Professional Services
Thought Leadership
The First 100 Days: Crucial Decisions in Professional Services Marketing
The first 100 days in marketing a professional services firm: what are the priorities?
Let’s say you have just signed on as CMO for a major league professional firm. It could be a consulting firm, an accounting firm, a law firm, an executive search firm, an architectural firm—you get the idea.
What do you do first? What decisions are critical to determine how resources are allocated? Budgets established? Positions hired? As it turns out, all you need to do is answer three basic philosophical decisions—all of which are points along a continuum. Having done that, other decisions should fall reasonably neatly into place. Here they are:
- Market the practices or market the brand? There’s a constant tension between meeting the needs of the rainmakers, sitting across from the potential client and meeting the needs of the firm’s global identity. Of course you have to do both, but where a CMO puts the most emphasis will drive many resource allocation decisions. For example, the CMO who privileges the brand might begin by assessing the firm positioning, or measuring the brand equity. The CMO who privileges the practices might look at identifying and supporting growth among practices, through the “gateway” service offerings being offered to clients.
- Centralize or decentralize? Vertically integrated, centralized marketing or the bottom up paradigm driven by local office support? Where does the marketing team physically sit? How much market information is housed centrally? There are clear trade-offs here. Centralized functions provide control and consistency, but carry with them a high-ticket price in overhead. Decentralized marketing, via practice group or geography, makes sure that resources are being spent on opportunities defined market-by-market, yet may not carry the brand forward sufficiently.
- Role of the staff? What do you expect from your full-time staff? Are they experts in a particular communications discipline? Or content specialists, deep in the particulars of the important markets? Or generalists/account executives, acting as marketing advisors to the areas that require counsel? The trend now is to hire internally a cadre of strategists and generalists who can help the line professionals develop intellectual capital, and to outsource most communications functions to outside firms. But the model must fit the goals of the organization.
The 1990s saw a huge increase in marketing sophistication in professional services, and that trend has continued in the 2000s. Based on our observations, current thinking in professional services marketing emphasizes:
- A centralized, top-down strategy
- Increased emphasis on brand management and reputation development
- Outsourced routinized functional capabilities
- Decentralized implementation, via practice and geography
- Clear responsibility to “content managers” for information capture and dissemination
- Penalties for line professionals who don’t share market information
- Reliance on new media for information sharing
- Face-to-face meetings between practice groups to share best practices and reinforce desired behaviors
Click here to download the entire article, “Three Legs of a Stool: The Decisions that Shape the Marketing Function” By Abby Carr and John Bliss, as published in Creating Rainmakers, a book by Ford Harding.
AGC
