What should be expected of "marketing experts?" Part II

Here's a continuation of my thoughts on what "what makes one marketer more expert than the other."

A marketing expert finds a way to get closer to the firm's clients. This requires that marketing leaders help their firms learn more about the clients than they already know.  Of course, doing this may be a hurdle that marketers must overcome, especially in precedent-oriented sectors like law and accounting.

Michelle Golden crystallizes the feelings of many private-firm marketers when she talks about "the stifling power of partners [who are] obsessed with bathing in the same bathwater as all their competitors and fellow association members."

But a marketing expert knows that the real avenue to competitive success (both for the firm and the marketer him- or herself) is to own more nuanced knowledge about the clients than the competitors do.  If firm fee-earners and practitioners are obsessed with competitors, a marketing expert can make the case that a competitive edge can be gained by undertaking some client research.  For example, finding out about the ways decision-makers are influenced in their buying decisions.  What attracts them toward us, and repels them?  How are their buying criteria shifting from one year to the next?  What do our clients find distinctly valuable about us versus our competitors?  Exactly what makes one client more attractive to our firm than another (it's often NOT about revenues)?

Many of today's marketing team members and functional leaders don't have a working knowledge of market research and analysis techniques.  And, because most staff-side marketers have not grown up within the professions of law, engineering, management consulting, and the like, fee-earners can easily justify their marginalization (and they can continue to believe their marketers are NOT experts beyond the tactical steps they are currently managing).   

The easiest avenue to gain these skills would be to go to classes or executive education conferences on how to conduct and analyze client research or mined data from a contacts database.

Having new and competitively advantaged capabilities changes the expertise equation.  Market research and quantitative and qualitative analysis skills are a must-have in order to understand professional service buyers and "consumers" in a unique way that will benefit a firm and its clients. 

They are also a must-have in order to make gains on becoming an unquestioned marketing expert.