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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's
article, Integration
of marketing, development is the key to doing
things differently was published in the
Boston Herald, Boston Women's Business, November
2009
Suzanne's
article, Does Marketing and Selling Differently
Help... or Hurt? was featured article in
Executive Recruiter News, November 2009
Suzanne
authored Consulting
Firms Must Become Real Businesses to Survive RainToday,
October 2009
Read
Suzanne's latest post - "The Real Holy Grail of Professional Service Firm Marketing
and Business Development Effectiveness" MarketingProfs, October 2009
Suzanne
was 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.
Read
a summary of Suzanne Lowe's newly published book
The
Integration Imperative.
 
New from the Expertise Marketplace™
Blog
The
Cobbler's Children
Professional
Service Marketing in Asia
Can
Marketers Alone Make Marketing Indispensible?
No Way!
Do
corporate silos serve a purpose? Well, yes they
can.
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Recent Issues
How
One Marketing Department Became a Full-Service
Internal Marketing Agency October 2009
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.
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The Marketplace Master™ is a monthly email publication
on professional service marketing from Expertise Marketing,
LLC.
About
this month's issue
This November 2009 issue features the third
installment of our case study excerpts from The
Integration Imperative: Erasing Marketing and Business
Development Silos - Once and for All - in Professional
Service Firms. Reviews about the book are featured
in publications and blogs across sectors, like law and
accounting firm-focused Marcus
Letter; Marketing
Asia; The
CMO Council; the November issue of
Executive Recruiter News; and Management
Consulting News.
The subject of this month’s issue is
global design firm Perkins+Will.
 The
organization’s executive managers initiated a
firm-wide internal study to break down internal silos
that were impeding the firm from optimally addressing
clients’ broader design needs. Their work –
still ongoing – set in motion a groundbreaking
new direction for the firm’s future marketplace
journey.
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
Integrating,
for the Clients' Sake
Architectural firms face multiple mandates:
ever-increasing excellence in client service; and the
reality of competing within narrow industry concentrations
(such as aviation, health care, and higher education)
and/or recognized solutions (such as interior design
or landscape architecture). These forces put enormous
strains on architectural firms to grow market share
and make gains in revenue and value-added growth for
clients.
Only a handful of architecture and design firms
consistently manage to achieve acknowledged excellence
in these areas. Perkins+Will
is among them. Since its founding in 1935, the firm’s
leadership has insisted that all professionals strongly
focus on client service.
Help! I'm Stuck Inside the Matrix!
Like many professional service firms, Perkins+Will
deployed its services through a matrix of capabilities,
including architecture, interiors, branded environments,
planning and strategies, and urban design. Each discipline
delivered its work through areas of practice, including
health care, higher education, K–12 education,
science and technology, and corporate-commercial-civic.
Beginning in 2006, members of the board and
other Perkins+Will leaders began to notice a worrisome
problem. Without knowing it, the firm’s professionals
had begun to create some internal organizational silos.
Each capability area or practice manifested its own
sort of culture, its own well-recognized processes,
and its own particular methods of delivering services.
The professionals appeared to be concentrating less
than they should have been on the ultimate quality of
the services delivered in the interest of the clients.
What's more, board members realized that the firm was
marketing and selling its services in a siloed way,
instead of introducing clients to the firm’s full
range of capabilities.
Board members also began to notice a change
in the firm's clients. Manuel Cadrecha, a member of
the Perkins+Will board, design director for its Atlanta
office, and its national sector leader for corporate,
commercial, and civic work, explained:
“Our clients . . . understand the complexity
of their challenges. They
. . . want to get our full range of capabilities delivered
to them through easily understood methodologies.”
The board made a critical decision to address this significant
challenge with nothing less than a deep and broad review
of Perkins+Will and its approach to its marketplace. Chief
Executive Officer Phil Harrison summarized the initiative:
“We viewed this as much more than a marketing
and business development effort. Our stated goal was:
‘Build a culture of innovation and creativity,
delivering client value through interdisciplinary
teams working in an integrated model.’ Literally,
we wanted to reinvent ourselves, to become more than
an architecture firm.”
Designing a New Way of Serving the
Clients
The Perkins+Will board of directors set up
a representative subgroup of leaders to frame the scope
of the work and to suggest a way to make recommendations.
This subgroup included leaders representing different
perspectives such as technical, quality control, finance,
and marketing. The group agreed to investigate in two general
directions. One focus was internal and required an exercise
in self-examination to understand how the firm currently
delivered its services and to identify what might be some
difficulties in delivering them more effectively. The
co-leaders of this internal exploration were Perkins+Will’s
chief marketing officer, Bill Viehman, and the leader
of its planning and strategies practice area, Janice Barnes.
The second focus area was external and was
led by Cadrecha and Eileen Jones, a principal and the
national discipline leader of the firm's branded environments
practice. Jones explained:
“We decided to conduct external interviews
with companies in different industries. We asked ourselves
what we knew or had read that pointed to organizations
already practicing in an integrated and multidisciplinary
fashion. We settled on a list including graphic design
firms, brand designers, financial organizations, consumer
products companies, business consulting firms and
media organizations.”
Their research unearthed about 15 key insights.
The most critical insights follow.
-
Customers want to align themselves with partners
who mirror their own values and structures.
-
The outcomes of multidisciplinary engagements require
a professional service firm to think differently.
Professional service firms that are capable of creating
and delivering enriched solutions must develop new
perspectives on internal processes and talent.
Regarding new types of people, Jones explained: “.
. . The question then becomes, ‘How can we place
[an] architect in . . . other business areas? What do
we know as a firm, and how can we translate that across
other disciplines, in order to come up with an enriched
solution?’” The Perkins+Will subgroup also began to understand
more about the concept of rapid prototyping. Jones recalled
a team epiphany:
“We diagrammed an iterative process model
of addressing the client’s needs. For example,
consider what the field of architecture has traditionally
delivered in the past—a beautiful three-dimensional,
physical model of a design idea. Now consider a new
brainstorming methodology that brings all the firm’s
interdisciplinary expertise to the table, all gathered
around the client’s problem. With a process
model like that, you can rapidly prototype multiple
solutions that are at the heart of the problem, without
building a beautiful iconic “thing.” You
get to a problem solution faster and better, with
the client included in the brainstorming, and immediately
able to respond to what you are diagramming.”
Roll up Your Sleeves!
The subgroup presented its initiative to the
Perkins+Will board of directors in June 2008 (and again
in July 2008 to the firm’s leadership group).
The thrust of the presentation was a call for the firm
to begin leveraging its expertise as embedded value
rather than added value—specifically, to start
delivering interdisciplinary design.
Not surprisingly, numerous internal changes
will be needed to support this new model. For example,
the firm will have to realign its human resources approaches
to attract and retain new types of people. Its professionals
will need to deliver hospitality to clients differently.
And the firm will have to figure out how to engage its
internal experts in new and different ways.
One of the early efforts will be to develop
and communicate a common understanding of what it means
to practice interdisciplinary design. Jones explained:
“We knew we’d need to make these meanings
clear to ourselves. Once we do that, it’ll be
important to make sure our customers understand our
terms and how these terms will impact their work with
us.”
Today, there’s a sense of future purpose,
and a clear-eyed commitment to breaking down old barriers
and working in a new team-oriented way. Harrison confirmed
the sentiment. “This means we will stop thinking
that Perkins+Will is an architecture firm, and start
thinking of Perkins+Will as a design firm. In re-envisioning
our practice in this way, design emerges as a transformative
power, where creativity and innovation are applied through
interdisciplinary teams to solve clients' business problems.”
Write
me to share your experiences about how your company
is integrating - for the clients' sake.
Take our
new, confidential, web-based
assessment tests to instantly diagnose your firm’s
structural and cultural barriers to marketing effectiveness.
You can also access our perennially popular professional
service firm differentiation assessment test for
instant feedback on whether your firm is doing differentiation
right.
© 2009 Expertise
Marketing, LLC All Rights Reserved
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