News Do You Measure Up - Demonstrating the Effectiveness of Your Marketing Activities is the Best Way to Shore Up Your Budget in Uncertain Times. Professional Services Journal 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. Read a summary of Suzanne Lowe's upcoming book The Integration Imperative. New from the Expertise Marketplace™ Blog What About Loyalty to Clients? Is it really "thought leadership" -- or just great design? Packaging for Thought Leadership The real barrier is our lack of courage... 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 Paradox of Doing Things Differently, May 2009 The Shared Accountability Conundrum, April 2009 The Accountability Conundrum, March 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

This month’s issue is about words and their meanings.

I explored the power of words to reshape long-held perspectives for my new book, The Integration Imperative: Erasing Marketing and Business Development Silos – Once and for All – in Professional Service Firms. The book will be formally published next month. (I’ll send you a separate e-mail to announce it.)

This month’s issue addresses the cultural importance of adopting an updated lexicon about marketing and business development, and assimilating it throughout the professional or business service enterprise. A new lexicon is an imperative for a PSF or B2B to effectively integrate marketing and business development.

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

Redefining Professional Service Firm Marketing and Business Development

Not surprisingly, one’s understanding of a term leads directly to one’s expectation about an organization’s roles and functions. And, in the professional and business services arena, the definitions of the terms marketing and business development vary widely from individual to individual, firm to firm, and sector to sector. These variable levels of understanding create enormous barriers to effective marketing and business development.

In preparing to write The Integration Imperative, I encountered this variability time and again when I interviewed my informal advisory group of senior-level PSF and B2B marketers and executives about the book’s content. During those interviews, I learned the extent to which each person had different perspectives and definitions for many of the terms I used.

After the first few interviews, I decided to define my terms before describing the issues and models of the book. Once we were on common ground, my interviewees were able to offer substantive guidance. If misunderstandings of terms occur among deeply experienced senior marketers like us, you can only imagine the extent to which they occur among other marketers, business developers, and their practitioner colleagues. Or when marketers and business developers move from one service sector to another.

Developing a Common Lexicon

The professional service arena is made up of numerous distinct sectors: engineering has its own practice-oriented terminology, which differs from law, or management consulting, or executive search. And so on. Of course, because the practices of each field are so radically different, the vocabulary of each field will always maintain significant levels of distinction.

Regarding the fields of marketing and business development, there is a different reason why a common lexicon has not yet been developed. Because PSF or B2B practitioners do not receive much instruction (if any) in marketing during their academic or professional preparation, they typically assign great weight to what they learn from their professional experiences. They learn about marketing and business development on the job. As these people move from firm to firm, they bring with them their individual understandings of what marketing and selling were as these functions were practiced in the firm at the time. They then inevitably create their own lexicons.

From these personal lexicons, they build expectations about what’s going to happen in their interactions with marketers and business developers, and about the results they and their firm should be able to realize. Even with the best of intentions, too often these practitioners assume they understand what their marketers and business developers mean when they use terms from their own lexicons. The misunderstandings that occur often lead to perceptions that marketers and business developers are not performing to expectations.

Let’s look at an example -- the term return on investment -- when applied to the number of people one might expect to accept an invitation to a client seminar. Based on their knowledge of the quality of the invitation list (a “cold” list of people who are largely unaware of the sponsoring firm versus a “warm” list of loyal clients and influencers), most professional marketers understand the return they should expect from the seminar invitation list being used. But a lawyer or an executive search consultant might not.

Bingo—because they simply misunderstood the marketer’s definition of the term return on investment when applied to an invitation list, practitioners’ expectations may not be met. The first internal barriers are erected. (Of course, barriers like this could be avoided if all participants in a professional firm’s marketing program communicated effectively with each other, but that’s a topic for another day.)

It’s Time to Reframe What Marketing and Business Development Mean!

I’ve used the tactical example above to illustrate my larger point about the imperative to redefine the bigger picture of marketing and business development. When it comes to these critical functions, the distinct sectors comprising the larger arena of professional services have yet to coalesce “up” into what should be an overarching lexicon for all professional services marketing and business development. A new lexicon is critical to introducing people to a newer and more expansive way of perceiving marketing and business development. It’s also vital in reducing the unmatched expectations that too often are found among the practitioner populations of PSF and B2B firms. A new lexicon effectively addresses the expectations disconnect that so often prevails within firms.

Reframing our understanding of the body of PSF and B2B marketing and selling practices is a natural step in the evolution of the field. It’s time for practitioners’ understanding of these functions to be expanded, upgraded and better integrated into their firms’ larger strategic goals. For example, why should the term “marketing” only connote the limited activities of, let’s say, “building awareness,” or “sales support?” Shouldn’t the term “marketing” be understood to also include targeting and segmentation? Pricing? Client loyalty? In many professional firms, marketing does not mean these latter terms, only the former.

New understandings of terms will foster practitioners’ ability to grow the “right” revenues, gain meaningful market share, and optimally serve clients. Words really are the most critical point of entry to solving problems and making organizational progress.

How Will a New Lexicon Happen?

As their firms encounter economic challenges -– and in today’s hypercompetitive business environment, these encounters are inevitable -- professional service managers will inevitably accept their responsibility to reframe their people’s understanding of expanded and more integrated functions of marketing and business development. Their primary responsibility will be at the level of the enterprise itself.

Their mandate will be to communicate the new meaning of “marketing” and “business development” for the firm. Just as I included a glossary of terms in the appendix of The Integration Imperative, I can imagine it won’t be unheard of for professional firms to issue a new glossary for their firm’s commonly understood (and newly evolved) definitions. Once they’ve taken this step, and people begin to grasp these new meanings, managers can begin to reframe everyone’s expectations for the performance of these functions.

In The Integration Imperative, the case study of Perkins+Will is an excellent example of a firm that embraced this cultural principle. The organization’s executive managers created a new lexicon, and renamed the enterprise’s go-to-market and client service orientation. For Perkins+Will, integration is an ongoing, almost holistic, commitment. And it is no accident that the firm’s leaders recognized the importance of words as the catalyst toward its future growth.

Eventually, I predict, we will see a growing number of educational and professional credentialing institutions embrace their own new roles: teaching a new, broader and more integrated vision of what service marketing and business development can mean for the sector and the entire arena of professional services. The body of knowledge that is today so fragmented will finally begin to coalesce and mature.

Write me to share your experiences with redefining professional service firm marketing and business development.

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