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. Reaching New Markets through Teaming and Join Ventures, April 28, 2009. Surveys What is the most difficult barrier your firm faces in improving M & BD effectiveness? What's your most difficult barrier in leading professionals to accept forward-thinking M&BD changes? News 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.) How to Create a Culture of Growth at Your Firm, Raintoday, February 2009. SMPS Connections featured this newsletter as a "Tool of the Week," September 2008. Read a summary of Suzanne Lowe's upcoming book The Integration Imperative. New from the Expertise Marketplace™ Blog My Big Question #2 Maintaining marketing morale in the face of layoffs 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 The Accountability Conundrum, March 2009 Structural Challenges to Marketing and Business Development Integration, February 2009 Cultural Challenges to Marketing and Business Development Integration, January 2009 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

I’m continuing my 2009 Marketplace Master™ articles featuring observations from my upcoming book The Integration Imperative. The book will summarize three structural and cultural frameworks that professional- and B2B service firms can deploy to connect marketing and business development functions together, achieve new effectiveness in growing revenues and market share, and ultimately, improve their value to clients.

In last month’s issue and very briefly in the February issue, I introduced one of the most insidious obstacles to marketing and business development integration: accountability. In those issues, I discussed the way accountability problems crop up between revenue-generating practitioners and nonrevenue-generating marketing and business development professionals.

But there are other aspects to the accountability conundrum that I haven’t discussed yet. These issues relate to the way accountability is shared -- or not -- among nonrevenue-generating functions including marketing and business development, and other administrative functions like accounting, human resources, IT, legal or beyond.

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

The Shared Accountability Conundrum

When it comes to working toward successful results in marketing or business development, informal collaboration and a lack of structure are the norms among a PSF’s administrative functions. Collaborating on marketing by "communicating" is popular. But only a small percentage of PSFs employ the higher-impact forms of administrative functional integration: recognized shared accountabilities, co-developed job descriptions, clearly delineated reporting relationships, and organizationally supported performance goals.

What's more, most PSFs and B2Bs do not formally compensate and reward administrative functions for collaborating and sharing accountabilities on marketing and business development. And those who do aren’t perceived to be doing it well, mostly because they haven't set up clear performance expectations.

While there is some evidence that professional firms are making progress on measuring the marketing and selling performance of their nonrevenue-generating functions, most appear loathe to formally articulate and monitor their desired behaviors or accomplishments. (If you want to know more about the research findings on which these discussion points are based, click here.)

The Friendship Marketing Model -- A Good Idea, or Not Good Enough?

Of course, friendly internal working relationships are vital to any organization’s ability to successfully build its market share. But in too many professional firms, marketers and business developers make progress primarily by currying favors, instead of being able to depend on accountable colleagues. Because many marketers and business developers live in a world of dotted-line relationships with their firms’ revenue-generating practitioners, they’ve learned valuable techniques for negotiating cooperative arrangements. They’ve learned to repeat this pattern with their administrative colleagues in finance, IT, HR (and beyond), and even with their counterparts in marketing and business development.

But this Friendship Marketing model, as I call it, is simply not good enough for real competitive effectiveness.

Imagine a visionary marketer who has just created an exciting initiative to help her firm gain market share. This idea champion genially asks a distant IT colleague for help, perhaps making a “what’s in it for you” pitch. She pitches her idea to the IT colleague first, then his boss, then his boss’s boss. She might downplay the real commitment she is seeking in case the person realizes just how much effort is really needed. She promises to sing her helper’s praises to his supervisors, or at least take the heat for him if his boss gets cranky. She checks in often, to see if her helper is making progress.

You get the idea. Under this Friendship Marketing scenario, the idea champion can never be certain of the helper’s true interest in meeting his commitment. She doesn't have real influence to direct an outcome. Priorities shift without warning, and too often away from the idea champion’s project. The Friendship Marketing model consumes an inordinate amount of her time and energy, and requires cajoling, wheedling, and convincing. It also requires herculean follow-up and, often, frequent resetting of deadlines because the work is unofficial or not formally mandated.

Professional and B2B service marketers and business developers know this scenario only too well. Even the most esteemed firms rely on the Friendship Marketing model. A friend told me recently (I’m paraphrasing): “I wish I could count on the work I’m having to convince people to do. All this asking and favor-building; all this monitoring, negotiating and coaxing. It’s a huge waste of time and energy. Wouldn’t it be better if I could hold people accountable?”

Integrating Administrative Functions with Marketing and Business Development

PSF executive managers can achieve more effectiveness in their marketplace pursuits if they are explicit about their requirements for everyone to contribute. People need a formal understanding of how they will be held accountable, and how they will share that accountability. Despite everyone's best intentions, “collaborate” means different things to different people. Take the IT person who, when asked to collaborate on a new marketing initiative, may think, “Collaboration is a nice idea. But I’ll only help those marketers when I can squeeze it in. It’s really not my job.”

By contrast, the IT person with a deep understanding of her managers’ expectations for her contributions to marketing, may say to herself in the same situation, “I’m clear that my function exists to help the firm compete as effectively as possible, and to serve the clients with as much value as it can. I’ll not only shift my priorities to directly and promptly assist my marketing teammates, but I’ll also co-lead this project, with suggestions for new and better ways for it to succeed.”

Professional firms are very good at articulating their formal expectations for revenue-generating practitioners to sell their and their colleagues’ services. Indeed, the professional firm model would have never survived if this notion of accountability hadn’t been etched in stone eons ago. They compensate for it, and reward for it. But if this kind of formal compensation and rewards structure is so workable among practitioners, why hasn’t a similar structure been applied to a firm’s administrative functions related to marketing and business development?

Creating formal, shared accountabilities among administrative functions with marketing and business development functions will be crucial for any professional enterprise that wants to gain substantive marketplace traction.

Write me to share your experiences with the accountability conundrum.

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