Wanted: Brains, Guts and Glory

Since I began my career in professional services marketing twenty years ago, I've noticed a distinct swing of the function's pendulum:  from all "doing" to now a truly challenging balancing act between "doing" and "thinking."  The good news is that many of the services now highly expected from the professional firm's marketing "department," like media relations, meeting planning and client database management, have become commoditized such that they can be fairly easily outsourced -- monitored and managed by in-house Marketing staff.   And, as we saw from our study "Increasing Marketing Effectiveness at Professional Firms," conducted recently with Larry Bodine, PSFs are beginning to develop distinct frameworks around the ways that these and other marketing services can be measured. 

Ah, but what about the thinking part -- the strategic advisory services that are of critical importance to professional firms?  How can we step out of our "execution" shoes to gain critical analytic skills to assess economic shifts and business opportunities, and then to counsel our professional peers to pursue the most appropriate avenues for growth?  I just reviewed a very helpful article written by the folks at strategy + business called "Sharpening Your Business Acumen."  It's a must-read for professional services marketers.  An excerpt from the opening paragraphs follows:

• "No single aspect of managerial skill is more important. If the company’s assessment of the external landscape — how patterns of converging and diverging trends fit together — is inaccurate, the company’s strategic positioning will likely be wrong. Decision makers will be tempted to develop the wrong capabilities, hire the wrong people, or enter the wrong markets.

  Business acumen demands intense mental activity. Seeing how the landscape is evolving requires a high caliber of qualitative logic and the ability to frame, assess, discard, and adopt many assumptions at once. Because that landscape is continuously changing, the task is doubly difficult and always worth revisiting."

The authors call upon business leaders to begin NOW to practice building qualitative models of their future business environments, in order to create solutions to benefit their companies and their clients.  With practice, they say, will come new skills and judgment to make powerful strategic decisions. 

OK, but here's the dilemma:  so many marketers are so busy with the "doing" part of their roles that there is little time left -- if any at all -- to engage in this extremely important modeling.  Ultimately, though, who is best to help shape a company's future directions, if not marketers?  I believe it is imperative that you, the senior marketers and CMOs of your professional service firms, make this the purview of your jobs!  Do whatever you can to gain the skills and the judgment necessary to provide sage counsel to your professional service firm management.  If you haven't already done so, make this YOUR turf, and start building your base to lead here.  You won't own it exclusively, but it's got to be in your portfolio.

The "Sharpening Your Business Acumen" article provides a practical springboard to begin your own education and those of your professional colleagues.  I've excerpted it below, and I urge you to incorporate this framework (or something like it) into your firm's future business planning cycles.   

"One simple way to begin is by asking yourself a series of six questions, exploring the ideas with colleagues and peers:

1. What is happening in the world today?
2. What does it mean for others?
3. What does it mean for us?
4. What would have to happen first (for the results we want to occur)?
5. What do we have to do to play a role?
6. What do we do next?"

In essence, a move like this may require that you begin to reshape your colleagues' expectations of what a marketer should do in your professional firm.  Yes, you'll need to build your brains, you'll need to exercise your courage, and if you can do this, you and your firm are more likely to experience glory.

Am I preaching to the choir?  How many of my blog readers are incorporating this kind of strategic guidance into their functions, and with what results?  If you don't "own" this work, who does and how is it working? 

Comments

[Phil Gott]

I think Suzanne is right about the importance of the thinking part of professional services (which I would call "pioneering"). In the rush to execution the need to create a flow of new ideas can too easily be overlooked and undervalued.

This applies to professional service functions (such as marketing) just as much as it does to the firms they serve.

The reality is though that thinking and execution require very different mindsets and skill sets. There are big differences between those dynamic professionals who are highly driven towards execution and the ponderous reflective, creative ideas people. We cannot expect any single individual to be excellent at both. Neither need we, so long as we have teams and we encourage each team member to play to their strengths.

I have been exploring these issues in a new white paper “A new 3-dimensional model for managing talent in Professional Service Firms” which is available from www.philgott.com.