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News
The
Integration Imperative is now available
online at Professional
Services Books' NEW online bookstore!
"Recommended
reading for all marketers and professional managers
searching for a complete picture on the roadblocks
to sustainable firm growth." Grant Butler
PSF
Journal The Integration Imperative
Book Review Issue 4 March 2010
Legacy Business Practices Hurt Service Firms by Suzanne Lowe
"RainToday"
March 2010
Suzanne
will be a speaker at the
2010 Frontiers in Services Conference, considered
to be the world's leading annual conference on
service research. It is co-sponsored by the American
Marketing Association.
June 10-13, 2010, Karlstad, Sweden
Suzanne
will be a featured panelist at the
Association for Accounting Marketing's 2010 Summit
June 22-25, 2010
Suzanne
will be a co-presenter at the
SMPS Annual Conference "Build Business" July
13-17, 2010
The
Integration Imperative reviewed in the SMPS'
"The Marketer" February 2010
Suzanne
was named one of professional services'
"top 12 gurus" December 2009
Suzanne was interviewed by Anna Farmery "The
Challenges of B2B Marketing" The Engaging
Brand Blog January 2010
Suzanne was featured in RainToday's podcast "Firms
Must Break Down Marketing and Business Development
Silos-An Interview with Suzanne Lowe" January
2010
 
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Imperative, during my daily commute. I just wanted
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of The Crevar Group
Recent Issues
Connecting Marketing with the Needs of the Sales Teams February 2010
Reconnecting Marketing and Business Development with the Business
January 2010
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The Marketplace Master™ is a monthly email publication
on professional service marketing from Expertise Marketing,
LLC.
You can order
The Integration Imperative and Marketplace Masters from Barnes & Noble, Amazon,
your favorite online bookseller or CEO-READ.
About
this month's issue
Starting with this issue, and continuing through
June, we will look at how implementing The Skills Imperative
contributes to a professional service firm’s ability
to grow the “right” revenues, expand its
market share, and add unique value to clients. This
month’s Integration Imperative case study excerpt
looks at Haley & Aldrich, one of the top U.S. environmental,
engineering, and management consulting firms.
Haley & Aldrich leaders created a pathway
to a “seat at the table” for the firm’s
nonrevenue-generating marketing leader. This structural
framework, coupled with the  firm’s mindful stewardship
of a shared-accountability culture, has contributed
to Haley & Aldrich’s continued prominence
in its sector.
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
Giving
Marketers a Seat at the Table — and Getting a
Leg Up on the Marketplace
"Getting a seat at the table" (the
executive committee or board of directors, the pinnacle
of a firm’s leadership) has become a well-known
metaphor among professional service marketers and business
developers. “Getting a seat” means being
recognized by the equity owners of one’s firm
as a valued participant—a peer—in the strategic
and management decisions of the firm.
The Haley & Aldrich story reveals the positive
chain reaction produced when a professional enterprise
integrates marketing professionals and client service
practitioners into the firm’s senior leadership.
Collaboration, an external focus, the adoption of formal
processes, dedication to personal growth and organizational
learning—all of these factors contributed to Haley
& Aldrich’s ever-broadening integration mindset.
Here’s a firm that figured out how to integrate
with its marketplace.
Founded in 1957, Haley & Aldrich began
as a small engineering firm offering specialized services
in the geosciences. Now it’s a firm of nearly
450 employees who generate revenue of almost $100 million
from 21 U.S. offices. Today, Haley & Aldrich delivers
an expansive set of consulting services to real estate
development, energy, industrial, and infrastructure
clients who are facing environmental, engineering, and
management challenges.
Inventing
the Future
When Sylvia Wheeler was asked to join as its
senior marketing professional in 1984, she was charged
with raising the marketing awareness of partners, including
those who were not eager to take on business development
responsibilities.
She came on board with the understanding that
she would be considered for ownership sometime within
two years. Then, as now, a peer review process determines
who is invited to take shareholder positions in the
company. In 1986 she became a vice president and an
equity owner of Haley & Aldrich.
In 1994 Wheeler became the first nontechnical
professional to serve on Haley & Aldrich’s
board of directors, as well as the first female member
elected by the firm's shareholders. (During her four-year
term on the board, the firm also welcomed a second female
board member, and several women have served as board
members since.) Worthy of note was that Wheeler was
hired for her experience as a marketing professional
rather than being a "homegrown" leader who
had patiently worked her way up through the ranks of
the company. This was a considerable shift for a company
known for building from within.
Wheeler’s journey to the firm’s
offer of a "seat at the table" would not have
been possible had the firm not been so strongly focused
on competitive success and learning, and capable of
harnessing its individuals to achieve goals for the
larger group.
For her part, Wheeler understood the importance
of "pushing the envelope." Almost from the
beginning of her tenure at Haley & Aldrich, she
interpreted her marketing role much more broadly --
to include ownership of strategic planning -- than did
most marketers, certainly at the time and arguably even
now. Wheeler retired in 2007.
Integrating
a Company Into its Marketplace
Even before he became the firm’s CEO
in 2000, Bruce Beverly embarked on a self-education
process by enrolling in an intensive executive education
program and, at every opportunity, attending conferences
of industry and client market leaders. He gained new
perspectives on the power of diverse ideas, collaboration
and teamwork, goal setting, strategic planning, and
systems thinking. Then, he began pushing the envelope
further, to dismantle Haley & Aldrich’s well-entrenched
homegrown norm of tying ownership of the firm to an
individual’s title or management seniority.
In 2008 Beverly extended this leadership agenda:
to change how Haley & Aldrich runs itself and how
it deploys its strategy. The goal was to operate even
more collaboratively than ever before, using the principles
articulated in James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones’s
1996 book Lean Thinking.
To customize these principles to a professional
service enterprise, Beverly recruited an expert on Lean
Thinking and assembled a team that included Denise Coleman,
Haley & Aldrich’s vice president of marketing
(and Wheeler’s successor) since 2006, and selected
managers and leaders. He asked this group to help the
firm change the way it implements its strategy.
One of the group’s goals was to start
breaking down the company’s internal silos. “Let’s
say a business unit person doesn’t know what Haley
& Aldrich’s marketing group and other company
leaders are doing,” said Coleman. “It was
our job to find the communication breakdowns, fix them
and improve our competence around those processes at
the same time.”
One of Coleman’s objectives was to improve
the firm’s marketplace sensing activities and
subsequent internal communications and response processes
around appropriate marketplace opportunities. She compared
Haley & Aldrich with other professional service
firms in a variety of sectors, and she gathered benchmarking
information about e-communications and how they are
being deployed. From that, she developed recommendations
for how Haley & Aldrich could use internal communication
vehicles that feature the least erosion in information
between what is learned from the person in direct contact
with the client and what is learned by the people who
receive that information (i.e., least waste—highest
value).
The company also began incorporating its own
version of Lean Thinking into its already successful
methods of client listening. According to Coleman, the
firm uses a technique it calls “the art of the
strategic conversation with clients,” in which
people employ neutral ways to delve deeply into what
their clients value and what concerns them. From there,
they can begin to consider how Haley & Aldrich might
meet those needs through new service offerings and business
models.
Overcoming
a Company's Legacy of Silos
For Haley & Aldrich, the road wasn’t
without its potholes. Beverly described his biggest
lesson learned:
"In my tenure as the CEO, I have been
challenged on the subject of the marketing group:
where is their value and what do they do? Such comments
are made because the person just doesn’t understand
the interdependent nature of marketing and business
development. I’ve tried to consistently give
a message of the value that our marketing professionals
provide and describe in clear terms exactly what the
marketing group is doing for us.
And now with our new strategy deployment process,
I’ll continue to encourage staff to understand
that we are in a collaborative learning process that
generates and uses marketing ideas to help our company
attain its goals over the next three years, and into
the future."
Coleman and Wheeler also pointed out that the
firm has done particularly well at positioning the people
in the company’s business development and marketing
support group as business partners. They applauded the
firm’s senior technical professionals for reinforcing
the cultural norm that it is a shared responsibility
to work with marketing professionals.
Write
me to share your experiences about how your company
is giving marketers a seat at the table and getting
a leg up on the marketplace.
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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Marketing, LLC All Rights Reserved
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