News The The Integration Imperative is now available online! I am quoted in the article - "Build Your Business by Finding the Right Match" Principals' Report Issue No. 09-08, August 2009. 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. I am 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. Follow me on Twitter! New from the Expertise Marketplace™ Blog Breaking Out of Old Patterns "Weak on Transitioning Prospects to Sales" What About Loyalty to Clients? Is it really "thought leadership" -- or just great design? 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 Redefining Professional Service Firm Marketing and Business Development , June 2009 The Paradox of Doing Things Differently, May 2009 The Shared Accountability Conundrum, April 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

One of the biggest concerns for today’s professional service (PSF) executive managers, marketers and business developers is effectiveness. Or, put another way, productivity. They know their outbound marketing and business development approaches simply don’t address today’s competitive pressures, rapid technological changes, and increasingly savvy buyers. They know they will be expected to drive meaningful and tangible growth in market share, the “right” revenues, and added value to clients -- for the entire enterprise.

In order to do this, many firms have to begun to work on erasing the internal silos that hinder their marketplace effectiveness. This month’s article takes a look at the way smart PSFs and B2Bs are reconfiguring their internal structural frameworks to integrate marketing and business development into every function. It’s a key theme in my new book, The Integration Imperative: Erasing Marketing and Business Development Silos – Once and for All – in Professional Service Firms, which will be out any day now!

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

Structural Imperatives: Process, Skills and Support

When I say “integrating marketing and business development into every function,” I don’t mean that every person must become a marketing or selling professional. But professional firms can indeed become more market focused -- and much more productive in achieving marketplace success -- by employing new structural frameworks that harness people differently.

Regarding a firm’s marketing and selling approaches, PSFs should reframe the way functions (as opposed to people or roles) contribute to the firm’s marketplace effectiveness. Specifically, managers should create a more integrated structure (process, skills, and support). These “best practice” frameworks are being used by leading professional firms -- from small, private professional partnerships to enormous, publicly owned B2B service companies -- to make substantive competitive gains.

The first, which I’ve called The Process Imperative, addresses the “left-to-right” steps of the marketing-to-sales process. Through The Process Imperative, professional service and B2B firms can broaden the scope of their marketing and business development functions, better balance them strategically, make them more discernible to everyone in the firm, make them more obviously iterative, and better link them to client service. Savvy professional firms follow five distinct process steps to help achieve this excellence. They are:

1. Define the most strategically important clients and targets
2. Acquire the most strategically important clients
3. Retain the most strategically important clients
4. Build the firm’s book of business with the most strategically important clients
5. Increase the firm’s favorable perception with all audiences

One of five case studies I’ll feature about The Process Imperative is a story of accounting firm Moss Adams, which developed new marketing and business development integration tools that dramatically accelerated its practitioners’ connecting marketing to selling, and selling to client service. These frameworks and new cultural norms are driving Moss Adams’ strong revenue increases (even in the United States’ slowed economy).

The second, labeled The Skills Imperative, is the “bottom-to-top” pathway of marketing and business development skill growth. With The Skills Imperative, PSFs and B2Bs can reframe their advancement pathways -- for practitioners and non-revenue generating staff -- to more clearly outline the steps every professional can take toward competency growth in marketing and business development.

One of the book’s four case studies about The Skills Imperative is about a smaller engineering and architectural planning, design and consulting firm, Ross & Baruzzini, and how it adapted a big-time performance management tool (The Balanced Scorecard), then combined it with a marvelous informal “guardian angel” mentoring program. I’ll also feature a story about how Haley & Aldrich, an environmental, engineering and management consulting firm, created a pathway to a “seat at the table” for its non revenue-generating marketing leaders, and how the firm’s mindful stewardship of a shared-accountability culture contributed to the enterprise’s continued prominence in its sector.

The third, called The Support Imperative, reframes the lateral working relationships between a professional firm’s administrative peers in Human Resources, Information Technology, Finance, Legal, and other administrative functions. With The Support Imperative, professional enterprises can create more formal avenues for function-to-function collaboration, shared accountability and co-leadership for contributing to the firm’s marketplace gains.

To illustrate The Support Imperative, I’ll include cases about new formal collaborations between administrative functions, for the purpose of improving marketing and business development effectiveness. An example is Randstad, one of the world's largest temporary and contract staffing organizations. This firm built an innovative global collaboration between marketing and finance departments, vastly improving the productivity of the company's marketing expenditures.

A Flexible Foundation

In the past, executive managers had to start from scratch to overcome internal functional barriers in order to achieve a new strategic focus, streamlined internal working relationships, and a “contribution” mindset. But a roadmap to get started can help!

The Integration Imperative features a number of customizable templates – process maps, skill-growth pathways, and collaborative relationships between support functions -- that PSFs can adapt to their own enterprises. My idea here was simple: give executive managers a set of high-level directional (yet customizable) process, skills, and support frameworks that could enable them to build new functional connections among the people in their organizations.

These Process, Skill and Support Imperatives, when implemented in combination with a deliberate effort to change the culture (which I’ll write about in an upcoming newsletter article), form a powerful yet flexible foundation that can break down a professional firm’s marketing and business development barriers.

Combined with The Integration Imperative’s illustrative case studies, the customizable templates will help people create their enterprises’ distinct pathways to improve everyone’s contributions to marketing and business development individually. The organization thereby improves its marketplace effectiveness collectively.

Write me to share your experiences about how your firm is integrating its marketing and business development through processes, skills-growth pathways or support functions..

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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