News The Integration Imperative is now available online! Suzanne will be a Distinguished Panelist at the Fall 2009 SMPS Foundation Think Tank: "Breaking Through the Commoditization Barrier and Creating Strategic Advantage" "Transforming Consulting Firms into Real Businesses" Management Consulting News August 2009 I am quoted in the article - "Build Your Business by Finding the Right Match" Principals' Report Issue No. 09-08, August 2009. Redefining Professional Service Firm Marketing and Business Development, ICCA Newsletter The Independent, July/August 2009, pg. 25 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. Read a summary of Suzanne Lowe's newly published book The Integration Imperative. Follow me on Twitter! New from the Expertise Marketplace™ Blog Sales and Marketing: working as equals! Winning the Professional Services Sale: My Thoughts In-fighting and cliquishness: the genesis of PSF internal silos? A nod to Patrick McKenna 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 Creating a culture where people do their best work August 2009 Structural Imperatives: Process, Skills and Support July 2009 Redefining Professional Service Firm Marketing and Business Development June 2009 You can order The Integration Imperative from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, or your favorite online bookseller! 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

Early this year, I began previewing the content from The Integration Imperative: Erasing Marketing and Business Development Silos - Once and for All - in Professional Service Firms. The first few issues outlined the marketing and business development disconnects found in professional and business-to-business service firms. This summer, I discussed three structural paradigms that could effectively integrate marketing and business development throughout an organization, followed by a guest article on cultural change management issues.

Some people learn best when they read stories about how real PSFs and B2Bs have worked to erase their firms’ marketing and business development silos. How did they first realize they had a problem? How did they overcome it? What were their lessons learned? How are their newly integrated functions working?

Starting this month, I will begin featuring excerpts from each of the eleven case studies featured in the book. The first case recounts a story about The Process imperative. It features executive search giant Korn/Ferry International, and how the firm better prepared itself to compete against emerging competitors, and shifted clients’ perceptions of its work from transactions to a valued partner.

Suzanne Lowe
President, Expertise Marketing

Author, Marketplace Masters: How Professional Service Firms Compete to Win

Author, The Integration Imperative: Erasing Marketing and Business Development Silos - Once and for All - in Professional Service Firms

Using Service Offerings as the Catalyst to Integrate Global Marketing and Business Development Initiatives

Korn/Ferry’s main service offerings revolve around executive recruitment, corporate governance and CEO recruitment, and outsourced recruiting. Its services also include management assessment, executive coaching and development, onboarding, leadership development, board and team effectiveness, executive compensation, and succession planning.

Its executive managers recognized that the firm’s service portfolio was overweighted toward prominent recruiting assignments in good times, leaving revenues (and profits) too vulnerable to the swings of the marketplace.

They decided to use Korn/Ferry’s strong array of services as a lever to integrate marketing and business development functions, and to broaden the focus of the firm’s professionals, many of whom were concentrating too much on recruiting as a revenue generator.

Leading the Charge for Functional Integration

In particular, the firm committed to diversifying its offerings, with two additional service lines. Futurestep, specializing in middle management professionals, was established in 1998 as Korn/Ferry’s scalable, outsourced recruitment subsidiary. And Korn/Ferry’s Leadership and Talent Consulting unit, created in 2000, offers behavioral assessment and talent developmental tools to help clients align their leaders with their company’s strategic goals and culture and maximize the effectiveness of their talent.

Michael Franzino

Mike Franzino, who came on board in September 2007, was chosen to improve the firm’s internal go-to-market functional capabilities, lead its global accounts program across all industries, grow its Global Financial Markets practice, and serve on the firm’s Operating Committee.

“Search attracts the world’s self-proclaimed entrepreneurs,” declared Franzino. “The problem is, they never met a search they didn’t love.” Franzino felt that too many recruiting professionals had failed to position favorably all of their firm’s key services. By not doing so, they had sacrificed an opportunity to broaden client relationships.

Michael Distefano

Mike Distefano, Korn/Ferry’s chief marketing officer, echoed Franzino’s thoughts: “This is where our real differentiation came to light: embedding our offerings, and making them better connect with our strong focus on executive recruiting. Previously, we had offered our services separately, as ‘stand-alone products.’ We suspected we could more broadly serve our clients, from whichever service they had originally hired us for.”

Franzino recognized that Futurestep and Leadership and Talent Consulting could not be imported wholesale into every client relationship. From one service offering to the next, for example, the firm might have different definitions of “the most strategically appropriate client.” And it might go about introducing those services to clients differently from one to the next, and seek to retain those clients or build business with them in varying ways. Franzino explained:

Beginning in April 2008, as part of his charge to refine Korn/Ferry’s go-to-market strategies, Franzino began calling for the firm to use its executive recruiting business as the primary driver for its two other revenue engines, Futurestep and Leadership and Talent Consulting.

This new line of thinking required executive recruiting professionals to have a strategic understanding of the client’s perceived risks and business challenges.

Evolving a Brand

Starting earlier but continuing in parallel to Franzino’s work, Korn/Ferry’s executive managers also decided to evolve and better integrate the company’s brand. Appointed as Korn/Ferry's CMO in July 2007, Distefano recommended ways to better integrate its marketing function with business development. Regarding Franzino’s work, Distefano recalled:

Overcoming Traditions

Franzino encountered two internal obstacles to the early success of his integration program. Both had to do with perspectives long held in a professional service environment.

The first hurdle was to change people's minds. “I knew we’d have to sell this idea around the world. We knew it would be about giving them real examples about how this new approach could help them raise production, drive higher margin revenue, and bring more value to clients.” He knew he would have to make a strong case for the merits of integration and its ultimate advantages for both the company and its clients.

Franzino’s second obstacle was measuring success. Certainly, it would be painless for Korn/Ferry recruiting consultants to celebrate the revenue growth of Futurestep and Leadership and Talent Consulting, regardless of what happened to the firm's executive recruiting services.

But Franzino believed these metrics, if considered in a vacuum, would eventually open up an internal schism over Futurestep and Leadership and Talent Consulting, and eventually drive revenue independent of executive recruiting services. Instead, he believed revenues for all three service offerings should rise at the same time, or at least in the same proportion. “The real benchmark is, ‘How many million-dollar-per-year clients do we have, and for how many of those clients are we generating revenue in all three businesses?’"

Prove It To Me!

How many professional service firms have embarked on initiatives with fancy names or acronyms (endorsed by the CEO and shepherded by a high-level committee of internal luminaries), only to have them fade away into obscurity, or worse yet, become the fodder for jokes in the hallway?

Luckily, Mike Franzino knew how to lead a charge. "If I am talking about recruiting to my colleagues, then I am out there executing the work. If I am guiding my colleagues about new integrated ways to market and sell our services to clients, then I am out there in front of those clients, marketing and selling Korn/Ferry's integrated services to them. So, when I ask somebody to make calls at four in the morning so they can jump-start a project on the other side of the globe, or if I ask them to check their voice mail on Saturdays and Sundays, or if I tell them to get on a plane, they won't think twice about it. They know I do the same things."

Franzino and his team did this (and continue to do this) through an extensive traveling road show around the company's global offices. Franzino introduced the new integration approach to local office heads, geographic heads, and practice leaders to ensure they were out there, as he says, "singing off the same hymn sheet." In particular, he spearheaded by example the Financial Services practice's embrace of the new approach. Along the way, he was mindful of changes in market conditions and the complexities of working on local conditions within a global environment.

"The work we've undertaken sets the stage for a compelling future," remarked Distefano. "In five to seven years, we expect to be competing against a different set of companies than we have in the last 40 years. Our work will no longer be viewed as simply a transaction about filling up seats in a client's company. We'll be the valuable partner our clients turn to when they think about their talent."

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Write me to share your experiences about how your firm is using service offerings as the catalyst to integrate global marketing and business development initiatives.

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