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What are Your Firm's Structural Barriers to Marketing and Business Development Integration?

A Professional Services Assessment

Many professional service firms (PSFs) have decided to integrate marketing and business development functions in order to grow the "right" revenues, build market share and provide a better value proposition to their clients.

But improving marketing effectiveness can be an uphill battle if an enterprise hasn't yet identified its structural and cultural impediments to integration.

Take our short Structural Integration Barriers Assessment to see which cultural barriers exist at your professional firm, and how they cause significant marketing and business development disconnects. Then you can take our Cultural Integration Barriers Assessment.

From there, you will be invited to consider how elements of The Integration Imperative might be applied to erase these organizational silos.

Note: The assessment results are instant and 100 percent private, visible only to you. We do not collect any information about you and have no way of seeing your results.

Check all that apply, then click Submit.

1. Our firm manages marketing and selling processes according to a matrix business organization (geographies, industries, functional focuses and/or service lines).
2. Our marketing to business development process "hand-offs" (e.g., inquiries to leads, to prospects, to proposals, to clients) aren't as seamless as they could be.
3. We implement our marketing to selling processes with less-than-optimal technological systems, uneven performance incentives and measures, and/or problems with internal communication.
4. We have trouble prioritizing our emphasis on client acquisition, retention, or building our book of business with clients.
5. Our revenue-generating practitioners sometimes have a hard time determining who's supposed to make marketing or business development decisions.
6. At our firm, we split assignments for aspects of marketing and business development functions (e.g., sometimes we assign marketing and business development functions to a practice/service line leader; sometimes to a separate marketing or sales head; sometimes to a practicing partner with sales responsibilities.)
7. Our firm expects people to collaborate informally on marketing and business development initiatives.
8. Our marketing programs emphasize marketing communications (i.e., holiday card mailers, brochures, press releases, advertising).
9. Our executive managers have increased their calls for return-on-investment proof of our marketing communications programs.
10. Our marketing and business development functions are support-oriented; we do not offer people in these functions a pathway to the firm's management.
11. As a cost-cutting measure, our firm has begun sending some of our marketing services to outsourced vendors.
12. Our firm doesn't invest enough in training for marketing and selling skills for our revenue generators.
13. Our firm doesn't invest enough in broadening the skills of our nonrevenue generating marketers and business developers.

 

 
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