Firms reach a maturity and a competitive playing field that requires a more sophisticated sales and marketing approach to sustain competitive performance and growth.
We help firms get to their next level of performance.
There are two Marketing Schools of Thought in Professional Services
The one your firm has chosen is delivering your current results. Did you choose the right school?
The Problem
Leaders want their firms to:
- Move upstream to larger clients and engagements
- Leverage strong brand preference among existing clients to cross-sell services
- Be more strategic in identifying high potential markets and ideal buyers
- Allocate marketing investments for the highest ROI
- Increase selling effectiveness and productivity
- Develop stronger lead generation capability
- Tell the firm’s “story,” in all its growing complexity, more simply and consistently
Most firms don’t make the leap.
The Solution
Thinking AND acting differently.
All professional services firms share innate growth hurdles borne of matrix structures, incentives, fungible offerings, competitive markets, and unique cultures. Top firms think about these “barriers” in a new way and turn them into opportunities through smart strategic choices that most firms are afraid to make.
Top firms act quickly, but they don’t hurry. They set smarter growth strategies in motion with an action-oriented sales, marketing, and delivery structure that plays to THEIR strengths, strategic objectives, and cultures. They don’t build copycat, cookie-cutter Sales and Marketing functions.
Failing to put this framework in place wastes your marketing investment and creates systemic risks to the business. Without it, firms waste valuable billable time, chase suboptimal sales opportunities, create longer sales cycles, develop weaker brands, grow more slowly, and let their competitors define who they are to their advantage. Ultimately, they get left behind.
Combining new thinking and acting creates an accelerated and virtuous growth cycle.
After 20 years in the marketing hot seat helping top global consulting firms grow,
I created Prudent Pedal to help professional services firms think and act differently.
Who We Help
We serve business leaders in insight-driven B2B firms.
Traditionally these firms have been “professional services firms” offering pure strategy, IT, financial, or human capital consulting solutions. Today, these firms are complex hybrids that provide a dynamic combination of professional services, software, and data.
Our clients sell sophisticated solutions to sophisticated buyers through complex buying cycles. Their markets are competitive, demanding, and dynamic. Their employees are intelligent, driven, and client-centric. Their organizational structures are matrixed and geographically dispersed.
These leaders want guidance and demand prudent, proven solutions that accelerate growth and build strong brands.
How We Do It
We help business leaders accelerate growth by laying the proper growth-building blocks, augmenting marketing’s strategic capability, and increasing sales performance.
We develop smart growth strategies and build the sales and marketing organizations to deliver them—no matter your industry, size, geography or culture. We start by translating firm growth intent into action-oriented sales and marketing strategies, then we build the operations and enablement processes that align Sales and Marketing to drive growth.
How we DON’T do it.
We don’t take the path of least resistance or appease the largest practice. We don’t develop over-baked strategies that ignore external and internal realities, offer generic assessments, avoid hard choices and sit on a shelf. We don’t create pretty logos, write taglines or choose Pantone colors for your brand identity. We leave that work to the overpriced strategy firms and “creative” agencies of the world.
We identify what’s holding your firm’s growth back and help you overcome it.
Our Thinking
How to Get Strategic Marketing Done in a Professional Services Firm
I received an email from a talented, self-described Young Turk marketer named Cannon. He was frustrated, exhausted, and struggling to overcome several onerous Sales and Marketing impediments at his firm. He wanted to know how to get strategic Marketing done in a...
12 Steps to Transform Professional Services Marketing
Professional services marketing is like no other.
Professionals services firms market complex, intangible solutions to what are big, public, and potentially embarrassing problems. The solutions are bought by the most sophisticated c-level buyers at top companies around the globe. And, professionals must operate from Byzantine, matrixed systems in one of the most political and contentious ownerships structures, a partnership.
10 Reasons Why Partners Don’t Understand Marketing
One of my more popular and controversial blog posts is “Why Your Marketer Doesn’t Understand Your Firm’s Business.” The title alienates professional services marketers before they get to the first sentence. It satisfies partners because it recognizes what they might...
How Much Should a Professional Services Firm Spend on Marketing?
This is one of the most popular questions asked among practice leaders and marketers in professional services. An agency colleague told me recently that the correct answer from most marketers is always “more.” Yet, most partners and busines…
Stupid Sh*t Professional Services Marketing Should Not Do
If you’re a practice leader or partner, you’ve probably received your sales “number” for this year. Your primary goal is hitting it. If you want your marketing team to improve your chances of hitting it, then stop asking them to do stupid s…
What is Marketing’s Role?: 2 Schools of Thought on Professional Services Marketing
What is Marketing's Role in Your Firm? Every year about this time cyclists ramp up an enduring argument. If you are a cyclist, you know where I am going; it's the great base-building debate. There are two schools of thought. The first is traditional, laid back and...
Sure, you want to grow,
but is your firm ready?
Most firms think a “marketing” or “brand” problem is slowing their growth. Don’t be so sure.
Self-score your firm’s effectiveness in 11 critical growth areas.
…few people know how to actively listen, ask provocative questions and penetrate to the heart of a matter…Perhaps, that is why most marketing strategists seem stuck; they can’t explore, search and understand businesses the way Jeff McKay does.
Jeff contributed far more to the organization than we could have dared to ask: he stepped in and led the marketing team as if he had been there for years, serving as mentor to support their professional development; he successfully ran and improved the marketing processes during a series of high pressure and time-sensitive work supporting several large software releases; and he provided strategic consultative guidance to the management team…
Capabilities
Strategy Development
We help you prioritize, choose, and translate your growth intent into strategic actions.
- Build brand awareness
- Establish a more strategic marketing approach
- Identify high potential markets and ideal buyers
- Move upstream to larger clients and engagements
- Leverage strong brand preference among existing clients to cross-sell
Learn more.
Driving Marketing Performance
We help build marketing capability that delivers strategic impact—no matter your investment level, firm structure or culture.
- Strengthen your Marketing team
- Allocate marketing investments for the highest ROI
- Build a strategic high-performance Marketing organization
- Develop a digital lead generation platform
Learn more.
Aligning Marketing with Sales
We develop the playbook that unleashes your teams’ combined strengths.
- Increase Sales productivity & effectiveness
- Produce higher quality leads
- Improve key account performance
- Deliver better sales intelligence and messaging
Learn more.
Firms That Have Moved to the Next Level
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