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.
Podcasts
The World’s Only Podcast to Deal with 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.
Evaluating Growth Opportunities with David Rhoads, Managing Partner, Farenheit Consulting
Lead Nurturing with partners Chris Aitken & Paul Gladen from Muzeview
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
Videos
Stop Focusing on Logos, Colors, and Taglines
You’re not building a brand. You’re building a reputation—and it starts from the inside. Grow with purpose and leave a legacy, not another commoditized firm spewing marketing speak.
Strategic Marketing Tools
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
When It’s Time to Reinvent the Firm
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...
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What is Marketing’s Role?: Two 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...
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The Roles You Need on Your Marketing Team
Professional services marketers fight hard to achieve their titles. Newbies start out as coordinators, move to managers, if they prove themselves, become directors, if they stick around long enough, and often become CMOs when they jump ship and negotiate the title...
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Are Your Firm’s Values Any Different Than the Local Dry Cleaner’s?
When I shop at Target, eat at McDonald's, buy a new bike at a local bike shop or even get my shoes shined, I expect the people I interact with to have integrity, provide great service, give me a quality product and be accountable for delivering what the company has...
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The 3 Biggest Mistakes Marketing Leaders Make
“Send it to marketing and have them make it pretty” is a phrase you hear regularly in professional services firms. The “it” in the phrase could be a presentation, a proposal or any other brilliant marketing idea coming out of a practice. Most marketing organizations...
read moreYou Don’t Have a Marketing Problem
In 2002 Rajat Gupta, then managing director of McKinsey, pushed the firm’s head of marketing and public affairs, Javier Perez, out of the firm. The reason: multiple partners had shared their dissatisfaction with the firm to writer John Byrne in a wide-ranging feature...
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