Expertise Marketplace - Professional Service Firm Marketing Blog

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.

 

Follow Suzanne Lowe on:

Google+: https://www.google.com/+SuzanneCampbellLowe

Twitter: https://twitter.com/SuzanneLowe

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/suzannecampbelllowe

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

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

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!”)

.

Follow Suzanne Lowe on:

Google+: https://www.google.com/+SuzanneCampbellLowe

Twitter: https://twitter.com/SuzanneLowe

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/suzannecampbelllowe

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

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

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.  

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

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/9jdfBPpNdPg?list=UU7vR2bZLcp7L_L4zXr0FRAA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

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.

Follow me on:

Google+: https://www.google.com/+SuzanneCampbellLowe

Twitter: https://twitter.com/SuzanneLowe

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/suzannecampbelllowe

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

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

How mid-level marketers can provide new value

Suzanne Lowe highlights a popular topic for the Action Learning Projects at the 2014-15 Professional Services Leadership Initiative at the Robert H. Smith School of Business: integrating marketing and sales.

 

Why do marketing and selling disconnects exist between these functions at professional service firms? Part of the reason is that they work at different ends of the business development pipeline.

In many traditional professional services marketing jobs, marketers work at the “beginning” of the pipeline -- defining and building awareness with targeted prospects and clients. (These traditions are changing, however!) Sellers traditionally work at the other end of the pipeline -- acquiring, retaining or building share of wallet with the prospects and clients.

No wonder silos crop up!

To help erase these marketing and selling silos, Lowe suggests marketers and sellers should work to increase their understanding of each other’s tools, processes and, most importantly, motivation.

Setting up effective professional services alumni relations programs

A CMO of a very well-respected financial services company is considering creating a structured alumni relations program for his firm. I volunteered to reach out to my senior marketing contacts about formal alumni relations programs. If your firm has such a program, we’d be interested in your perspectives on the questions below.

(If I get enough answers to merit another blog post on this subject, I’ll aggregate them and get something out!)

• What are the most successful aspects of your firm’s alumni relations program? The least successful?

• If your firm uses alumni relations for business development, is your approach active (e.g., directly asking for referrals, and/or including the alumnus in your referral outreach) or passive (e.g., saying “we’d appreciate your referrals” but no follow up)?

• What reciprocal benefits do you offer your alumni, e.g., actively promoting them for board positions, or actively helping them develop their own business? 

Professional Services Marketing 3.0

I recommend Bruce Marcus's new book, Professional Services Marketing 3.0. Like Bruce, it's a thoughtful, well-grounded piece of work that is filled with respectful observations and crisp comments on the state of marketing in professional services.I only wish Bruce's work were more widely known outside of law and accounting circles.

One of the points Bruce makes so well, in an excerpt published recently in CPA Trendlines, is about the importance of client-facing practitioners and marketers working better together. We're not talking here about simply being better collaborators (although collaboration is enormously important).

We're talking about the difference between marketers' knowing the firm’s work capabilities and really deeply understanding its practice and how practitioners think. We're talking about developing new skills -- on the part of marketers and their client-facing practitioner colleagues -- toward cross-enterprise expertise and competitive advantage.

To that end, I say "Onward!"

Mapping out "sample experiences" for clients

Many of you know Charles Green's substantive Trusted Advisor work. He sent me a new piece recently, in which he says: "The best way for a client to learn how to work with you is to let them work with you. Create a sample experience."

These two short sentences offer an incredibly good articulation of how to integrate marketing and selling. 

Green writes: "Sample selling the services might mean brainstorming; a small project; a lunch-and-learn; a webinar; a series of articles; a series of conversations for which you don’t bill time; sharing of some previous work."

Now read that sentence again.

Green's points raise three huge issues, each of which pertains to the powerful benefits of integrating Marketing and Selling in professional and B2B firms.

1. Marketers and practitioners, working together, can map out a series of well-integrated sample experiences for strategically-targeted clients and prospects. By thinking about offering sample experiences, they are encouraged to let go of old paradigms of what should be in the marketer's purview (webinars, a series of articles) and what should be in the practitioner's purview (conversations for which you don't bill time; a small project).  Instead, they can consider the best outcome of that sample experience: to acquire, retain or build share-of-wallet with strategically appropriate clients.
2. By considering how they might offer different sample experiences depending on the outcome they seek (acquire, retain and build share-of-wallet), marketers and practitioners can begin to break down their notion of what the firm really sells. Is it protected (but hide-bound) methodologies and relationships?  Or is it the dedication to solve the client's problem in a uniquely favorable way?  
3. Too many professional and B2B firms are stuck trying to measure the ROI of tactical marketing or selling programs that are too loosely tied to real marketplace outcomes (acquire, retain or build share-of-wallet with strategically appropriate clients). If they worked together to create sample experiences, they'd more quickly break down these old notions of measuring ROI.  

Write to me and let me know how your firm is doing at creating sample experiences. What's worked? What are your lessons learned?

Do corporate silos serve a purpose? Well, yes they can

Do corporate silos actually offer a company some benefits?

Well, yes, they can.

For the opportunity to talk about this issue, I offer my gratitude to BL Ochman. BL is the only person to ask me that question (the very first one she asked in her just-posted interview with me) regarding the concepts in my new book, The Integration Imperative. 

Corporate silos result from a lack of or a barrier to organizational cooperation, communication and shared accountability between business units, functions and colleagues. They may cause lower go-to-market effectiveness, productivity and results. 

Most business people fall prey to the knee-jerk reaction that silos are always bad, all the time. But in some ways they can, at least in their early stages, pull a company toward greater effectiveness.  Don't we all know an "intrapreneur" who initiated a forward-thinking program that turned out to be a great idea for the whole firm? It's not always a terrible idea for management to encourage professionally passionate people to pilot new programs, right?

But when those special projects or initiatives turn into hardened processes, or can't easily be incorporated into most people's daily jobs, they become problematic. Consider the way Client Relationship Management (CRM) has affected so many professional service firms.  What is actually a good idea -- a system that helps share and manage vital client information internally -- too often becomes a rigid process, under the purview of too few people, and less-than-helpful for too many. I'm sure many of us could name corporate initiatives that feel onerous and that impede the marketplace gains the firm could be making.

Instead, those new pilots or great ideas should be developed, from their inception, with their ultimate goal in mind: integration into everyone's function within the firm. 

For small PSFs, teaming and joint venturing could help ride out a recession

This spring, I facilitated a panel discussion at the ACEC annual conference about how small professional service firms can grow their businesses by teaming up or entering into joint ventures with other firms.  If undertaken as a strategic long-term move, and not a last-minute tactical grab to survive a recession, it could be a smart way to compete.  

Here's a PDF of a summary of that session, with thanks to our friends at IOMA's Principal's Report for offering us a chance to share it.  Download DPRAug09_RightMatch