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T. Rowe Price digital marketer appplauds the #PSLI Professional Services Leadership Initiative

T. Rowe Price’s senior digital marketer describes the benefits she and her colleagues received from their participation in the first cohort of the Professional Services Leadership Initiative (PSLI). The PSLI just graduated its second cohort. These benefits include building stronger relationships with colleagues, learning from other professional service sectors, understanding pricing, and focusing on metrics. She provides advice to new PSLI attendees: Participate!

  

The PSLI is a unique executive development program for high-performance marketers and managers. It is targeted to globally prominent professional and B2B companies that demonstrate a notable commitment to pursuing marketplace excellence. The PSLI is unique in its approach because it only allows non-competing companies to become sponsors. JLL, T. Rowe Price, PwC and Randstad were the PSLI’s sponsoring companies for 2014-15.

In the last two years, these world-class professional enterprises have sent more than 40 high-performing marketers to the PSLI. Topics included marketing models, global branding, digital marketing, data analytics, partnering with agencies, integrating marketing and sales teams, and client experience management. The group also completed team-based Action Learning Projects, in which they applied what they learned to real problems facing their companies.

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Randstad’s North America CMO describes the value of the 2015 Professional Services Leadership Initiative #PSLI

Randstad’s North Americas CMO describes the benefits she and her team received from their participation in the 2014-2015 Professional Services Leadership Initiative (PSLI). These include non-competitive information sharing, gaining a global perspective, being challenged to grow, developing a perspective beyond her own company and working in teams. She provides advice to new participants: Be prepared!

 

The PSLI is a unique executive development program for high-performance marketers and managers. It is targeted to globally prominent professional and B2B companies that demonstrate a notable commitment to pursuing marketplace excellence. The PSLI is unique in its approach because it only allows non-competing companies to become sponsors. JLL, T. Rowe Price, PwC and Randstad were the PSLI’s sponsoring companies for 2014-15.

In the last two years, these world-class professional enterprises have sent more than 40 high-performing marketers to the PSLI. Topics included marketing models, global branding, digital marketing, data analytics, partnering with agencies, integrating marketing and sales teams, and client experience management. The group also completed team-based Action Learning Projects, in which they applied what they learned to real problems facing their companies.

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Does open office space affect professional services integration?

Last fall, a client showed me her company’s new office space. Everywhere I looked, there were no walls, lots of windows, modular desks, cubbies for the storage of employees’ personal belongings (each morning they choose a new desk), standing computer stations, and flexible meeting spaces.

 

My client was enthusiastic about this new office arrangement, and called it a model for enhanced collaboration. I’ve heard the open-space approach is catching on with other companies.

I can see how open office space helps stimulate collegial conversations and new forms of worker relationship building. But, for professional service firms especially, is it enough to address a critical issue: the integration of marketing and selling?

For the most effective  integration of marketing and selling, professional firms should still consider the structural and cultural methods that I have talked about in my previous writing and speaking. For example, the shared development of marketing and selling goals, the co-leadership toward achieving optimal outcomes, the sharing of functional accountabilities, and performance measurement frameworks that are flexible enough to not kill a good idea too quickly.   

Don’t get me wrong. I am all for breaking down barriers in a professional services environment! I think the open space approach holds much promise. But by itself, it’s not enough to achieve true marketing and selling integration.

 

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A five-year cycle for marketing technologies

Marketing technology in the professional services arena appears to be on a five-year evolutionary cycle.  We looked at four areas:

CRM, marketing automation, contacts management and brands.  In CRM, marketers now have options for cloud-based services that they didn't have five years ago, when most CRM Systems were housed on hard drives and local servers.

Marketing automation wasn’t actually possible five years ago!  Today, marketing automation is an embedded capability with most CRM systems, and, supported by data analytics, is becoming a normal process at leading professional service firms. 

For contacts management, we see a shift from a gatekeeper approach (“MY contacts! Don’t touch them!”) to one that is more digitized, centrally managed and crowdsourced (clients voluntarily offering their contact details on social networks).

Regarding brands, professional service firms are shifting from being named after their founding partners to shortened names, even acronyms, that are more appropriate for a digital environment. 

  

Professional service firms that want to compete effectively must take notice of these five-year cycles -- and anticipate the next marketing technology wave five years from now. In five years, the best professional service firms will use marketing technologies to mine their individual buyers’ perceptions and purchase choices. The most astute professional firms will use marketing technology to push their traditional B2B boundaries toward a stronger B2C approach.

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The power of the pilot

The Professional Services Leadership Initiative #PSLI, held for the second year in a row at the R. H. Smith School of Business @SmithSchool, concluded last week. More than twenty marketing managers from around the world presented their Action Learning Projects to their senior executives. The projects focused on: integrating marketing with selling; using market research to change account managers’ focus on less-effective push marketing to more effective pull marketing; developing more effective email marketing campaigns; and increasing market share for an important new client segment.  

 

 In each case, the proposed projects were presented as pilots for testing and evaluation prior to broader roll-out. The PSLI participants recognized the power of using pilots -- where a new approach could be attempted on a limited basis with a tightly framed part of an organization or audience. The senior executives in attendance at the presentations agreed, and endorsed these pilots for immediate launch.

#PSLI @SmithSchool

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Integration improves internal productivity

Silos between marketing and sales continue to be a challenge for professional service and B2B companies. Marketers find it hard to make the case that integration will bring more than reputational advantages. And because a short-term mindset prevails in many firms, it’s a significant challenge to track an integrated pull-push initiative through the sales funnel to actual booked revenues. Too much work! Too many moving parts!  

 

But marketers can make the case that integration will improve internal productivity. Using actual or modeled salary and/or time expenditures for discreet marketing campaigns, marketers can show how a “before” effort takes longer time and more effort than an integrated campaign. This kind of demonstration might be compelling for senior managers who are looking for measurement tools that have real meaning for their companies.

Too many professional service and B2B marketers are either less than savvy on financial measurements or are actually not exposed to finance inside their companies. But measuring internal productivity offers a way for marketers to build the kind of financial acumen that demonstrates an understanding of their companies’ business. This activity would also enable marketers to integrate with their HR or finance colleagues, internally, using either real data or representative data. (“A non-integrated email campaign took our managers and marketing staff ‘x’ hours to produce. A similar integrated email campaign took 25% fewer hours!”)

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The ROI Trap

Professional service marketers too often fall into a trap if they pursue the wrong types of ROI measurement. One ROI trap is measuring the wrong things like non-client “events” such as click-throughs on an email campaign, web site hits, or media mentions. These activities are nice to know but not necessarily indicative of future sales.

Another ROI trap is measuring the wrong timing such as a near-term increase in revenues soon after a marketing campaign or event. Professional service clients are not quick buyers. Their sales cycle is too long to try to measure one-off responses like that.

 

The most effective ROI measurements always focus on the client. The simple act of asking questions about a prospect’s or client’s consideration of your firm inevitably leads to that person’s perception of greater value. This is especially true if your firm tweaks its marketing outreach based on the feedback it receives. Qualitative interviews – just asking about a person’s value perception -- is the most powerful type of client engagement I’ve ever seen.

Qualitative interview questions should include questions like, “What about our recent thought leadership materials did you find to be valuable? What would make them more valuable?” From that point on, a client’s consideration will increase, because s/he is engaged with your firm.

Engage the client like this at regular intervals, and the revenues will follow.

 

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Use internal segmentation to drive change

Suzanne Lowe advises professional service marketers to use classic segmentation methods when introducing new initiatives to internal client-facing practitioners and/or business developers. Let’s say Marketing wants to implement a new initiative that's never been tried by the firm before: an email campaign that uses new thought leadership content.  

  

She suggests segmenting the internal colleagues into three categories.

First, “lead users” or “early adopters.” These are people who would be most likely to welcome a partnership with Marketing on testing a new initiative or improving a marketing approach currently in use. This “early adopter” group is more likely to be interested in evaluating the pilots, tolerating “failure” and working in partnership with marketing to make improvements for the next time.

The second group, the “responder” category, represents those internal colleagues who might say “yes” to trying a new approach once they’ve seen it tested successfully by others in the organization.

The third group, the “decliners,” may never say yes to working with Marketing to try new approaches to build relationships with prospects or clients.

Using this segmentation approach, Marketers can be more strategic in rolling out new initiatives. It’s also a smart way to pilot test and tweak the campaigns before broader introduction to other client-facing practitioners.  

Stereotypes are no longer acceptable!

In my video this week, I describe the study findings about workplace gender bias cited in a December 6, 2014 New York Times article by Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg (“When talking about bias backfires”). The article offers fascinating insights for professional services marketing.

 

“. . . new research suggests that, if we’re not careful, making people aware of bias can backfire, leading them to discriminate more rather than less.” Sandberg and Grant write, “When we communicate that a vast majority of people hold some biases, we need to make sure we are not legitimizing prejudice . . . Instead, we need to communicate that these biases are undesirable and unacceptable.” 

These points offer critical lessons for the function of professional services marketing. Professional services marketers in some cases legitimize a number of outmoded stereotypes when they talk about the biases held about the function. (I’m not even going to write them down. If you’re reading this post, you know what they are!)

But the old stereotypes are actually no longer even true. They are certainly no longer desirable.

I call on professional service marketers to be explicit about their disapproval of the old biases about professional services marketing. Instead, you must talk about the organizational benefits of overcoming outmoded perceptions.

“We want to see this [insert stereotype] vanish, and we know you do, too.”

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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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