 |
News
The
Integration Imperative is now available
online at Professional
Services Books' NEW online bookstore!
 Suzanne is excited to be part
of a collaboration of 37 of the industry’s most
successful marketing and sales minds for Bull's-Eye!
The Ultimate How-To Marketing & Sales Guide for
CPAs
Suzanne
will be...
...
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
Building
Responsibility and Enthusiasm for PSF Marketing
and Selling May 2010
Training
Attorneys to Market and Sell: Small Steps Equal
Great Gains April 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 our last case excerpt on The
Skills Imperative, we will feature Jones
Lang LaSalle, a financial and professional
service firm specializing in real estate services and
investment management. Through a new program called
START, it built new marketing and business development
connections that improved optimal value delivery for
clients. START also has served as the springboard for
other programs designed to increase the company’s
value to clients, expand its book of business with them,
and simultaneously grow individuals’ professional
competencies. For a look at the full case study, check
out 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
Growing
a Global Client Base while Promoting Individuals' Professional
Growth
Jones
Lang LaSalle is one of the cases featured here because
it combined its compelling commitment to growth with
its creation and deployment of formal initiatives to
integrate marketing and business development. This commitment
is manifested in three ways.
First, with its START program, Jones Lang
LaSalle began to globalize its Corporate Solutions business.
It developed comprehensive processes and systems, instituted
training, and drove global integration of local marketing
and business development activities. The result is a
powerful network that allows the firm to develop truly
global service offerings for clients. The START program
also produced other programmatic initiatives, most notably
the company's Account Growth Program, which in 2007
began as a pilot project in its Americas' regional Corporate
Solutions business unit. This program extends the firm's
growth commitment, allowing it to focus directly on
building its book of business with strategically appropriate
clients.
Second, Jones Lang LaSalle set about to grow
the competencies of its own professionals to better
integrate its marketing and business development functions,
thereby providing more integrated solutions for clients.
This “grow-your-expertise” effort is a valuable
illustration of how a company can simultaneously help
its people grow their skills, outline new formal processes,
and clearly establish new shared accountabilities and
collaboration pathways.
Third, the company supported the evolution
of individual roles and responsibilities to lead new
enterprise-wide functions. In the START program and
its progeny, the Account Growth Program, the company
encouraged individuals to create new functions that
brought positive results for the enterprise and also
fostered new skills and professional advancement avenues.
Integrating
Marketing and Business Development Globally in Order
to Develop Better Client Solutions
In the early 2000s, Jones Lang LaSalle's business
development teams worked within three distinct regions:
Americas, EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa), and Asia/Pacific.
As the company's corporate clients began to operate
more globally, Jones Lang LaSalle's business development
team members began hearing from them about how difficult
it was to work through the company's siloed business
development functions to purchase the global solutions
they needed.
Nancy Grimmer, then the head of the Americas'
Corporate Solutions facilities management proposal team,
saw opportunities for individuals to work more closely
together using common resources rather than being separated
by their narrow business unit or geographic niches.
Because the businesses that were to form the company's
Americas Corporate Solutions division were the most
mature, it was decided to launch the initiative, newly
named START (Strategic Action Resource Team), there.
By 2008 the START program comprised about 20 people worldwide
and could point to extremely positive results. In one
year alone, for example, the proposal win rates of the
Corporate Solutions unit soared from 30 percent to well
over 50 percent. In some areas, the company achieved 70
percent win rates.
With its emphasis on skills growth, collaboration,
shared accountability, and co-leadership, START also
has served as a professional growth engine. START made
it possible for many people to take on new leadership
positions within Jones Lang LaSalle.
Integrating
Marketing and Business Development in Order to Expand
Client Relationships
The START program did include some thinking
around expansion and growth opportunities. But as of
late 2007, the Corporate Solutions unit's marketing
functions had not been directly tied in to coordinating
early-phase growth and renewal opportunities with the
existing account base.
In 2007 Jones Lang LaSalle executives tapped
Atlanta-based Paul Uber to direct the company’s
strategic initiative to expand the depth of its client
relationships across Corporate Solutions. Grimmer and
her colleague Sarah Stanley, then the manager of new
business proposals for Americas Corporate Solutions,
began to look at what was being done to build business
with current clients.
In the area of account growth opportunities,
they found evidence of functional disconnects between
marketing and business development.
Building
Power Tools to Drive a Company's Growth
Uber and Stanley met in December 2007 to further
outline how the company could better equip its Americas
Corporate Solutions CRMs (Client Relationship Managers) with new power tools to help
them drive account growth. Uber was in a position to
guide the development of the firm's formal programmatic
response and enable Stanley's transition to lead the
newly named Account Growth Program. The program was
positioned as a new resource for account directors and
sales teams. Stanley's role was to teach new techniques,
communicate, and facilitate the group's thinking.
In January 2008, Grimmer announced the new
initiative to the Americas marketing team internally
and then to the Americas Corporate Solutions account
directors.
The Account Growth Program has three main goals:
-
Build a stronger sales mindset toward account
growth. Stanley became involved in teaching
the "Account Growth Toolkit," a session that highlights
for account directors and CRMs the main sales tools
available to them.
-
Become more proactive about account renewal
and growth opportunities. Stanley began using
the Account Growth Initiative's new Power Sales
Tools to help CRMs better anticipate growth opportunities.
She recognized that they could benefit from a newly
developed account success template. Launched in
April 2008, the new account success template was
designed for accounts of any size or complexity
and to be easily managed by on-account resources.
By April 2008, Stanley also had distributed
a newly developed checklist tool, so that the CRMs
could begin immediately to collect project success
information. This new checklist was designed
to help CRMs showcase the firm's value-added services,
quickly and in a customized manner, when clients
issued a new request for proposal.
-
Increase the availability of timely account
service information. Because Corporate
Solutions CRMs needed critical general and technical
information on and evidence of the firm's value
to clients in other regions and lines of business,
Grimmer and Stanley developed three tools for their
use:
-
"Get Smart," a new electronic communication
sent at the end of every month.
-
An analysis proving the value of integrated
service delivery.
-
An account growth toolkit, a document-sharing
technology that will be available on the firm's
intranet.
Lessons
Learned and Early Results
People need time to accommodate new resources,
however welcome or effective those new resources are.
Both Grimmer and Stanley were decidedly proactive; they
had to introduce their new functions and support capabilities
to their colleagues. Internal word-of-mouth and positive
reviews made a difference in the success of these programs.
At the appropriate time, Uber, Grimmer, and
Stanley plan to share their Americas Corporate Solutions
integration experience, and the lessons they've learned,
with their global counterparts. Their intent is to continue
demonstrating a positive impact, revise the Account
Growth Program as needed, and then introduce it to global
colleagues.
Write
me to share your experiences about how your company
is growing a global client base while promoting individuals'
professional growth.
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
|
