Services marketers: self-taught or formally trained?

Last week, I debuted my Learning to Fly newsletter series about skills growth in professional services marketing, business development, leadership and management. This series is relevant for anyone who has -- or wants to have -- responsibility for leading a professional firm to grow its market share. (Click here if you want to subscribe.) 

I'm not the only one thinking about the issue of training people to grow their service firms.

There's a poll currently underway on LinkedIn (thank you Gary Katz), asking marketers to vote on whether they've been formally trained or self-taught. It's not specific to professional services, but I know some of the respondents, and many are indeed professional service marketers. 

So far, the results parallel what I found in my own research. At this writing there are only 27 votes, but it's a pretty telling pattern so far: 63% say they are self-taught, and 38% say they are formally trained.   

Interesting comments too. One person says: "Down the line we all become self-taught." Well, sure. We shouldn't ever stifle people from continuous learning, or others from continuous informal mentoring. 

But what could the results of this (admittedly unscientific) poll also tell us about formal "grow the service business" education?   

• That a majority of today's service marketers have yet to find an MBA program with a strong service-marketing focus, and so they had to rely on "self-taught" to advance in their careers?
• That their professional firms aren't internally helping them grow their skills, with their own internal "best practices" on services marketing? 

My hypothesis: the issue of self-taught versus formal training -- especially in services marketing -- will soon become a very big issue. That's why I am devoting my 2011 newsletter series to this topic.

Mark my words: As professional service firms increasingly find that their competitive success is on the line, there will be increased interest in formally developing all their people (not just client-facing practitioners, but marketers and other administrative professionals).

"Formal learning" about the best practices of growing and managing professional service firms: that's the future.  

How will we get there?

Come with me. I will show you. 

Comments

[Tim Haveron Jones]

Paul is right to point out that there is (still!) a burning need for client-facing personnel to be educated in at least the basics of marketing theory and practice. I would add that there is also a reciprocal need for marketers to understand the real drivers of profit and value in professional services firms, which many do not.

To Suzanne's original point, I think that most PSF marketers with more than a few years' experience are almost guaranteed to be mainly self-taught - simply because when we were starting out, marketing hardly existed in any of these firms and we had to make it up as we went along. Many are still doing just that - because they work in firms where, as Paul points out, there is "a gap between what they want to do and what the firm will let them do."

[Suzanne Lowe]

So right, Paul! This was indeed one of the major pillars in my book The Integration Imperative. Skills growth, for client facing professionals, is heavily focused on client and project management. While this is not bad per se,it does leave a huge gap in terms of understanding, anticipating and managing market shifts. And many client-facing professionals are "developed" in a way that doesn't adequately address their skills in growing the firm. Rather, they learn how to simply keep in lock-step with immediate client needs.

But marketers need to grow skills, too, and that's the focus of this poll. I saw it as a springboard to discuss my call for PSFs to do a better job of training their people (client-facing or not) to better share accountability for growing the firm.

[Paul Gladen]

Suzanne - I have no doubt that services marketers would benefit from greater availability of services relevant formal training but I wonder if the greater need is for services marketing training for client facing professionals.

I suspect many services firm marketers face a gap between what they want to do and what the firm will let them do based on a lack of understanding of marketing principles and practices amongst the firm's client facing professionals.

As marketers seek to raise the bar on their own skills what can they do to bring the rest of the firm with them?