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The
Marketplace MasterTM
is a monthly email publication on professional service
marketing from Expertise Marketing, LLC.
Welcome
This month we start our discussion of culture, and how
it can affect how a firm goes to market.
After studying more than 500 firms over a five-year
period, we’ve concluded that professional service
firm (PSF) leaders must identify their firms’
distinct personality when deciding on methods to attract
and retain clients. One size does not fit all!
Next month we’ll discuss a group of five “cultural
clusters” revealed by our research, and then the
different approaches that worked for each.
Suzanne
Lowe
Author, Marketplace Masters: How Professional Service
Firms Compete to Win
President, Expertise Marketing, LLC
Is Your Firm’s Culture Part of its Marketplace
Strategy?
Plenty of professional service
firms talk about their culture, but culture is more
than simply something they need to proclaim to the world.
It can also influence how they attract and retain clients.
Most professional service firms discuss culture in
an outwardly-focused way. For example, see the blog
written by Richard Edelman, President and CEO of PR
firm Edelman. In a comment to his post on managing a
professional services firm, he writes “We need
to have people at our firm who embrace the culture,
which is client focus, delivery of results, continuous
pursuit of excellence, and creativity.”
Excellent values, all of them. They should be the bedrock
of any firm – in fact, clients increasingly expect
them as “must-haves” when choosing a service
provider.
But what many PSFs are missing is that their culture
goes deeper than their exterior profile. In addition
to an outwardly-focused, client-centric culture, every
firm has at least some favorably differentiated aspects
of its “cultural DNA” or “personality.”
The
Difference between Culture and Personality
Few firms even understand that there is a difference
between their culture and their “personality.”
Competitively astute firms will identify these distinctions
and integrate them into their go-to-market processes
and methods.
For example, a firm’s personality may be that
it has low self-esteem. (Yes, there really are firms
like this!) Everyone in the firm is a worrywart, concerned
about their competitors sneaking up on them and stealing
clients. How does that “cultural DNA” impact
their market behaviors in a way that benefits them competitively?
They meticulously double check themselves on the accuracy
and completeness of every work product. They are aggressive
in gathering and using competitive intelligence, and
they are focused on training and developing their professionals.
It also means they push for innovation because they're
so worried they're not good enough that they are driven
to stay ahead.
Would they ever actually announce to the marketplace
that their firm’s personality is one of low self-esteem?
Of course not! But they could align their market processes
and programs around their cultural DNA, their unique
personality profile. And that does
translate into appropriately successful competitive
behaviors.
Culture
as a Predictor of Success
When we researched the go-to-market methods of professional
service firms for Marketplace Masters, we discovered
something totally unexpected: that a firm’s culture
appears to be a predictor of its success at getting
closer to clients.
Our research revealed five clusters of firms with obvious
cultural characteristics. (We will introduce these five
clusters to you in next month’s issue.)
Without having asked a single question about culture
on our questionnaire, we suddenly found ourselves witnessing
the influence of a firm’s “internal personality”
on its eventual success – or failure – in
using certain methods to attract and retain clients.
Firms in some of the five cultural groups succeeded
at using certain methods – such as using primary
client research – whereas firms in a different
group had failed at using the same methods!
Our finding pointed out that for some cultures, certain
methods will likely be more effective – especially
if used in combination with each other – than
they might be if used within a different culture.
One
Size Doesn’t Fit All
It’s time for professional service firms to
stop implementing one-size-fits-all client attraction
and retention methods, without truly comprehending the
relevant underpinnings of their firms' “personalities.”
And it’s certainly time for PSFs to initiate client
attraction and retention methods at which they are more
likely to succeed instead of fail.
Successful firms will identify their firm’s
“cultural DNA,” understand its
influence on how they go to market, and align
their go-to-market strategies to it.
Culture
Case Study
We invite you to download our case study on Kepner-Tregoe
– a management consulting and training company
with a “Practical Results through Process”
culture. It is recognized globally as being at the forefront
of organizational design, research, and practice. It
has an almost 75 percent retention rate among current
clients. The case study points out how the firm integrates
its marketing strategy with its process-focused culture.
Download the
case study (PDF)
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Talk
Back
After our last two issues, (Why Aren’t
More Professional Service Firms Researching
Client Perceptions? and Master Your
Marketplace by Looking Forwards and Backwards)
a former senior marketing executive at two global
PSFs had this to say about our exploration of
market research:
“The two articles on market research
are very interesting. There was always resistance
to serious market research at the two big
firms where I worked.
For the accountants and the consultants,
there was the belief that the client managers
were gathering critical information through
their relationships with clients. Some of
this information was valid but it was rarely
in-depth and even more rarely did it provide
a glimpse into the future of the clients'
industries. Also, such information hardly
ever was housed in a database that could be
up-dated and shared. Often the research was
assigned to the national heads of industries
group who seldom communicated with the client
managers and marketing professionals in the
offices, thus creating a knowledge gap.
My impression was that these billable-oriented
firms didn't like spending money on market
research because they didn't believe it brought
in any business. Of course, many new audit
and tax clients just fell into the stable
thanks to ever-changing regulations from Washington.
I always believed that good marketing started
with good research but never had money in
the budget for it.”
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