketing automation technologies. However, they argued that human
relationships would remain key to success for professional firms and that the core processes would remain
similar and resistant to computerisation. Those processes included getting to know clients, learning their
needs and taking time to form lasting human relationships.
There was also a view that as computers take over some of the drudgery of marketing and BD roles,
professionals will be freed up to spend more time focusing on these human factors. “Maybe we’re seeing
the renaissance of people doing people stuff,” said Prior.
CMO panel (left to right): Nick Mackeson-Smith (MC), Fraser McNaughton, Danielle Bond, John Clay, Kersten Norlin
and Murray Prior
In another session, the neurobiologist Dr Bob Murray from Fortinberry Murray, argued that firms shouldn’t
rush into replacing human-centric processes with technology because “the future belongs to those who can
form lasting relationships, not technocrats”.
Read this for a deeper dive, but in a nutshell, he said that humans were highly emotional beings that are
hardwired to want certainty, autonomy, trust and status. Technology could help meet some of these needs,
but a human touch would remain literally critical.
Dr Murray’s comments backed up a key point made by Wayne Stewart from Monte Rosa, which is that one
of the biggest challenges in BD is to get a client to move away from an incumbent supplier. The reason is
that humans simply don’t like change because it challenges their fundamental need for certainty, so
competitive offers must appear both superior and low-risk or incremental to win the day.

9. 10. Don’t forget to smile
Finally, don’t forget to be happy. That was the message from a blissful, Byron Bay–living Alex Dawson,
from Positive Scenario. His organisation has made a business from sharing the views of US happiness
guru Shawn Achor with otherwise grumpy organisations across Australia.
Firms that focus on happiness enjoy a range of benefits, from higher levels of staff engagement and
productivity to lower levels of sick leave and turnover, Dawson said. In turn, firms should start by focusing
on increasing people’s happiness levels then watch performance follow – rather than demanding higher
performance then expecting everyone to feel great when it’s been achieved.
And how do you make people happy? A few tricks are to collaborate more, allow flexibility, spend time
focusing on each other’s wellbeing at work and embrace outliers. The latter means working out why Karen
in the corner is so damn happy every day, rather than trying to drag her back to the organisational mean.
Dawson added that being nice to others, hiring the right people and meditating can also help.
Phew!
I hope you’ve enjoyed this whirlwind tour of the conference. Given it necessarily misses a lot of detail and I
can’t even begin to capture all the gossip from the superb mid-conference drinks, you realise how much
knowledge and information is shared at the event. Can’t wait for next year.
Grant Butler is the founder and Director of leading corporate writing firm Editor Group. He is also the
author of Think Write Grow (Wiley 2012) about thought leadership marketing, a former journalist with
The Australian Financial Review and a long-time ICON member.