News The Integration Imperative is now available online at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, ACEC Bookstore, the Lawmarketing Bookstore, and the SMPS Bookstore. The Integration Imperative is getting great reviews! Click here to read some of them. Suzanne will be a Distinguished Panelist at the Fall 2009 SMPS Foundation Think Tank: "Breaking Through the Commoditization Barrier and Creating Strategic Advantage" Suzanne and Mark Beese co-authored "Law Firm Leadership: Leadership Isn't Management" Law Journal Newsletter, October 2009; Click here to request a pdf copy of this article. "The Real Holy Grail of Professional Service Firm Marketing and Business Development Effectiveness" CMO Council, August 2009 "Transforming Consulting Firms into Real Businesses" Management Consulting News August 2009 Suzanne is quoted in the article - "Build Your Business by Finding the Right Match" Principals' Report Issue No. 09-08, August 2009. Read a summary of Suzanne Lowe's newly published book The Integration Imperative. New from the Expertise Marketplace™ Blog Digital Versus Paper: What's the Future for Professional Services? Gagging on a Really Bad Direct Marketing Email Educating Business Sales and Marketing: working as equals! 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 Using Service Offerings as the Catalyst to Integrate Global Marketing and Business Development Initiatives September 2009 Creating a culture where people do their best work August 2009 Structural Imperatives: Process, Skills and Support July 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

For our October issue, we offer the second in our series of content previews from The Integration Imperative: Erasing Marketing and Business Development Silos - Once and for All - in Professional Service Firms.

This month’s excerpt features Holland & Hart, the largest law firm in the U.S. Mountain West. It restructured its marketing function into an internal branded service agency, reconfigured its marketing and business development processes, and carved out exciting new professional growth pathways for its marketing team members.

And, not surprisingly, this integration initiative exceeded Holland & Hart lawyers’ expectations for value.

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

How One Marketing Department Became a Full-Service Internal Marketing Agency

This story begins in April 2001, when Holland & Hart hired its new "marketing guy," Mark Beese. He was charged with building a new department from the ground up. In his first six weeks on the job, Beese hired six new team members.

But by November 2001, Beese's group was overwhelmed with implementing attorneys’ requests for what they had long been accustomed to getting: lots of marketing program implementation. However, it was clear that Holland & Hart attorneys viewed the firm's marketing assistance as optional, even sometimes sending their marketing service work to outsiders.

Beese and his teammates recognized they were at a critical juncture: although they were successfully fielding a growing number of opportunities to work with attorneys to market the firm, they were facing significant challenges to better manage their attorneys’ expectations. And would there be any time left to carve out long-term growth pathways for themselves? Help!

Over the course of the next seven years, this group of marketers successfully initiated four critical shifts, each of which played its part in creating an extraordinarily effective marketing–business development integration machine.

Restructuring Marketing into an Internal Services Agency

Beese and his marketing colleagues decided they would organize themselves into a new structure—as an internal marketing services agency. Their first goal was to earn the attention of their most enthusiastic “clients” by offering a broad spectrum of classic marketing services, including event planning, marketing and client research, advertising and public relations, client database management, writing, graphic design and layout, and a variety of training programs.

Their second goal was to consolidate the firm’s use of marketing services. "We began calling ourselves account reps, and aligned ourselves by departments that were well recognized by the firm's attorneys,” said Beese. “We created account plans, and proactively brought these plans to our attorneys.” Soon, an increasing number of practice groups wanted to try the new model. A chain reaction had started.

Demonstrating the Power of Brand Loyalty

Flash forward to September 2005, when Holland & Hart was named one of the top 50 law firms for marketing and communications by the Marketing the Law Firm newsletter. This outside recognition, combined with the marketing team’s success in working with more and more Holland & Hart lawyers, helped the group demonstrate that branding and brand management can indeed encourage client loyalty.

All along, Beese and his teammates had worked on changing their lawyers' perceptions of them from "doers" to "advisors." Beese explained:

Adding Integrated Services to the Marketing Department's Portfolio of Offerings

In October 2006, then managing partner Larry Wolfe developed and distributed a survey to the firm's partners. He wanted to know what his partners needed and expected from the marketing department. From the findings, Beese and his colleagues gained a new insight: the firm was asking them to be more strategic and to do more to help grow the enterprise.

And so, they made the critical decision to add business development services to their portfolio of offerings. They spent the rest of 2007, and early 2008, readjusting their services as follows:

• Identifying and researching top client prospects

• Identifying and researching industry associations, speaking opportunities, and publishing opportunities

• Creating a "who knows whom" matrix to connect attorneys with clients, prospects, and other attorneys

• Developing integrated marketing and business development plans

• Preparing marketing materials that support both business development and marketing activities.

Keeping the Focus on Results

An early challenge was to understand and use familiar terminology that would mean something to the attorneys, and add momentum to the shift toward the marketing team’s broader strategic purview. “When we convey how our skills have expanded and grown, we talk about deliverables,” said marketing manager Brittaney Schmidt. “We don’t name our roles as ‘your marketing manager’ or ‘your business development manager.’”

In doing so, the team telegraphed its shift away from tightly bounded “roles” and toward more process-oriented, stepwise “functions.” The group also began to embrace classic project-management and team-communication principles. It was important, all agreed, to make priority decisions based on well-understood criteria. The emphasis was on action, movement—and value-added results.

Lessons Learned: Managing Your Success Takes Vision

Each time it rearranged itself into a new organizational structure and each time it offered newly integrated services, the marketing team embarked on proactive communication with the firm's department chairs, practice leaders, and partners. Account reps attended practice meetings to talk about their new services and delivery approach.

Despite the inevitable naysayers or avoiders, a strong percentage of Holland & Hart practice group leaders became prominent evangelists for the new model. The result? Almost before they were ready, Beese and his teammates had to ramp up their delivery capabilities. Again and again, they were reminded they had to pay close attention to balancing their clients’ demands against their own resource capacities. Managing client expectations will always be necessary. Managing your success requires an outcomes-oriented vision for the future.

By late 2008, Beese had integrated yet another capability—client service—into his team’s functions. With this evolution, Holland & Hart partners and their marketing colleagues arrived at an exciting and competitively advantaged moment: strategically managing their clients’ entire buying life cycle, from marketing to buying to consumption of a professional service firm’s palette of offerings.

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Write me to share your experiences about how your marketing department is becoming a full-service internal marketing agency.

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