 |
News
The
Integration Imperative is now available
online at Professional
Services Books' NEW online bookstore!
The
Integration Imperative reviews:
PMForum
March 2010
SMPS'
"The Marketer" February 2010
"Recommended
reading for all marketers and professional managers
searching for a complete picture on the roadblocks
to sustainable firm growth." Grant Butler
PSF
Journal March 2010
Legacy Business Practices Hurt Service Firms
by Suzanne Lowe
"RainToday"
March 2010
Suzanne
will be...
...
speaking at the
2010 Frontiers in Services Conference, considered
to be the world's leading annual conference on
service research.
June 10-13, 2010, Karlstad, Sweden
...
a featured panelist at the
Association for Accounting Marketing's 2010 Summit
June 22-25, 2010
...
co-presenting at the
SMPS Annual Conference "Build Business" July
13-17, 2010
New from the Expertise Marketplace™
Blog
Mapping out "sample experiences" for clients
Where are you going? A personal reflection
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'm reading your book, Integration
Imperative, during my daily commute. I just wanted
to tell you how energizing it is
to read ... very thought-provoking. In the mornings,
I'm entering the train tired and groggy, and arriving
in Penn Station energized and ready to go. The
reading also sparks my mind into action-mode,
and I invariably create a to-do list while reading."
-- Andrew Weinberg CPSM, Senior Marketing and
Business Development Manager, Langan
Engineering & Environmental Services
"Love, Love, Love your newsletter!"
Tracy Crevar Warren, President of The Crevar Group
Recent Issues
Training
Attorneys to Market and Sell: Small Steps Equal
Great Gains April 2010
Giving
Marketers a Seat at the Table — and Getting a
Leg Up on the Marketplace March 2010
|
 |
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,
our new online bookstore, your favorite online bookseller
or CEO-READ.
About
this month's issue
For the last couple of months, we’ve
looked at how professional service firms (PSFs) and
B2Bs can improve the effectiveness of their marketing
and selling functions by helping their people grow their
skills. Our May issue features Ross
& Baruzzini, an engineering
and architectural planning, design, and consulting firm.
It adapted a big-time 
performance management tool and combined it with an
informal “guardian angel” mentoring program.
The result? Ross & Baruzzini’s people feel
a sense of responsibility and enthusiasm for marketing
and business development. (The full Skills
Imperative case study is featured in my book The
Integration Imperative.)
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
Building
Responsibility and Enthusiasm for PSF Marketing and
Selling
Consider the critical importance of instilling
in people a sense of responsibility and enthusiasm for
marketing and business development. PSF and B2B executive
managers face the difficult reality of building a go-to-market
process that works for everyone in the company. They
must encourage the most desirable behaviors from people
who find them unfamiliar, and in some cases, distasteful.
One firm that's effectively managed this difficult
balancing act is Ross
& Baruzzini. Founded in 1953, Ross & Baruzzini
provides its architectural, mechanical, electrical,
communication and security systems engineering services
to clients who need to solve their facilities and infrastructure
challenges, primarily in the aviation, higher education,
government, health care, and maritime industries.
This small company adopted the Balanced Scorecard*
as its structural springboard to build market share.
At the same time, it demonstrated a great deal of cultural
savvy by informally encouraging professionals to collaborate
and share accountabilities for growing the firm. Each
of its initiatives—whether formal or informal—was
intentionally designed to bring technical people into
the world of marketing and business development.
Planning
Starts with the Client in Mind
From the mid-1990s to 2001, Ross & Baruzzini
grew robustly. Nevertheless, early in the new millennium,
members of the firm’s operating committee began
to feel that the company was not firing on all cylinders.
As recounted by partner Dave Kipp, "We seemed to
be hitting a plateau. Our revenue began to flatten.
We found ourselves dependent on too few market niches,
which left us with an unbalanced portfolio. And we began
to feel that our successes—or disappointments—happened
too unpredictably.”
In 2002 the firm’s operating committee
members initiated a three-month discussion about adapting
the Balanced Scorecard. They wanted to be more purposeful
in making progress on the firm’s plans, and to
align their professionals’ everyday behavior to
the strategic goals of the enterprise.
They began using the Scorecard that same year. Now each
year, centered around the company’s July 1 fiscal
year, Ross & Baruzzini’s operating committee
reviews the firm's rolling five-year strategic plan and
makes up its annual target plans. This event triggers
a top-down goal-setting process that flows through the
organization to every individual.
All professionals are required to sit down
with their supervisors to review the company's overall
annual goals and the goals of their business units.
Together, professionals and their supervisors outline,
in plain terms that are meaningful to both, each individual’s
goals and actions and how they align with the firm's
overall strategies. The supervisor and professional
may review it again in person before it's sent back
"up" to the operating committee.
After the operating committee takes a last
look at the content of all the Scorecards, they are
finalized for the year ahead. From there, Scorecards
become living documents that are reviewed quarterly.
Ross & Baruzzini's director of human resources tracks
them to ensure their tactical implementation. Anyone
can see anyone else's Scorecard. The firm’s Scorecard
and that of each division is even published on the company
intranet.
A Tool
for Breaking Down Silos
Like any typical Balanced Scorecard, Ross &
Baruzzini's Scorecard features four perspectives: financial,
internal business processes, customer, and individual
learning and growth. But operating committee members
realized the Scorecard’s four separate quadrants
could easily build silos, not erase them. They were
committed to helping their professionals become more
market-driven, not less. They wanted the Scorecard to
help increase their effectiveness in collaborating and
sharing responsibilities for marketing, selling, and
delivering excellent service to clients.
To guide the best cultural mindset, operating
committee members renamed the customer quadrant "client
satisfaction." Also, they began to reinforce the
notion that revenues and profits were only an outcome
of outstanding execution in the other three quadrants.
Kipp explained:
For us, the Scorecard cycle starts with the
client’s satisfaction, flows over into learning
and growing, from there into internal business processes,
and finally to financials. . . . Financial results
are seen as an outcome of doing the other things right.
The Scorecard lends itself to encouraging everyone's
mindset that business development is their responsibility.
Hold
On, But Loosely!
But members of the operating committee knew
the Balanced Scorecard could not, by itself, provide
the cultural underpinning they sought. And they thought
a formal mentoring program would appear too controlling
to employees; they believed it could defeat the spirit
of collaboration that could allow the firm to thrive.
And so, starting around 2004, Ross & Baruzzini
executive managers began looking for informal opportunities
to give newer professionals a chance to get in front
of a client, to make mistakes, and to spread their own
wings. By setting an example of their own outreach to
newer colleagues, they could more effectively encourage
other Ross & Baruzzini principals to get engaged
in helping the staff grow and develop. The idea was
not to be heavy-handed, but to interact when serendipity
presented opportunities to do so.
Kipp recalled a time when he and one of the
firm’s younger associates were on a plane, traveling
to a client meeting. During casual conversation, the
young man mentioned an interest area that he hoped to
develop further. Kipp saw how passionate this young
colleague was about the topic, and he saw an opening
to help the young man find an outlet for his interest.
He said, “I’d love to help you develop your
idea. Why don’t you scribble up an outline and
we can work on it together?” Right there, an informal
mentoring relationship began, and it continues to this
day. This relaxed mentoring model has also helped the
firm better capture its professionals’ ideas on
solving clients’ emerging needs.
To be sure, Ross & Baruzzini's cultural
approach to integrating marketing, selling, and client
service is not without its challenges. It takes time,
enormous amounts of internal communication, and an ability
to tolerate people who resist. By employing a "guardian
angel" method, an organization cannot run itself
as an autocracy. Instead, as the firm’s operating
committee understood, achieving their integration results
might take years.
They learned that negativity is inevitable
and that it serves a purpose. Executive managers had
to be willing to let the doubters express their criticisms.
They believed naysayers have merit in terms of keeping
the firm and its professionals well grounded.
They also realized the importance of flexibility.
Ross & Baruzzini president Craig Toder summed it
up:
It took us a couple of years to get the Scorecard
going. People needed to see that we were serious,
and we needed to get significantly better about having
fewer and more measurable goals. But still, we don't
look at our scorecard as a fixed point or our mentoring
initiatives as overly rigid standards; they can change
and grow as we do.
What are the results of this balancing act?
Since 2001—an uncertain year in nearly every industrial
market—Ross & Baruzzini has prospered in all
of its market niches, added new client types, and increased
its contract size and profitability. The firm’s
portfolio is appropriately balanced and positioned to
both capitalize on opportunity and weather downturns.
Fueling the change is the idea that every professional
can be involved in the acquisition of business and the
prosperity of the business. The firm has gradually been
able to shed the limitations imposed by an inward focus.
It has moved to a balanced posture driven by its clients.
*Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, The
Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action
(Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1996).
Write
me to share your experiences about how your company
is building responsibility and building enthusiasm
for marketing and selling.
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.
© 2010 Expertise
Marketing, LLC All Rights Reserved
|
