Expertise Marketplace - Professional Service Firm Marketing Blog

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.

Follow Suzanne Lowe on:

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http://www.expertisemarketing.com/index.html

http://www.expertisemarketing.com/suzanne-lowe.html

PwC marketers praise the 2015 Professional Services Leadership Initiative #PSLI @SmithSchool

High performing marketers from PwC talk together about the benefits they received from their participation in the 2014-2015 Professional Services Leadership Initiative (PSLI). These include making connections, access to leadership, and building relationships.

  

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.

 

Follow Suzanne Lowe on:

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http://www.expertisemarketing.com/index.html

http://www.expertisemarketing.com/suzanne-lowe.html

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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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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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.

Mid-level marketers learn about The Client Experience

In this new 90-second video, I'll describe one of the curriculum offerings for the November 2014 cohort of the Professional Services Leadership Initiative (PSLI) -- the client experience.

I've highlighted some of the skills growth areas about the client experience that professional service leaders want their mid-level marketers to understand. These areas include: researching and mapping the client experience (digitally and in-person); designing a unique client experience that aligns with the firm’s differentiation, positioning and branding strategies; and delivering the experience consistently across channels.

 

 

Cross-sector marketing education WORKS

It has been so gratifying to hear from real people whose words corroborate my hypothesis that cross-sector professional services marketing education makes them more effective at their jobs.

“Suzanne-

Wanted to say thank you for all your support during this program. It truly was a great experience and incredible to meet individuals within other professional services organizations to share in the conversations. Wishing you the best always and may our paths cross again.”