The Real Holy Grail of Professional Service Firm Marketing and Business-Development Effectiveness
To grow revenue and market share, professional and B2B service firms keep looking for the business version of the Holy Grail in all the wrong places: "Hire big-time rainmakers!"; "Acquire that hot boutique firm!"; "Revamp our website!"
All too often, those ballyhooed initiatives fail to deliver on the expectations of increased effectiveness in an enterprise's marketing and business-development efforts.
Narrowly Focused Initiatives Aren't Working
Moreover, marketing and business-development leaders from small professional service firms (PSFs) and large global enterprises are increasingly taking it upon themselves to champion initiatives that they passionately believe will directly benefit the marketplace future of their firms.
Many narrowly focused initiatives to improve PSFs' and B2Bs' marketing and business-development results aren't necessarily wrong, but they're not working. To understand why, we have to take a step back to see the underlying problem.
The Root of the Problem
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Suzanne Lowe is founder of Expertise Marketing, LLC and author of Marketplace Masters: How Professional Services Firms Compete to Win. She blogs at the MarketingProfs Daily Fix and her own blog, the Expertise Marketplace.
Comments
What a load of horse manure. But a great job of grabbing my attention with the intro. I really thought there might be some valuable content here. Also a great job with working in all the hot buzzwords and phrases. Now if there was only some meat here that I could use. Sigh.
I agree with Kevin. What was this. This is light. Nothing practical. How about, "compensate your marketing team based on their effectiveness in generating leads that BD can run with." That gets people to work together. The intent is fine. Getting to the guts would be better.
Thank goodness I read your comments. I was thinking I was either crazy or really stupid as I didn't get it! thanks for speaking up.
I think the prior comments are unfair. The author clearly identifies her ideas as "three structural frameworks". Frameworks by there very nature lack the "meat" and the "guts", but it can be a good start. Think of it as the skeleton, if you will. The meat and guts are added to it. Perhaps we can look forward to a future article toward this end.
Patience, people! My post is meant to set the stage for bigger discussions. Thank you, Bryan, for asking for more instead of slamming my introduction to a serious topic. In fact, my entire new book, The Integration Imperative, is filled with examples and details about the issues described in this post. Try going here http://www.expertisemarketing.com/integrationimperative/index.html to see a picture of the framework I've described in this "Holy Grail" post.