Looking ahead at the specific industry of which your service business or professional practice is a part is also important.  To determine which trends are significant to you, explore the marketing elements of your industry.  These include the following: general changes in your industry, changes in services in your field, pricing changes, changes in the way your service is distributed or delivered to your clients, possible changes in promotion, changes in the clients themselves.

-Jean Withers and Carol Vipperman, Marketing Your Service

Continuous improvement, or CI in shorthand, is a management approach that gained currency in the 1980s and 1990s.  With a CI culture, nobody in the organization ever thinks, "OK, now that we've achieved this year's cost targets, let's just run things steadily for a bit, no more changes."  A CI culture implies there's always a next idea or a next step, however small.  And it says that if you're not moving a little bit further forward in some way, there's a danger you'll start slipping back - if not in absolute terms, then relative to your competitors.  You have to be paranoid about complacency.  

And with a CI culture, nobody ever thinks, "OK, there's more to do, but I'll wait a few months and assemble a good, long, meaty to-do list, then I'll really go for it, I'll make a sprint for the tape."  A CI culture says do even a little bit today, don't wait for a major event, a big process - if you do, there's a risk it won't happen, it could become too monumental and hard to handle.

- Andrew Wileman, Driving Down Cost

Every internal review of a company's marketing should ask four questions that have not been typical of marketing reviews until now:  

• In our industry, are we second to none technologically?  
• Among service industries, and compared with firms of our approximate size, are we second to none technologically?  
• Are we doing all we need today to be second to none two years from now?  
• Have we carefully considered innovative ways that new technology can be used to improve our service and grow our business?

- Harry Beckwith, Selling the Invisible