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Upcoming
Speech:
Strategic
Firm Leadership and Management, Society
for Marketing Professional Services, New York,
November 9, 2007
Articles
and Publications:
The
One Piece of Advice You Can't Generate Leads Without,
Rain Today, September 2007
What
Would a Female Superhero Do for Gender Diversity?,”
American Bar Association’s Tort, Trial
and Insurance Practice Section newsletter,
July 2007
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)
New
from the Expertise Marketplace Blog
Five
Biggest Professional Service Presentation Don'ts
I'm
tracking others' insights - on Pricing and Value
Propositions
I'm
tracking others' insights - on Innovation
I'm
tracking others' insights - on Value Propositions
and Differentiation
Here's
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The
Marketplace Master™ is a monthly email publication
on professional service marketing from Expertise Marketing,
LLC.
Orchestrating
Improvements in Professional Service Marketing Processes
Frank
Sinatra famously sang "I did it MY way." But
when you’re marketing professional services, this
notion can be particularly paradoxical.
On
the one hand, marketing the firm requires strong internal
coordination of strategies, brand promises, messages
and processes. In order to make Sinatra's song really
hum, his band members had to harmonize together, in
time and in tune. On the other hand, revenue-generating
practitioners have to customize their marketing and
business development processes for potential and current
clients. This is often where real competitive advantage
is discovered.
Professional
service marketers are uniquely positioned to observe
this nexus, and to orchestrate improvements in marketing
processes. They envision how to help the band be even
MORE harmonized, MORE in tune, and also MORE able to
customize when needed.
But
it takes a special kind of "professional bravery"
to encourage a firm's wholesale adoption of new marketing
processes, even if these new processes are
an improvement. "Doing things differently"
means people must stop doing things "my way,"
for the benefit of their larger organization.
This
is the topic of our October issue: how marketing leaders
are optimizing their firms' marketing processes and
influencing –positively – their firms' competitive
effectiveness. Jeff Durocher, Vice President of Market
Development of Illinois-based RHR
International, told me how he's faced this challenge.
RHR International is a 60-year old consulting firm specializing
in executive and organizational development, assisting
senior management in areas of executive integration,
high potential development, succession planning, team
building, talent management, executive coaching and
board effectiveness.
Suzanne Lowe
Author, Marketplace Masters: How Professional Service
Firms Compete to Win
President, Expertise Marketing, LLC
"Let's
Implement Marketing Your Way . . . AND Mine"
One
of marketing's most complicated processes relates to
communication: managing contact lists and deploying
these lists to disseminate the firm's content. Most
professional service firms harbor a legacy of the "gatekeeper"
syndrome, where fee-earning practitioners closely guard
their relationships and contacts lists, instead of sharing
information to their firm's centralized contacts database.
Durocher, who joined RHR International in the mid-1990s,
discovered his firm's gatekeeper legacy the hard way.
He recounts below how this discovery became the springboard
for his leading the firm toward a significant marketing
process change.
Jeff Durocher
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Our
firm creates excellent content. I tell our consultants
that their personal distribution of the firm's
intellectual output is a fantastic way to stay
in touch with clients or prospective clients,
and helps expand the way they perceive us. For
example, if clients just knew us as people who
did organizational assessments, they could also
think of us to do their succession planning.
When
I first joined the firm, I asked everyone to
send me spreadsheets of their contacts. It took
a year to get all the lists, duplicate them
and create my own small core database. But I
also started a process of forwarding our packaged
expertise to our consultants, and asking them
to disseminate this thought leadership to their
contacts.
I
began to find out that many of our consultants
did not forward our materials to their
prospects and clients. Some people would just
flat out tell us, "You know, I don't do
anything with that material you send me."
Others would ask me why I keep sending the firm's
content to them. Sometimes clients would call
me and not know about the most recent item that
they should have received. It was clear there
were a lot of little content-distribution breakdowns
occurring.
So
we surveyed our consultants: "Are you sending
our materials out?" We found about 30%
were distributing our packaged intellectual
content; 30% or so wouldn't even consider it;
and the other 30% occasionally would do it,
and sometimes awkwardly, like sending out a
year's worth of material all at once.
I
said to myself, "OK, fine, I'll build a
list of my own potential RHR buyers." I
turned my small core list into a corporate contact
list, and housed it on a powerful relational
database. When our consultants spoke at conferences,
I got the list. When we advertised, I got the
list. I hired a temp to data-enter the Fortune
500 CEOs and their company's board members.
My list was about 10,000 people. The combined
list of the rest of the company was less than
3,000. On my own, I started sending potential
buyers our firm's materials.
That
got some of our consultants' attention. I remember
vividly receiving an angry fax from one of our
consultants about a letter I had sent to one
of his clients. He felt I had violated some
sort of unspoken code of contacting the client
without his knowledge. This didn't bother me
a bit. My philosophy is it's better to make
errors of commission instead of errors of omission.
But
the plan worked. People who got mad about what
I was doing ultimately expanded their relationships
with their clients. My steps led to their having
a discussion with their client, and also their
getting more familiar with the services and
intellectual capital of our entire firm. By
forcing them to change their marketing and client
relationship processes, it led to more client
work, in spite of themselves.
Three
years ago, I installed a CRM system which is
heavily tied to our firm's e-mail software.
I wanted to make it very easy for consultants
to share their contacts' information. Now, when
they add a contact to their personal list, a
copy also goes to our CRM list. We made it optional
for consultants to let us completely direct
the firm's content distribution to their clients.
Just
this year, we've noticed more people are saying,
"Here, send these publications to my list
too. I can't keep up with all the steps to touch
a client at the right time with the right information.
Why don't you just include me in your process?"
People are getting over the idea that they have
to "protect" their clients from Marketing,
and that we can actually do a better job of
managing the process of content distribution
than they can themselves.
And
the results show. We just produced a webinar
that we promoted over the last two months. For
the first time, we had probably half the firm
tells us, "send the webinar invitation
to my contacts list." So we've crossed
the tipping point, and it led to our largest,
most successful webinar yet. We usually get
about 200 or 300 webinar attendees; for this
one, we had 600. I fully expect that for our
next webinar, we will even get closer to 100%
participation from our customers and our consultants.
We've
changed their own process.
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No
Fear Durocher
outlined three important "lessons-learned"
about changing marketing processes, and getting people
to start endorsing them.
- Be sticky. "If you believe
you are right, then you have to tell people over and
over. Be consistent and continue to do it."
- Endure the backlash. "You
have to take a couple of courageous steps in order
to break through some of the barriers. For instance,
tell the consultants what you are going to do, then
actually do it."
- Don't listen to excuses. "As
long as what you are doing is relevant to your business
and can potentially expand the firm's work, just press
forward and don't let them talk you out of making
the changes you believe are necessary. You need support,
of course, at the right levels. (Durocher reports
to the CEO). As long as you update your senior managers
about what you will be doing, they will realize what
the real problems might be. When necessary, they will
advocate for the change you seek."
During
my nearly twelve years of marketing management consulting
to professional firms, the vast majority of marketing
leaders I've encountered have stayed well behind the
invisible line of their own "inside" function.
Durocher, in his fearless display of direct communication
with clients (without permission!) proved that a firm
can indeed change its marketing processes, benefit from
the results – and that everyone will live to tell
the tale.
Your
feedback is important to us. Please contact
us with your comments and questions.
Want
to see the results from our study on marketing effectiveness?
More
information on the complete 80-page study and its accompanying
68-page case studies report.
Take
the confidential, web-based Marketplace Masters professional
service firm differentiation assessment test for
instant feedback on whether your firm is doing differentiation
right.
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2007 Expertise
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