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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)

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Edmond Russ

When I first came to Grant Thornton (GT) in 2001, it was a $360 million firm. All during the 1990s, most accounting firms had expanded dramatically, but GT had not.

I thought one of the first and best things I could do to grow the firm would be to generate widespread awareness of GT's great work. The firm had a small but favorable reputation. In spring 2001, I met with our senior leaders and presented some of the marketing tools I would use to build our brand, including advertising. One of the partners said, "We tried that and it didn't do anything for us. You'll never be able to afford enough advertising to make a difference." Other partners echoed his sentiment. Others just kept quiet. I could tell they were reluctant. But I knew this was the right way to go. Because of the time of year that I joined the firm (it was not formal budgeting time), coupled with their lack of endorsement for my idea, I knew I couldn't get advertising officially into the budget that year.

So, in order to secure money for a small awareness advertising campaign, I positioned the program as a short-term test. I decided I would measure awareness levels for a very targeted set of prospective clients – CFOs and finance directors. I got permission to have the firm sponsor a Financial Executives Institute (FEI) event, and to advertise in CFO Magazine. At the same time, we did other things to generate business (direct mail, for example). We only focused on clients of the Big 4. Sure enough, by about 2003, awareness levels did creep up, from 5% unaided recall to 8%.

By 2003, we picked up many Andersen partners in new offices. These folks knew the value of brand building. In essence, they said to their new GT colleagues, "You've got to spend money on brand building. We need help to build awareness of this firm." So, with this internal endorsement, combined with the increase in awareness levels, I recommended that we expand what we were doing in advertising. We picked up additional budget money to do spot radio in six new markets.

I was careful to document any anecdotal evidence I could find that these awareness-building initiatives were working. A banker or attorney might say to a partner, "Hey, I heard about Grant Thornton on the radio." I ran across other anecdotes about local surges of awareness. I made a point of capturing these quotes on my computer.

By late 2004, I met with our senior leadership team and reported we had nearly doubled awareness levels across the country and in new pockets where we'd had zero awareness before, like the Carolinas. I read them the quotes from partners and staff who had written me. People were not saying "Grant who?" any more. I then asked for more money; this time for more print and also national network radio advertising.

In 2005 and 2006 I went back again to show the increased numbers: awareness numbers that had been 5% in 2001 had moved to the mid-teens by 2004-2005, and were continuing to increase, as were our revenues.

By 2006, we were committing many times my original brand-building budget requests, and buying print, network radio, cable TV and network television ads. Now, in 2007, we are expanding yet again, to include PBS, Meet the Press, and a pretty strong schedule on both CNBC and CNN.

Along this journey, I've employed a number of principles:

Talk to decision-makers in their own language. My audience is accountants. Accountants love data. I've showed them that our marketing costs, although increasing in absolute dollars, are actually decreasing as a percent of net revenue. Beyond my initial request for "pilot" funds, the way you convince accountants to do something is to focus on numbers.

Start small, on a test basis. Prove the concept with small, measured successes first. Then, with confidence, you can request the funds needed to roll it out firmwide in next year's budget.

Make a point of promising to measure results, and reporting on them. I've reinforced the connection between investing in marketing and the positive results we've gotten. You have to use measurements to explain why something worked or didn't. I talk to our partners once a quarter. I make a point of telling them how their efforts, coupled with our marketing programs, have brought in xx% more clients than last year at this time.

Become informed about the marketing practices of competitors, but don't go too far to copy them. It might make sense to explore the marketing practices of other firms in accounting or tangential industries, but remember that your firm is trying to be different.

Make friends with Finance. I'd prefer that Finance people produce the measurement numbers, because it adds more credibility. In the beginning of our fiscal year, I establish with them the metrics by which Marketing will be judged. Finance then produces the spreadsheet on which our progress is measured.

Leverage your investments. For example, as part of the sponsorship when we joined FEI, we got 6-7 ads in FEI's monthly magazine. We also made sure we got speaking engagements at as many of their conferences as possible, and linked our web site to theirs with thought leadership articles. We did focused programs with FEI. We tracked Grant Thornton's awareness with FEI members, and it was consistently higher – 8 points higher this year – than our national awareness numbers. Now it's a piece of cake to justify the sponsorship fees for FEI.