My wife says that I tilt at windmills when I try to convince the professional services world that Marketing is strategic and more than making things pretty. Alliance partners and business leaders say they have the “strategic stuff” covered. My marketing peers wonder why I expend so much energy and political capital fighting an undefeatable foe. After all, it’s easier to just ride a horse in the direction it is going.
In the immortal words of John McClane in the movie Die Hard, “Yipee ki yay,…!”
In Episode 3, Responding to the Threat of Content Marketing, Jason and I tackle the approaches professional services firms can use—must use—to defend themselves from the SaaS onslaught and the commodification of “proprietary” intellectual capital. Most...
This week two disparate events converged in my mind to provide some useful advice to professional services firms wanting to grow. The first event was the release of a professional services “high growth” benchmarking study. I’m not a fan of this report because I think...
Planning for next year is well underway in firms around the world. Soon performance goals and marketing budgets will be allocated in hopes of achieving desired growth. It is an exciting and exhilarating time. Over the years, I’ve seen many zealous practice leaders...
Immersing yourself in business books will never make you a strategic thinker. Not in million years. Clients and friends often ask me how I developed my “strategic thinking ability”—what they sometimes describe as my way of connecting seemingly disconnected things into...
Firms often label themselves as “…a Leading (fill in the blank) firm.” I suspect they believe that saying as much will speak the result into being. Unfortunately, as most of us already know, being an industry leader requires much more than saying you are one. When I...
In The Marketing Trend Devouring Your Core Business, I described how SaaS companies are using content marketing to aggressively commoditize traditional professional services firms. This week I offer some suggestions firms can put in place to immunize themselves...
There is much talk about digitization’s impact on blue-collar jobs, including job elimination, skill depletion, and role obsolescence. From my vantage point, the risk is just as high, if not higher, for many “white-collar” jobs. The phenomenon is hitting some experts...
If you have been reading my blog for some time, you know that one of the key tenets of my growth philosophy is that firms must align their core capabilities, market opportunities, and brand relevance if they want to set a smart growth strategy in motion. Today, we are...
Quick. Tell me the strategy of your organization. For bonus points, tell me how your team and your role fits into that strategy. And how it affects your actions each day, especially in terms of what you choose NOT to do as a result of the strategy. If you’re like most...
At some point, the capability, service or consulting model that built your brand becomes commoditized, trite or simply out of fashion in the business world. You have stopped growing and redesigning your logo isn’t going to fix it. It happened to actuaries at the HR...
Jeff helps firms set smart growth strategies in motion. He was the SVP of Marketing at Genworth Financial, the Global Marketing Leader at Hewitt Associates, and held senior roles at Towers Perrin and Andersen. Learn more.
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