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News
Upcoming
Speeches:
Convert
Your Marketing Role into a Strategic Firm Leadership
Position, SMPS-PSMA Build Business 2007
National Conference, Washington DC, August 23,
2007 (details)
Articles
and Publications:
Suzanne
Lowe contributed to: Marketing
Metrics De-Mystified: Methods for Measuring ROI
and Evaluating Your Marketing Effort, by Sally
Handley FSMPS, President of Sally
Handley, Inc.. Sally is an adjunct faculty
member at Pratt Institute in Manhattan, where
she teaches Marketing /Communications for design
firms.
Practice
Management: Re-evaluate how you evaluate your
marketer (PDF), by Suzanne Lowe and Sally
Glick for Accounting Today, September
2006 (also published with permission on The
Marcus Letter)
Why
You May Not be Truly Differentiated, Consulting
News, September 2006 (available to CN subscribers
only)
Hallmarks
of an Effective CMO (PDF), The Marketer,
August 2006
New
from the Expertise Marketplace Blog
Social
Networking and Professional Services: an oxymoron?
Parts 1 through 6 starting with the June
19 post.
Question
the status quo!
Heavy
lifting: Leading a firm toward new marketing strategies
Be
VERY Afraid . . . NOT! - is the CMO doomed?
See
all the posts at the Expertise Marketplace blog
Subscribe
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Recent
Issues
You
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Marketplace Masters from Barnes &
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or CEO-READ.
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The
Marketplace Master™ is a monthly email publication
on professional service marketing from Expertise Marketing,
LLC.
In Praise of Persistence
I'm
half way through my 2007 exploration of how individual
people are steering their professional service firms
to "do things differently" to achieve marketplace
leadership. During these six months, I've met many marketing
and business development leaders who've demonstrated
a significant level of professional bravery. These good
people have encouraged, pulled and sometimes shoved
their colleagues to take unfamiliar steps, usually with
solidly positive results. But I've never met one as
steadfast as Edward Kasparek. Ed gets the award for
keeping his eye on the prize until everyone else could
see it too.
My
focus for this month is about how professional service
firms are working to grow their "share of a client's
available business," or as many firms view it,
"cross-selling." My last substantive look
at this issue was in my July
2006 Marketplace Master™ issue, where I unveiled
new
research findings about the overly-tactical deployment
of cross-selling in professional service firms. This
time, I wanted to find a person who has led his or her
firm to embrace a "doing things differently"
mindset about growing revenues with clients.
Along
the way, I had a chance to examine one of the real reasons
why a push to "do things differently" eventually
works: a champion of a concept waits until
organizational factors align, and then s/he strikes
when the iron is hot.
Suzanne Lowe
Author, Marketplace Masters: How Professional Service
Firms Compete to Win
President, Expertise Marketing, LLC
Strike While the Iron is Hot
Introduced
to me by my friend, rainmaking guru Ford
Harding, Ed is a senior vice president and head
of business development for Thornton
Tomasetti, an international building engineering
company with US revenues of about $100 Million (and
growing strongly). The 51-year-old private firm employs
600 people through 16 offices (12 are based in the U.S.;
two in Asia and two in Europe), and specializes in engineering,
building forensics and analysis. It has produced designs
that have created structures for long-span sports and
entertainment centers and some of the world's tallest
buildings.
In
the paragraphs below, Ed shares his story about how
he's helped his Thornton-Tomasetti colleagues employ
never-before-tried techniques to grow their revenues
with targeted clients
Edward Kasparek
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One
of the unique aspects of my role is that I'm
a touch point -- helping to connect the dots
-- between the many people at Thornton Tomasetti.
I travel extensively, and meet with colleagues
across all of our offices, market sector groups,
and service lines. By meeting with all these
people, and external partners too, I can see
the big picture of how we can more effectively
position our firm and sell our services. Over
the years, I've seen areas that challenge us:
people in different offices trying to sell services
to the same client without knowing about the
others; or people in different parts of our
firm pursuing the same exact projects, without
knowing it. Or working separately to represent
our firm at the same conference, without having
communicated with each other before hand.
It
was clear that we could improve our efficiency
and effectiveness in selling our services. About
eight years ago, I started to call for more
collaboration between our internal professionals.
I named this initiative the "Center for
Excellence." Frankly, I wasn't suggesting
any radically new techniques; rather some internal
methods that I felt we could employ to communicate
more effectively. For example, I wanted to initiate
a focused market-sector approach to pursuing
business. I felt we should better collaborate
with the best experts throughout all the offices
of our firm to win more work. I suggested a
business development conference call, occurring
once a week, to help us share information about
potential projects and get an early lead on
distributing these opportunities to the relevant
participants internally. The philosophy of "know
who," and "know what" is as important
as "know how." As part of this initiative,
I wanted to develop our firm's national leads
list, to give us a heads up on potential projects
that were coming up.
At
first people chuckled. Not much happened. But
over the years I continued to make the case
that other firms in our industry were making
strides to improve the coordination of their
selling efforts. Starting about five years ago,
we did in fact institute a weekly business development
conference call.
I
continued to talk to outside colleagues and
our firm's alliance partners (including architects,
contractors and other consultants). I researched
and read. Over the next five years I kept working
at persuading my colleagues to embrace other
ideas to help us cross sell more effectively.
With some level of regularity in our marketing
and business development meetings, I reported
on how these ideas were being implemented by
others in our field.
I
couldn't get much traction, even though people
thought I had good ideas, until a few key events
occurred, all at about the same time, starting
about two years ago.
First,
our firm evolved from numerous separate profit
centers into three larger profit centers. This
was a big step for us, but immediately, this
financial structure fostered more collaboration.
We were able to see the bigger picture about
selling our value to clients. Before then, literally,
working together was a real concern for our
professionals; if they helped a colleague in
another geographic location or service line,
they would have actually reduced billable time
from their own profit center!
Second,
we celebrated our firm's 50th anniversary in
mid-2006. This offered us an occasion to rebrand,
and to take a broader look at how we present
ourselves in the market and differentiate our
offerings. This initiative was a great springboard
for people to think differently about how to
sell and market.
With
those two significant events, and my continued
cajoling about how our firm's many alliance
partners were successfully instituting some
simple methods, in the last two years we've
established several new ways to cross sell.
One
is once-a-month "market sector" meetings,
which we hold on the phone, in person and through
a videoconference. These meetings focus on particular
market sectors (aviation, healthcare, and sports
and entertainment). In these meetings, we discuss
opportunities with our internal experts, who
share with us their knowledge and their direct
networking with clients.
We
will expand this "market sector" idea
next month to some of our mechanical engineering
or architectural partner firms. We will discuss
specific clients, how we might develop or co-develop
business with them, and tactical issues like
who might be best to meet with the potential
client. This will also give us an opportunity
to ask specific people in our offices to network
with our business friends in particular cities,
to ensure that everyone is aware of upcoming
opportunities, and to help these allies put
some of our experts on their joint presentation
teams.
From
there, I hope to expand even further: for example,
inviting guest speakers from an architectural
firm that we work with to come into our market
sector calls and give us a talk about how their
firm is doing work, and how we might be able
to help them. We've talked to several national
architecture firms about this idea, specifically
in the healthcare sector, and it's being welcomed.
We
have yet to begin tracking our efforts formally,
but it's the next logical thing to do. Now I
can truly say that we do have a cross-selling
capability. The weekly conference calls and
the market sector meetings have all helped us
grow revenues tremendously. Also, my next big
push will be to get our service sectors involved
in this "market sector" approach.
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Ed's lessons learned: marketing and business development
champions have to get the message out early and often,
and have to substantially focus on improving internal
communications. "If you really believe in your
idea, you must be persistent."
"Cross-selling"
is NOT the same as "growing the firm's share of
a client's available business"
I
was impressed at Ed's perseverance during the many years
it took him to convince his colleagues to adopt better
coordinated cross-selling methods. (Luckily, Thornton
Tomasetti enjoys a strong marketplace reputation, and
grew its revenues over those years even without being
optimally organized to do so.) Thanks in part to Ed's
persistent encouragement, though, Thornton Tomasetti
deserves "high fives" for taking advantage
of critical shifts in the firm's lifecycle to improve
its implementation of tactical cross-selling processes.
As
we concluded our interview, Ed acknowledged the validity
of one of my wrap-up remarks: "Cross-selling' is
not the same as strategically considering how to grow
a firm's 'share of a client's available business.'"
We talked about how this kind of strategic assessment
requires an embrace of competitive intelligence and
a stronger information-exchange with clients.
I
guess I just previewed Ed's next big idea. I'll wager
it will gain traction a lot quicker this time.
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2007 Expertise
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