New Survey Results Are Marketing and Business Development Functions Stuck in a Rut? See the results of our research. How well do Marketing and Business Development work with other operations, like Finance, IT, HR, Legal and more? See the results of our research. Do PSF practitioners WANT to market and sell? See the results of our research. Take our latest survey: PSF Marketing/Business Development Integration – Does it Benefit Clients? News Ken Lizotte's new book prominently features Suzanne Lowe's ideas on successful business practices for professional service firms: The Expert's Edge: Become the Go-To Authority People Turn to Every Time (McGraw Hill 2008)   Podcast: The Silver Group's interview with Suzanne Lowe on differentiation and her upcoming book. January 2008. MP3 file Read a summary of Suzanne Lowe's upcoming book The Integration Imperative™. The One Piece of Advice You Can't Generate Leads Without, Rain Today, September 2007 (Awarded Marketing Sherpa's Best B2B Opt-in Email Campaign) Speeches and Webinars “If you Can’t Measure it Don’t Do it,” Part 8 of Rain Today's “The One Piece Of Advice You Can’t Generate Leads Without” series. April 23, 2008 "The Integration Imperative," 2008 SMPS Midwest Regional Conference, Chicago, May 9, 2008 "The Integration Imperative™: Erasing Marketing and Business Development Silos – Once and For All – in Professional Services," SMPS Northeast Regional Conference, Providence, May 8, 2008 New from the Expertise Marketplace™ Blog How Well do PSF Marketing and BD Work with Other Functions? Rainmaker, Rainmaker, Make me Some Rain Marketing and business development stuck in a rut? See all the posts at the Expertise Marketplace blog Subscribe to the blog's RSS feed for regular updates. (Need RSS help?) Subscribe Did a colleague forward this newsletter? Sign up to receive your own copy. "What a great newsletter — about the only one I've ever found useful in the marketing space." — Marketing and Communications Director, New York investment firm Recent Issues Five Questions for Wendy Horn on Reorganizing a Law Firm's Marketing Approach, March 2008 Five Questions for Jessica Reiter on Launching a Groundbreaking Branding Initiative, February 2008 Five Questions for Eileen Harrington, VP, Marketing, Analysis Group, on the Firm's Web Initiative, January 2008 You can order Marketplace Masters from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, your favorite online bookseller, or CEO-READ.

The Marketplace Master™ is a monthly email publication on professional service marketing from Expertise Marketing, LLC.

About this month's issue

As I spend the next few months focusing my time and attention on researching and writing my upcoming book I thought I'd share some of the most popular Marketplace Master™ articles.

The article in this issue was written prior to the February 2006 nationwide study on Increasing Marketing Effectiveness in Professional Firms, published by my colleague Larry Bodine and me.

At the time, as I was looking for patterns about where PSF marketers were placing most of their marketing measurement emphasis, I saw a fairly distinct split between measuring "internal" and "external" marketing initiatives. I encouraged PSF marketers to measure at a deeper level than the low-hanging-fruit, tactical initiatives.

Suzanne Lowe
President, Expertise Marketing
Author, Marketplace Masters: How Professional Service Firms Compete to Win

P.S. Is your firm employing unique marketing and business development strategies or tactics? Are you marketing your firm differently? Let us know if you would like to be featured in a future issue.

Methods of Measuring Marketing ROI

Some people say that dreaming up creative, savvy marketing campaigns is a right-brained activity – the very essence of the “fun” stuff about marketing. But professional service marketers know that they are also expected to oversee the very left-brained activity of measuring the ROI of their efforts. Practitioners are applying growing pressure on marketers to provide evidence that their marketing investment is worth it. And, not only do marketers have to be accountable for marketing expenditures, they also need to prove that measurement itself is even feasible. No wonder that getting early results from ROI measurement is so important!

This imperative to get quick results influences the types of initiatives that professional service marketers choose to measure. It also influences the way they measure.

My sense is that, in general, marketers start out by focusing on tactically well-defined internal and external marketing initiatives so they can prove to their firm’s internal clients that the very act of measurement is a good idea. Then, as they develop more expertise in measurement, they move on to measuring more strategic initiatives.

Results of a recent survey

At a recent presentation to an audience of professional services marketers, I asked them to respond to a quick survey about how they were using technology to measure the effectiveness of their marketing programs. While this is by no means a scientific sample, it still provides some insight into what other firms are doing and may get you thinking about where your firm is directing its measurement efforts.

The bulk of what people were measuring falls into what I call the “internal” category – that is, inside-the-firm initiatives that support a firm’s endeavors to attract and retain clients. As you’ll see below, many of these internal measurement initiatives are made possible because of a firm’s technological infrastructure (e.g., contacts management databases, spreadsheets and intranets).

Internal measurement initiative examples:

• Client Relationship Management (CRM).
• Business Intelligence (BI).
• Sharing knowledge within the firm – some use internal blogs to share best practices with colleagues.
• Tracking business plans – some have automated systems to track goals, activities, schedules, and responsible parties. Management uses them for performance reviews.
• Creating a detailed database of the skills of everyone in the firm.
• Performing 360 evaluations.
• Tracking sales pipelines.
• Improving the effectiveness of the sales process.
• Creating reports on each practice’s financial performance.
• Online benchmarking.
• Creating dossiers on client companies.

Some of the marketers in the audience indicated they use a variety of technologies to measure the actual marketing initiatives themselves.

External measurement initiative examples:

• Capturing data by requiring clients and prospects to register for webinars and events – this was one of the more popular externally focused methods of measurement. Some firms maintain copies of webinars permanently on their Web sites so clients have 24 x 7 x 365 access, as long as they register their data.
• Opt-in email lists – not only is it possible to track who subscribes, you can track the open and click-through rates of every email you send.
• Extranets – available only to clients, these require a registration process.
• Web analytics – firms can learn the most popular items clients are viewing and downloading on their Web site, what key phrases they entered into search engines to find the firm, and what other Web sites are driving the most traffic to the firm’s site.

Of course, professional service marketers are measuring other tactically well-defined external initiatives, even if they don’t use technology to do so. For example, many are measuring prospect inquiries from activities such as advertising, PR campaigns, firm-sponsored conferences or speeches given by the practitioners.

You’ve measured the low-hanging fruit. Now what?

It’s clear that professional service marketers are keen to prove that measurement itself is a worthy activity. It’s also clear that most have chosen to succeed at measuring the low-hanging-fruit – and mostly tactical – marketing activities like those cited above. This is entirely understandable.

Thanks mostly to those professional service marketers who are “breaking measurement ground” for future marketers, I predict that professional firms will soon begin to measure more strategically robust marketing initiatives, such as the following:

• How are we doing at defining and identifying the most strategically appropriate clients?
• Beyond the simple measures of revenue generated, who are our most strategically important and loyal clients? How are we doing at retaining them?
• How are we doing at increasing our revenues from these most strategically important and loyal clients?

I believe technology will indeed play a part in the heightened profile and sophistication of marketing measurement. For example, looking at the list above, it’s clear that a firm’s financial systems, when linked to its client relationship management platform, will help the firm define and identify the most strategically appropriate clients, and keep track of the firm’s “share of wallet” with those clients. In addition, data mining practices of client behaviors will help reveal those clients who are true evangelists.

Even since its publication in early 2006, our research study on measuring the ROI of marketing in professional firms continues to shed light on the complex, strategic measurement techniques that firms choose to use.

Marketers should aim to incrementally push the envelope on their firms’ investment in measuring marketing’s ROI. Start tactically, gain some early measurement successes, and then urge your practitioners to invest in more strategically meaningful techniques.

Your feedback is important to us. Please contact us with your comments and questions.

Call for interview subjects: Do you know of a professional service firm that is taking steps to integrate its marketing and business development functions and would be willing to be interviewed for Suzanne’s upcoming book, The Integration Imperative™? If so, please direct them to our page on The Integration Imperative™ for more information.

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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