News The Integration Imperative is now available online at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, ACEC Bookstore, the Lawmarketing Bookstore, and the SMPS Bookstore. Leo Bottary discusses The Integration Imperative on his Client Services Insight blog. December 2009 "The new face of professional services," Management-Issues, co-authored by Suzanne Lowe and David Kipp. November 2009 Read a summary of Suzanne Lowe's newly published book The Integration Imperative. New from the Expertise Marketplace™ Blog PSF marketers' best weapons for leading change? Facts and Data! Are law firms responding to the marketplace? More evidence: marketing and sales are disconnected Join our discussion on the future of legal marketing 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 Integrating for the Clients' Sake! November 2009 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 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

Our July issue featured an overview of the structural imperatives from my new book, The Integration Imperative: Erasing Marketing and Business Development Silos - Once and for All - in Professional Service Firms, followed by case study excerpts in September, October and November. For this last issue of 2009, I’ll provide an overview of the cultural imperatives of the book and showcase a single graphic that depicts the gist of the book.

I also want to say “thank you” to the many people who helped make this year’s issues of The Marketplace Master™ such a success.

• Kate Kirkpatrick, CMO of Gensler, whose story provided a great example of how one can evolve the marketing function of a professional firm (hint: get closer to the business!).

• Susan Newton, who contributed our August guest article on how to create a culture where people do their best work.

• Michael Franzino and Mike Distefano of Korn/Ferry International, for their contributions to the case study: “Using Service Offerings as the Catalyst to Integrate Global Marketing and Business Development Initiatives.”

• Mark Beese, Larry Wolfe, Jennifer Kummer, Brittaney Schmidt and Emily Hager for their Holland & Hart story: “How One Marketing Department Became a Full-Service Internal Marketing Agency.”

• Janice Barnes, Bill Viehman, Eileen Jones, Manuel Cadrecha, and Phil Harrison of Perkins+Will, whose story became the case study: “Integrating, for the Clients' Sake.”

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

Cultural Imperatives: A New Lexicon, Formal Shared Accountabilities and More Explicit Expectations

Early in my writing of The Integration Imperative, I sketched out a picture that helped me articulate a critical theme in the book: that professional service firm executive managers must wield both structural and cultural solutions in order to erase their firms’ marketing and business development silos. My drawing skills are pretty bad, so I asked Scott Williams to refine it.

The middle of the graphic depicts a set of three interdependent cultural principles that, taken together, will effectively integrate marketing and business development throughout a professional and B2B service firm.

The First Cultural Principle

The first cultural principle is to articulate the new meaning of marketing and business development for the enterprise. It addresses a particularly vexing hurdle to integration: definitions of the terms marketing and business development vary widely from individual to individual, firm to firm, and sector to sector.

Not surprisingly, one’s understanding of a term leads directly to one’s expectation about the role and function of the job. Adopting an updated lexicon and assimilating it throughout the enterprise can be a pivotal point for a PSF or B2B striving to effectively integrate marketing and business development.

Moreover, a common lexicon is critical to introducing people to a firm’s 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. Even with the best of intentions, too often 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.

Misunderstandings over terminology and uneven expectations arise with professional service marketers and business developers as well. In preparing to write The Integration Imperative, I encountered this variability when I interviewed my informal advisory group of PSF and B2B marketers and executives. 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, you can only imagine the extent to which they occur between this community and their practitioner colleagues. Or when marketers and business developers move from one B2B or professional service sector to another.

The Second Cultural Principle

The second cultural standard is that of increasing formal avenues for collaboration, shared accountability and co-leadership on marketing and business development. Structural models by themselves are not enough to help professional firms optimally integrate their marketing and business development functions. Too often, these firms create gorgeous structural frameworks that don’t outline formal pathways for collaboration, accountability sharing, and co-leadership between practitioners and nonrevenue-generating staff. I think they should. Culture—harnessed and led—is once again the critical glue in reinforcing productive organizational change.

Sure, professional service firms do encourage their people to collaborate or share leadership with their colleagues. When I was an in-house marketing director, my performance reviews regularly included acknowledgment of my collaboration with practitioners.

Under the Friendship Marketing model, as I call it, marketers and business developers make progress with practitioners primarily by currying favors instead of being able to depend on accountable colleagues. Under this scenario, an idea champion can never be certain of the helper’s real interest in meeting his commitment. She doesn't have real influence to direct an outcome. Priorities shift without warning, and too often away from the idea champion’s project. The Friendship Marketing model consumes an inordinate amount of time and energy, and requires cajoling, wheedling, and convincing. It also requires herculean follow-up and, often, frequent resetting of deadlines because the work is unofficial or not formally mandated.

Professional service and B2B marketers and business developers know this scenario only too well. Even the most esteemed firms rely on the Friendship Marketing model. A friend told me recently (I’m paraphrasing): “I wish I could count on the work I’m having to convince people to do. All this asking and favor-building; all this monitoring, negotiating and coaxing. It’s a huge waste of time and energy. Wouldn’t it be better if I could hold people accountable?”

The Third Cultural Principle

The third cultural paradigm is that executives should make their expectations more explicit about how everyone can contribute to marketing and business development. Many PSF and B2B service firms have made great strides in using internal communication when a particularly important internal “expectations” message arises. In these situations, executive managers often turn to marketers to craft their message and distribute targeted information, which is often about changes in collaboration arrangements, new accountabilities, and revamped leadership structures. Not surprisingly, afterward internal communication becomes an ongoing element of marketers’ functional responsibilities.

But formal internal communications techniques won’t be enough to break down internal barriers to integrated marketing and business development.

Executive managers also must apply a potent new kind of cultural glue: reviewing and integrating job descriptions, checking and integrating reporting relationships, and reframing performance management guidelines to ensure that people understand how they are expected to work together in new ways toward meeting the organization’s revenue, market share, and client added-value goals. Just by communicating that an initiative like this is under way executives also signal that a culture shift is under way. But rather than simply applying lip service, executive managers are rebuilding the enterprise’s expectations from the inside out.

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Write me to share your experiences about how your company is using a new lexicon, formally sharing accountabilities, and more explicit expectations.

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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.

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