Speeches ACEC’s 2009 Annual Convention and Legislative Summit, The Integration Imperative: Erasing Marketing and Business Development Silos—Once and For All—In Professional Service Firms. April 27, 2009. News Branding fourth among five small business marketing pillars, PWG Marketing, February 2009 (An adaptation of my CMO magazine article.) SMPS Connections featured this newsletter as a "Tool of the Week," September 2008. How to Create a Culture of Growth at Your Firm, Raintoday, February 2009. The View from the Other Side: B2B Marketing Practices from Other Industries, ITSMA, June 2008. Read a summary of Suzanne Lowe's upcoming book The Integration Imperative. New from the Expertise Marketplace™ Blog (These recent posts are a series on marketing and selling process improvement). Differentiation in professional service firms Astonishing PSFs are breaking barriers The upside of layoffs Evolving cultural DNA 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. "I LOVE your newsletter. I think it’s the best one I get. Full of real content and yet not too long. Kudos!" Diane Schmalensee, Facilitator and President of Schmalensee Partners Recent Issues Cultural Challenges to Marketing and Business Development Integration, January 2009 Expectations for Marketing Experts - Assigning and Managing Resources, December 2008 Expectations for Marketing Experts - Thought Leadership, November 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

In the January issue of the Marketplace Master™ I announced my 2009 articles will feature discussions related to my upcoming book, The Integration Imperative.

In last month's article, I outlined six serious cultural challenges to marketing and business development integration in professional service firms. These include: unevenly assigned accountabilities; feelings of marginalization; a too-heavy focus on the short-term; the "immaturity" of marketing and business development functions; the harmful interplay among unrealistic expectations, demand for talent and high turnover; and the significant shift underway today in the requirements for effective management.

This article addresses professional- and business-to-business firms’ structural barriers to optimal marketing and business development integration.

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

Structural Challenges to Marketing and Business Development Integration

In "up" economic cycles, professional service firms’ traditional approaches to the structural frameworks of marketing and business development (its processes, skill sets and administrative support) appear effective and efficient. But when the marketplace sputters, as we're witnessing currently, these structural frameworks are revealed for what they often are – less-than-optimal hodgepodges badly in need of overhaul.

If PSFs and B2Bs want to compete effectively and serve clients optimally in the future, they’ll have to face the disconnects that have crept into their marketing and selling process handoffs. They'll have to address the too-limited scope of their marketing and business development functions. They'll have to make clear-eyed assessments of the underdeveloped marketing and business development skills they've allowed from their practitioners and their non-revenue-generating staff.

Could these situations exist at your firm? One of the best ways to address deeply systemic problems like these is to break them down into observable pieces.

Let's take a look at four critical structural issues.

Structural Challenge #1: A Lack of Process Coordination in Going to Market

Many PSFs do business through a matrix of geographies, industries, functional focuses and/or service lines. With each layer of organizational complexity, the challenges increase for seamlessly managing an inquiry into a lead, a prospect into a proposal, or a proposal into a client. Process coordination becomes even murkier because most firms allow significant variability in the way their marketing and selling activities are implemented or managed.

PSFs’ process coordination challenges are exacerbated by under-performing technological systems, uneven performance incentives and effectiveness measures, or problems with internal communication protocols. PSFs also have trouble prioritizing whether to emphasize activities to acquire clients, retain them, or build the firm’s book of business with them.

The bottom line: a lack of process coordination exists because the function of marketing is not seamlessly integrated with the function of business development.

And every one of these process structure challenges is entirely fixable!

Structural Challenge #2: A State of Confusion and Uneven Accountabilities in Marketing and Business Development

What exactly is marketing? What is business development? Who’s in charge of what, and how should we structure it?

In a PSF or B2B, business development (selling) is a one-to-one activity. But marketing is a one-to-many activity. The potential for boundary confusion creeps in when one-to-one practitioners (accountants, engineers, lawyers, etc.) want to get involved in the one-to-many aspects of marketing.

Imagine it: revenue-generators developing their own sub-brands, or hoarding prospect names in their own personalized databases. What’s more, many professional firms split assignments for aspects of marketing and business development functions. When they do, they create gaps or duplications in accountability.

Also, too many firms expect people to collaborate informally on marketing and business development initiatives. Friendly collaboration sounds good in theory, but it’s important to officially outline shared accountabilities for each function's success (including structural components like updated job descriptions and clearer reporting relationships). Otherwise, this “friendship” model leaves an organization with under-harnessed people and ineffective professional service marketing and business development.

Structural Challenge #3: Lopsided Marketing and Business Development Programs

There are four ways to discern structurally lopsided marketing and business development programs.

First, a budgetary over-emphasis on marketing communications (i.e., holiday card mailers, brochures, advertising), and not enough on activities like segmentation, differentiation strategy, client research or new service development.

Second, an increase in calls for ROI proof of a marketing communications program. ROI pressures exist precisely because PSFs over rely on less-than-optimally researched and undifferentiated marcom tactics for less-than-well-targeted prospects.

Third, position descriptions that overemphasize communications and relegate marketing and business development roles to “support” (literally set up to be silo’ed), instead of being crafted with clear pathways to strategic leadership. Many PSFs neither recruit nor try to retain marketers and business developers who have strategic or analytical capabilities.

Fourth, evidence that some of the more tactical aspects of communications are beginning to be handled externally by outsourced vendors. It’s tempting to outsource commoditized marketing services, especially in tight financial times. And it’s smart to manage marketing and BD budgets for maximum productivity. But if PSFs delegate their tactical initiatives away, without a parallel initiative to ensure better integration of marketing and business development functions, they risk exacerbating the organizational silos that may have already crept in.

Structural Challenge #4: Underemphasized and Silo’ed Marketing and Business Development Skill Development

A professional service firm is essentially a collection of entrepreneurs who thrive on friendly internal competition. But there’s a downside to all this fun. Practitioners can become more interested in what their colleagues think than what clients think! When PSFs under-invest in the marketing and selling skills-growth of their revenue generators (and eventually holding them accountable for gaining these skills), it’s a slippery slope. It can hurt the entire firm if a practitioner’s advancement is not well-tied to the marketplace.

And what about growing the skills of marketers and business developers? There’s a lot of talk about how professional- and B2B service marketers should provide “insights on complex, strategic issues” or “work hand-in-glove with innovators” or “speak the language of the CEO.” Exactly how should they learn these important skills?

Shouldn’t executive managers more consciously support the integrated skills growth and career advancement of their marketing and business development professionals? Currently most PSFs don’t. No wonder there’s an overemphasis on marcom!

Time to Get Your Structural House in Order

“The main obstacle we have encountered is ourselves.” This verbatim quote came from someone who responded to one of my many research projects on the challenges and emerging best practices of professional service marketing.

Think for a moment about what could happen if professional firms better coordinated their stepwise go-to-market processes. Imagine if they structured a better balance between their marketing program elements, or reconfigured everyone’s formal accountabilities so practitioners, marketers, business developers and other administrative functions could better integrate with each other.

Consider what could happen to a PSF’s or B2B’s competitive effectiveness if it structured and supported a well-defined skills-growth pathway for marketers and business developers.

Professional firm executive managers must ask themselves this hard question: are we competing for marketplace gains as effectively as we could? If the answer is anything less than a resounding "Yes!", these firms are vulnerable, especially in economic downturns.

With deliberate focus and commitment, professional- and B2B service firms can indeed overcome their structural marketing and business development integration challenges. The results can be substantively growing market share, increasing the “right” kind of revenues, and providing significant value for clients.

Carpe diem.

Write me to share your experiences with structural challenges. Have you observed these four at your firm? Others?

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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