Professional services firms reach a maturity and competitive 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 Challenge
Leaders want their firms to:
- Move upstream to larger clients and engagements
- Leverage strong brands to cross-sell services
- Identify 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
All professional services firms share innate growth hurdles borne of matrix structures, incentives, fungible offerings, competitive markets, and unique cultures. We call this the BS of PS. Firms that fail to address the BS of PS waste billable time, squander sales and marketing investments, and limit their own growth potential. Ultimately, firms who refuse to address it get left behind.
Top firms turn these barriers into opportunities by making different, smarter strategic choices that recognize the uniqueness of the firm and the people it attracts. Then, they deploy those choices through action-oriented sales and marketing approaches that play to THEIR capabilities and cultures.
Getting greater returns for the energy invested
After 20 years in the marketing hot seat helping top global consulting firms grow,
I created Prudent Pedal to help professional services firms realize their full potential.
Who We Help
We serve business leaders in insight-driven B2B firms.
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.
Traditionally these firms have been “professional services firms” offering pure strategy, IT, financial, or human capital consulting solutions. Today, these firms are complex hybrids, like SaaS companies, that provide a dynamic combination of professional services, software, and data.
These leaders want guidance and demand prudent, proven solutions that accelerate growth and build stronger 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 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.
Sure, you want to grow, but is your firm ready?
Self-score your firm’s effectiveness in 11 critical growth areas.
Capabilities
Strategy
We translate your growth intent into strategic actions.
- Position & build brand strength
- Identify high potential markets and ideal buyers
- Move upstream to larger clients and engagements
- Leverage strong brand preference among existing clients to cross-sell
- Establish a more strategic Sales & Marketing approach to growth
Marketing Performance
We build marketing capability that delivers strategic impact—no matter your investment level, firm structure, or culture.
- Build a high-performance Marketing organization
- Allocate marketing investments for the highest ROI
- Deliver strategic impact across the firm
Align 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
Our Thinking
A Professional Services Marketing Self-Assessment
This professional services growth and marketing assessment allows you to self-score 11 critical growth-enabling areas, then, weights and prioritizes each area for attention.
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.
…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…
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