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 The PSF Journal Do You Measure Up - Demonstrating the Effectiveness of Your Marketing Activities is the Best Way to Shore Up Your Budget in Uncertain Times Issue No. 2, March 2009. Suzanne is quoted in the cover article. 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 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 Structural Challenges to Marketing and Business Development Integration, February 2009 Cultural Challenges to Marketing and Business Development Integration, January 2009 Expectations for Marketing Experts - Assigning and Managing Resources, December 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

At the beginning of the year, I announced my 2009 articles will feature discussions related to my upcoming book, The Integration Imperative. The book will introduce a set of interdependent structural frameworks and cultural paradigms that can help PSFs and B2Bs break down functional barriers to effective marketing and business development. It will also feature 11 case studies of real firms that are making considerable integration progress.

In January's and February’s issues, I summarized the most prevalent cultural and structural impediments to marketing and business development integration. In this issue, I take a closer look at one of most critical of these obstacles: accountability.

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

The Accountability Conundrum

Any discussion about PSF marketing and developing business accountability inevitably must address a number of questions. Who’s got accountability for marketing and business development (and won’t share it)? Who wants it (and can’t get it)? Who doesn’t want it (and should have it)?

How well do executive managers understand the "best practice" structure for PSF marketing and business development functions? What's being done to optimize current marketing and business development processes, tools, and methods, or to rebuild them anew? How effectively are executive managers harnessing their people to make real market share gains, grow the "right" revenues, and serve the clients optimally?

Until executive managers address the accountability conundrum, the answers to the questions above will likely be unsatisfactory. For this issue, let’s explore the way accountability problems crop up between revenue-generating practitioners and nonrevenue-generating marketing and business development professionals.

One-to-One or One-to-Many?

Business development (selling) is a one-to-one activity. Practitioners’ brains (well, their brain power) are the “products” clients are considering for eventual engagement. But marketing is a one-to-many activity, with many aspects that are best deployed from a firm-wide, centralized purview.

The accountability conundrum presents itself when one-to-one revenue-generating practitioners want to get involved in the one-to-many aspects of marketing. Eventually this dysfunctional structure leads to cultural challenges.

Let's consider the example of a professional firm putting on a seminar for clients of an important business unit. The content for the seminar will be developed by the business unit leader (we'll call her Rhonda), who possesses the intellectual capital clients will eventually buy. (Therefore, showcasing Rhonda's intellectual capital is a one-to-one initiative.) The firm's nonrevenue-generating marketing director (we'll call him Jerry) is responsible for developing and implementing the program for the seminar. Jerry is an expert in crafting positioning and branding messages for professional firms. The firm's marketing strategy is a one-to-many initiative. Thus Jerry expects to “own” the seminar invitation copy.

Jerry brings the invitation copy to Rhonda. He wants to ensure that he's articulated Rhonda's intellectual capital accurately. Instead, Rhonda insists on rewriting the entire invitation, even changing the way the company itself is described. Believing that her most important goal is to please her clients (a laudable one-to-one goal), Rhonda sees nothing wrong with her actions. But in doing so, she steps out of her one-to-one purview and wanders into Jerry's one-to-many territory. She delays Jerry's marketing planning and production schedule for the seminar, which leads to cost and time overruns that affect other practitioners' planned marketing programs, and eventually the entire firm's approach to its other clients. She's also undermined the one-to-many strategic positioning message that Jerry had carefully crafted (and which was approved by the firm's equity shareholders).

There are no bad guys here. Indeed, professional firms need practitioners who can and who want to write and speak well. By recognizing and communicating about what's a one-to-one activity (anything related to expertise-oriented intellectual capital) and what's a one-to-many activity (anything related to the centralized packaging of that intellectual capital), practitioners can integrate more effectively with their firms' nonrevenue-generating professionals. And then what happens? More silos and less than effective marketing and business development.

While it's tempting for marketers and business developers to be frustrated and perhaps even upset at the boundary-confusion picture I've just painted, the reality is that most revenue-generating practitioners are good people who earnestly want to work effectively on marketing and business development. The same goes for their firms’ nonrevenue-generating marketing and selling professionals.

The Dark Side of Collaboration

There's another reality at work here, and it's directly related to the accountability conundrum: it's the dark side of collaboration. Too many firms expect their people to collaborate on marketing and business development initiatives without an adequate organization structure that formalizes the interdependent accountabilities for each function's success. “Formal” connotes a structural component such as a documented process, policy, or tool. One of the most obvious is a job description that spells out what people are supposed to do and, in some cases, how.

“Collaboration” is also the knee-jerk response of PSFs that haven't straightforwardly faced their organization's tangled lines of accountability for marketing and business development. One of the most obvious examples of this confusing situation is the way PSFs and B2Bs split accountability for marketing and business development into a dizzying matrix of practice leaders, geographic heads and client account managers. I'm also concerned when marketing and business development function leaders aren't formally accountable to each other either. That, too, is an enormous problem—separate marketing head versus separate sales head, each working semi-independently, and so on.

Moreover, as sometimes happens, professional firms make everyone accountable to an overly narrow goal. Some firms, especially those with a long history of private ownership, have traditionally assigned strategic marketing and higher-level selling to revenue-generating practitioners or retiring rainmakers. This practice, although not intrinsically flawed, can sometimes glorify the seller-doer structural model toward the point of skewing the organization’s balance.

Consider the highly successful rainmaker who becomes fixated on a tangential marketing or business development project. I recall the practice leader of a respected professional firm who wanted to produce a lush coffee table book chronicling his firm’s long and celebrated history—it became his cause célèbre. For this project, he commandeered the attention and energy of many business developers and marketers -- collaboration, anyone? -- whose time could have been better spent being accountable for more astute and strategic programs.

Developing Optimal Structures and Cultures

Integration requires executive managers to take a forward-thinking look at optimizing their go-to-market structure and cultural paradigms. They need to develop an integrated marketing and business development framework, clearly articulating how people can work together more effectively.

In the April issue I'll discuss more aspects of the accountability conundrum: accountability avoidance, assigning accountability inappropriately, and how accountability affects the way in which marketers and business developers work with their administrative counterparts in areas such as human resources, information technology, finance, and legal.

Write me to share your experiences with the accountability conundrum.

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