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The
Integration Imperative is now available
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will be...
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co-presenting at the
SMPS Annual Conference "Build Business"
Boston, MA July 13-17, 2010
...
the keynote speaker at the Build Business with
Charm and Intelligence Baltimore, MD October 6
- 7, 2010
...the keynote speaker at AMC
Institute November 12-14, 2010, Santa Fe, NM
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Recent Issues
Growing a Global Client Base while Promoting Individuals' Professional Growth
Great Gains June 2010
Building
Responsibility and Enthusiasm for PSF Marketing
and Selling May 2010
Training
Attorneys to Market and Sell: Small Steps Equal
Great Gains April 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,
our new online bookstore, your favorite online bookseller
or CEO-READ.
About
this month's issue
This month, we will feature the first of two
Integration Imperative excerpts on professional service
firms that successfully integrated their administrative
functions with marketing and business development functions.
Both stories about the Support Imperative will chronicle
the potent market-focused results that can accrue when
professional firms formally manage the connections among
their “support” functions.
Our first excerpt is about R.W. Beck, a management and engineering consultancy. Its marketing and HR functions teamed up on the firm's first-ever initiatives on performance improvement and organization development to formalize how professionals could better collaborate and share accountabilities. The endeavor resulted in improved teamwork to market, sell, and deliver client services.
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
Marketing and Human Resources to Turn a Company of Experts
into an Expert Company
The way most professional firms work together
looks like a patchwork quilt. The people in Paris operate
one way; those in Singapore operate quite differently.
On top of those variables, most professional firms make
it explicit that practitioners must work together,
and they regularly evaluate their success in doing so.
But what about sharing accountability with “support”
functions? What about asking them to formally collaborate
with each other?
I chose R.W. Beck as a case study for three reasons.
First, the firm purposefully reoriented its human resources
function to include an emphasis on organization development
and change management. Second, it created a formal partnership
between marketing and human resources. Third, it developed
a new performance management system to frame how all
the firm’s professionals could better collaborate
and share accountabilities as they worked together.
The net result of this new construct is improved teamwork
to market, sell, and deliver R.W. Beck’s client
services.
This story begins in 2005, when, during one of the
firm’s strategic planning sessions, R.W. Beck
executives recognized that their organization was essentially
a geographically based company of experts. Every office
operated as its own fiefdom, with multiple cultures.
Even though the firm had recently adopted a new compensation
system, there were widely varying approaches to rating
people’s performance. Goal setting and accountabilities
were all over the map. Consistent feedback mechanisms
did not exist. Succession planning and leadership development
were spotty.
This story hinges on three major initiatives: a performance
review process that requires every professional to set
explicit goals and accountabilities, a standardized
calibration framework to help executives determine consistently
how their professionals are performing, and a revamped
leadership development program that is linked with both.
Although these programs were designed to focus
broadly on all aspects of the way R.W. Beck’s
people work together, they are also excellent examples
of a major theme of The
Integration Imperative: making marketing and
sales a part of everyone's job.
Evolving
from a Company of Experts to an Expert Company
The first formal steps toward change were taken
in December 2007. The head of human resources interviewed
more than 100 people in the firm’s offices. All
were asked for their opinions on the firm’s current
performance review process and ratings guidelines. They
were encouraged to talk about what worked or did not
work. And they were asked for suggestions about what
they thought would advance the firm’s goals.
Taking these touch points as a development
guide, R.W. Beck’s executive and human resource
managers set about creating the structural aspects of
the new performance review program. They required everyone
to set explicit goals and accountabilities. All aspects
of the reviews had to be consistent across geographies
and position levels. It was also important that each
review address areas that R.W. Beck particularly wants
to foster, including client focus; job knowledge and
skills; and brand-oriented personal attributes.
The firm developed the same type of structural
guide for its new calibration process. The idea was
to standardize, across the company, a well-recognized
rating system that could objectively determine differences
in performance levels and foster consistency when supervisors
and managers conducted performance reviews.
The HR
– Marketing Partnership
Arguably, creating the framework and deployment
map for a professional firm’s internal performance
review and rating program is the easy part. Executive
managers knew R.W. Beck's people would likely react
as would any other large group of people who have been
comfortable with the way things had been done in the
past.
And so began another first for R.W. Beck: a new formal
partnership between the firm’s marketing function,
led by the vice president of strategic marketing, Jessica
Reiter, and the firm's HR function. By demonstrating
the shared collaboration and integrated accountabilities
of these functions, they hoped to lead by example.
As head of strategic marketing, Reiter was responsible
for corporate communications and was also R.W. Beck's
brand champion. Management executives viewed marketing’s
partnership with human resources as a uniquely valuable
opportunity to help every person in the firm coalesce
around a new model of working together in a way that
powerfully demonstrated the firm's brand promise.
For their first step, Reiter and her colleagues created
a communications plan with a firm-wide launch strategy.
In January 2008, they developed and distributed memos,
e-mails, and FAQs about the upcoming changes. In February
2008, the head of HR and then CEO Russ Stepp traveled
to the firm's major offices to deliver in-person presentations
about the new management process. For smaller offices,
Reiter arranged for a professionally recorded video
of this presentation at a studio. The video recording
was posted on the firm's intranet, along with copies
of all related documents.
Beyond the initial communications launch, marketing
and human resources introduced numerous tactical follow-up
initiatives, including a mentoring program, an online
training course, new recruiting activities, and a new-employee
onboarding orientation.
Marketing
and Human Resources: Becoming More Together Than Either
Could Be Alone
Because some R.W. Beck professionals had been
with the company for more than 25 years, everyone proceeded
with enormous sensitivity to the culture. But the biggest
lesson learned for marketers and human resources teammates
was the epiphany they experienced from their internal
collaboration. Stepp explained, "Our marketing
and human resource professionals became more than any
of us thought possible; each is becoming an expert in
what the other one is doing. The stronger this administrative
partnership becomes, the closer we get to achieving
our ‘Expert Company’ goal.”
Write
me to share your experiences about how your company
is integrating marketing and human resources to turn
your company of experts into an expert company.
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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