Expertise Marketplace - Professional Service Firm Marketing Blog

Friendship-Based Integration Is Not Enough

My new video highlights the continuing challenges of integrating marketing and sales (business development) in the professional services arena. Since publishing my book The Integration Imperative, there has been much progress to integrate these functions. And I'm pleased that the critical topic of integrating marketing and selling is addressed by the 2014-2015 Professional Services Leadership Initiative (PSLI). #SmithSchool

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But professional service firms over-rely on a culture-based Friendship Model of integrating marketing, sales and other functions. The Friendship Model is based on collegiality: one person asks a colleague to help jointly solve a business problem. This kind of collaboration does have merit! Many professional firms appropriately support collaboration as part of their performance evaluations. By itself, though, the Friendship Model of integrating marketing and selling cannot create sustainable market share gains, cannot alone build the “right” revenues, and may not offer the clients substantive value.

Why? Because it’s too informal. Friends are too often pulled away by competing priorities, by lack of accountability and by simply being assigned elsewhere or leaving their role. By only relying on a cultural solution, professional service firms miss out on competing as effectively as they could. The Friendship Model doesn't do enough to harness people formally to work together toward a common goal.

Professional- and B2B-service firms should add structure to break down marketing and selling silos.

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Managing outsourced service provider relationships

In this video, I discuss the opportunities and challenges facing mid-level professional services marketers as they manage outsourced service providers for their enterprises. For many mid-level marketers, leading a project with an outside agency is their first chance to steer an initiative on their own. The stakes are high.  

  

Many mid-level professional services marketers find – sometimes the hard way, through mistakes and underperformance -- that these opportunities come with pitfalls. Senior executives have certain expectations. The outside agencies or outsourced service providers, with their own technical or creative capabilities, have their own expectations. Mid-level marketers are at the crux of this triangle, and must deftly pivot between both sides. They must help set – and re-set -- the scope of the project. They must communicate, communicate, and communicate again, as they drive the project to a positive outcome. Disappointments are not only possible, but all too common.

Instead of learning the hard way – on the job – about how best to manage these agency relationships, wouldn’t it be better if mid-level professional services marketers had a chance to learn about these and other issues BEFORE they begin managing a project for their company? That’s what the Professional Services Leadership Initiative (PSLI) is offering currently to 21 marketers from around the world.

Pricing strategy in professional services marketing

My new video addresses the increasing importance of pricing strategy in the professional services arena. The tradition -- prices being developed by a handful of professional service partners -- no longer affords an effective competitive advantage. That’s why mid-level marketers considered the Pricing Strategy module to be one of the most valuable subjects offered in the first cohort of the Professional Services Leadership Initiative (PSLI) at the Smith School of Business.

Effective pricing is fundamental to the business success of a professional enterprise. Marketers have a unique understanding of the client’s perception of value and the always-shifting global marketplace. They should understand pricing models in order to become key partners in the creation of a professional service firm’s growth strategies.

  

 

 

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Mid-level marketers learn about The Client Experience

The Professional Services Leadership Initiative has successfully launched

The Professional Services Leadership Initiative (PSLI) had a strong start this week. The professors from the the R.H. Smith School of Business's Center for Excellence in Service were fantastic. The Smith School's Office of Executive Programs produced an excellent experience for the 23 marketing managers who traveled from around the world. 

It was awesome to see the breadth and depth of the cross-sector interaction between the participants from Randstad (staffing and HR services), T. Rowe Price (financial services and asset management), and Jones Lang LaSalle (real estate services).

Session Two begins in February 2014.

A curriculum for a services marketing leadership development pilot

In my last post, I talked about the uniqueness of the Professional Services Leadership Initiative (PSLI) pilot as it has been conceived by me and my collaborators, the Center for Excellence in Service and the Office of Executive Programs of the RH Smith School of Business.

Here are the services marketing leadership development modules that we are finalizing for the fall 2013 pilot: Market Intelligence Gathering, Business Models, Global Branding Strategy, Integrated Marketing Communications, Working with Agencies, Internet Marketing, Marketing Analytics,  Finance for the Non-Financial Professional, Introducing New Services, Designing Channels, Collaborating with Sales, Client Relationship Management, Pricing a Service, and Communication Skills.

In my next post, I’ll outline to whom this PSLI pilot program is targeted.

The PSLI's uniqueness: cross-sector and non-competitive learning

In my last post, I summarized the mission of the new Professional Services Leadership Initiative (PSLI) pilot program that I will help launch this fall with the Center for Excellence in Service and Executive Education at the RH Smith School of Business. The thrust of this new pilot is to help services marketers increase their functional productivity, effectiveness, and successful performance.

I am particularly excited about the PSLI and this pilot because it is an extension of a cross-sector knowledge exchange that I’ve facilitated for business and professional service CMOs for a dozen years. I have seen first-hand how much an individual marketer in one profession – say, architecture – has learned from a peer in another profession – say, management consulting. Executive search marketers learn from legal marketers. Real estate services marketers learn from financial services marketers. And so on.

This PSLI pilot builds on the individual learning exchange model, too, but this time on a company-by-company basis. We’ll bring a group of five mid-level marketers from up to five companies together to participate in an educational program. They will all learn from the same program, then work together on an action learning project in smaller groups on an actual service marketing challenge.

These knowledge exchanges work especially well when the represented companies are not direct competitors. There are fewer barriers to real learning when the participating companies can share fully.

In my next post, I’ll outline the curriculum of the PSLI pilot program.

This fall: a cross-sector professional services marketing leadership development pilot

In my last post I shared the news that I am partnering with the Center for Excellence in Service to create the first US-based cross-sector Professional Services Leadership Initiative (PSLI).

Through this PSLI, this fall we will launch a services marketing leadership development pilot for four (and maybe five) global professional services firms.

The PSLI’s mission is to help professional and business service firms succeed in their increasingly competitive markets. The PSLI pilot seeks to educate mid-level marketers on the best cross-sector practices of professional services marketing. The pilot will especially emphasize building skills that will help them: 

• Address the unique challenges and opportunities of the professional services business environment,
• Collaborate with internal colleagues to deliver optimal marketing results,
• Understand their company’s business imperatives as it seeks to increase global market share with targeted clients, and
• Improve their capabilities in problem solving, collaboration, execution, and leadership.

This very exciting pilot represents the next step in the knowledge exchange that I believe will benefit the leaders of all professional service firms.

In my next post, I’ll outline the uniqueness of the PSLI and our 2013 pilot program. 

Leaders' retirements mean big changes for professional service firms

Here's another reason why I'm keen to develop a cross-sector educational program to help tomorrow's professional service firm leaders manage and grow their firms effectively: the impending retirements of today's baby-boom generation leaders. How well prepared are the next generation of management consulting leaders to move their firms ahead?

Take a look at my comments about this issue, in the new issue of Consult, Canada's magazine for certified management consultants.

Building skills and credentials to grow a professional firm

How are professional service firms helping their current and future leaders gain skills and credentials to manage their companies?

As yet, there is no United States-based cross-sector educational program that integrates the deep knowledge and best practices of growing a firm so that it can compete effectively. That intelligence lies inside the minds (and silos) of sector-specific associations, professional firms and individual leaders.

I want to change that. My colleagues and I are building a Brain Trust of professional service firm leaders who will serve as advisors about the creation of such a program. 

Here's an article that outlines an emerging vision for this idea. It's published by one of my collaborators, the Association for Accounting Marketing, in its new publication, "Growth Strategies." 

Contact me if you'd like more information on this initiative.

A Woman of Substance

Over the past few months I have picked my way through Maureen Broderick's new book The Art of Managing Professional Services. A very good book, written by a woman of substance.  I love seeing work that is thoughtful, thorough and pertinent. Any PSF leader will find wonderful points and meaty examples in its pages.

Here are two points I found particularly worthy of discussion:

PSFs perpetuate silos. Broderick's Chapter 3 (and one of the book's stated best practices) focuses on People (recruiting, training and evaluating). Great points throughout this section. But like DeLong's book When Professionals Have to Lead, Maister & McKenna's book First Among Equals, and Lorsch & Tierney's book Aligning the Stars, The Art of Managing Professional Services mainly focuses on client-facing practitioners. (The p. 50 example of Booz Allen Hamilton does specifically say "for all staff" -- hurray).

But the sad truth is that most PSFs largely invest in recruiting, training and evaluating for only a segment of their people! By definition, in my opinion, these firms are not as well run as they could be. Non client-facing staff in marketing, business development, HR, IT, Finance, and more, are left mostly on their own to become better integrated into the business. And the turn-over figures published by observers like SpencerStuart support this fact.

My just-published research certainly supports my point that too many PSFs have yet to think critically about some of their other critical resources. PSFs actually perpetuate their own silos! The sooner PSFs grasp the competitive advantages of professionally developing -- and integrating -- their administrative talent, the more competitively effective they will truly be.

Organizational Infrastructure should be much higher on the PSF management agenda. The book's Chapter 10 recounts the relative lack of importance PSF leaders assign to their governance and management decision-making. This issue is huge. I could write a book (and maybe I will!) on the bifurcated decision-making that exists in most PSFs. Broderick rightly points out that "using professional nonbillable support teams" (p. 241) -- including adding them onto the firm's executive management committees -- is essential for successful governance.

But the traditional partnership model (where equity ownership is offered only to practitioners of the profession) still prevails at most privately held firms. As such, decision-making is too often conducted without the sage advice of those "support" professionals who actually have the expertise and experience to help a PSF grow more effectively.

Thank you Maureen Broderick, for your substantive book!