Presentations
Building the OPTIMAL Marketing Organization
There is no perfect marketing structure, but there is an optimal structure for your strategy, firm culture, and desired level of investment. This presentation recorded at the Association of Accounting Marketing: Summit 2018 helps you think through the 5 Tough Questions you must answer before building your marketing organization.
Prudent Guides and White Papers
The BS of PS
Your guide to overcoming the roadblocks to growth and legacy in the wonderfully dysfunctional world of professional services.
Growth in professional services is essential. It provides scale, opportunity, strategic options, and wealth. But, pursuing growth for growth sake is the mindset of a cancer cell and it can cost a firm its soul.
You’ve Stopped Growing and Redesigning Your Logo Isn’t Going to Fix It
The capability, service or consulting model that built your brand becomes commoditized, trite or simply out of fashion. All firms reach this place. What distinguishes professional services firms from others is how they see, interpret and transcend what is happening.
Here’s how to get growing again.
Build the Marketing Function that is Right for Your Firm
All firms have different strategies, talent, budgets, and goals. Don’t build a function the way some benchmark says you should.
Build it so it achieves YOUR firm’s strategic objectives.
Are You Allocating Marketing Investments to be Fair or to Drive Growth?
You can’t do both.
This is your guide to a more intelligent and effective way to allocate your precious marketing dollars.
Win the budget battle by being smarter and more strategic—not by being a squeaky wheel.
As a marketing leader, I have helped rebrand some of the world’s top consulting firms. I’ve learned a lot from my mistakes along the way.
The 20 Biggest Brand Mistakes Firms Make (and How to Avoid Them) is written for firm leaders to help you avoid mistakes professional services service firms repeatedly make with one of their most precious assets.
Podcast
LISTEN to the Only Podcast Addressing “The BS of PS”
Rattle and Pedal, hosted by Jeff McKay and Jason Mlicki, offers divergent thinking on growing professional services firms. Be prepared for an unorthodox exchange on life in professional services.
LATEST EPISODES:
- The Pipeline Cliff — An Interview with Mark Wainwright on Sales Planning for Doer/Sellers
Mark Wainwright shares his thoughts on the intersection where certainty ends and partners’ “night sweats” often begin […]
- Becoming the Leader You Were Meant to Be — An Interview with Ted Harro of Noonday Ventures
Ted Harro joins us to talk about how to develop your leadership skills and find leaders within your firm. The post Becoming the Leader You […]
- Shifting Thought Leadership from Brand Building to Sales Enablement
Why and how firms need to put more focus on activating thought leadership in the sale and inside client relationships. The post Shifting […]
Infographics
If you’re a practice leader or partner, one of your primary goals is hitting your number.
Improve your chances of hitting it by not asking marketing to do these 20 things that waste time and resources. Free them up so they can get to more demanding, and more valuable, work.
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?
29 More Demanding and Valuable To-Dos Once You’ve Stopped Doing Stupid Sh*t.
This is the sister to our “Stupid Sh*t Marketing Should NOT Do” infographic, one of our most popular downloads for both marketers AND practice leaders.
Do you want to grow faster, be more profitable, and differentiate your company?
Then, identify your ideal client. Identifying an ideal client is the fundamental building block of a profitable, growing business. Some firms wait until they have stopped growing and need to painfully retrench. Others do it when they are king of the hill and have the luxury of excessive demand.
Take the single action that has the greatest impact on your firm
Strategic Marketing Tools
Growth Readiness Self-Assessment
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 enablers because you can’t fix a growth limiter until you know what it is.
Marketing Capabilities Gap Assessment 2.0
You can’t build a high-performance marketing machine without knowing your starting point. This simple, powerful tool allows you to quickly, cost-effectively create a heat map of your firm’s growth capabilities.
There exists no more powerful and dangerous organizational structure than a matrix. Properly managed, it unleashes innovation, collaboration, client-centricity, and high-performance teamwork. Mismanaged, it is the sand–pebbles, rocks, and boulders–in the gears of the machine. This tool helps you unleash the power of the matrix.
It’s difficult for marketing to hit a nebulous “lead” target. This intuitive tool allows you to pinpoint the number of prospects, leads, and opportunities that Sales and Marketing need to drive to surpass your growth goal.
Popular Articles
How to Get Sh*t Done in a BS of PS Culture
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. His question had multiple parts, but I’ll address just one here:...
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...