| Good marketers know their market. Great marketers can successfully target and win work from that market. In professional services firms, the difference between good and great marketers hinges on their ability to engage the right partners with their ideas and gain support for implementation.
Professional services firms use marketers for activities that help with the development and growth of their client base. As a marketer, you must understand the client base, the marketplace, potential ways to build eminence and brand, and how to leverage relationships. Many great marketers have these skills and can offer a range of strategies and implementation tactics.
However, these skills must be underpinned by understanding of the core business drivers and methods of communication with partners. Many marketers are unable to overcome the ‘cultural divide’ caused by partners’ lack of understanding of marketing skills and subsequent low priority for marketing initiatives.
To tackle this problem, you need to practice some core marketing advice: listen to your internal market and re-evaluate your approach to partners. Demonstrate your ability to understand a complex internal client, their drivers and needs and find the most suitable delivery methods to them. The aim is to strengthen your credibility in advising partners on how to build relationships with their clients and to tailor their communications and interactions to retain or win more work.
In working across a partnership, marketers are faced with a deluge of tasks with competing timelines, priorities and outcomes. In providing tactical support in response to these needs, you can learn about the business and build relationships with partners. Over time, this will create a position where you can put forward key projects and proactively provide advice to meet strategic needs. Use these activities to educate the firm about how to make best use of marketing resources and support their integration with the practice groups. In turn, you will be able to increase partner engagement for longer-term marketing activities.
Working in practice groups
When placed in practice groups, work to understand the team dynamics and identify the key decision makers, such as the managing partner and other influencers, and the gatekeepers, such as executive assistants. Learn the timing and flow of the work within the practice and build relationships with those who can provide expertise for your projects.
Working in a practice group places you within reach of key business decisions and decision makers. You are in a position to adapt partners’ approaches to the market and to pitch your own ideas and, if successful, implement them. If an idea is not backed, seek feedback as to why – timing, resources, lack of defined benefit, or need to have an example of implementation. Learn from this for future pitches.
When you have an idea, test the level of interest before developing it further. Articulate it clearly in 1-2 visual slides that contain the proposition, process to be deployed, outcomes, benefits and costs. Ideally your pitch will be to the managing partner and the result will give you a clear ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on whether you should develop the idea further.
Even if your idea does not gain support, the proactive and professional manner in which the idea was presented should impress and hopefully enable further opportunities to present. Feedback should be requested and factored into the next pitch
Factors that will increase the success of the discussion
- Timing. When is the best time to meet the managing partner? Try to schedule a time that is not critical to practice management and avoid coinciding with end of month billings, during a difficult client engagement or tender, or while other key infrastructure leads are implementing initiatives, e.g. performance and career counselling. Remember that others are vying for the time of the managing partner and their resources.
- Know the practice. What are the key marketing priorities of the practice? Is it to build profile, develop relationships with a particular client type, identify and convert leads, or generate fees from a market segment? How will your idea help to achieve these goals and actions already under way? What resources are available – are these stretched? Will the practice be challenged and motivated to participate? Resourcing is crucial to delivery; consider how you can generate support to deliver when others are demanding fee earners’ time.
- Understand your executive sponsor. What are the personal and professional goals of the managing partner? Will your idea assist their own performance measurements, such as demonstrating leadership or innovation? Consider these and build in some useful KPIs or internal communications to support the managing partner’s goals. Be ready for a discussion about possible project team members who would benefit from involvement. This will assist in accessing subject matter experts, resources and, importantly, in implementation. If the project is successful, ideally these team members will advocate to their peers the benefits of being involved in marketing projects.
- Business benefits. What is the bottom line? How does the proposal tie directly into the practice’s business objectives? What will it deliver and when? For example, developing client service agreements or standards for key clients might be completed in the short term, but outline the effects down the line such as raising the level of client satisfaction during the next service assessment review period. What are the risks if the idea is not implemented? Can new opportunities or engagements be tracked to show the action generated leads and work? Are there other benefits to the practice such as using people to participate in a market-focused activity or learning through attending client meetings with partners?
- Support required. What are the costs and requests on the practice? Will the initiative be easily built into existing engagements and workflow or require additional time? Busy partners will require insight into where and when their resources will be used. Other support might take the form of communications that can be drafted to be sent out by the executive sponsor or incorporated into meetings. Updates on the program and reporting can be included to ensure that the support is continued to the program’s end.
Are there others who need to be consulted, such as finance or scheduling, human resources or IT? Will they be required to provide support or their systems affected by increased demands?
Great marketers need patience and persistence in professional services settings to generate internal support and credibility with partners. Only once that is achieved can marketing produce proactive results and outstanding return on investment.
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