Marketing Strategy
Identify, prioritize, and attack market opportunities that drive smart growth.
Without a strategic approach, you let competitors define who you are to their advantage, chase sales opportunities not aligned with the value you provide, create longer sales cycles, waste valuable time, and ultimately grow more slowly.
Matrices, ownership structures and service dynamism make it difficult for firm leaders to make strategic choices. These decisions involve opportunity costs, cultural evolution (or revolution) and emotional upheaval if partners feel that their wealth is being “redistributed.”
When tough strategic decisions don’t get made, the firm default is to try to meet everyone’s needs. The result is a discombobulated marketing “strategy” attempting to satisfy partners and practice leaders—all with “a top priority.”
I call this the “grow everything” strategy. It sounds good, looks good and seems strategic. It gives everyone in the firm their do. Unfortunately, every time it launches, it hits the ground with a resounding thud.
“He who is prudent and lies in wait for an enemy who is not, will be victorious.”
Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Our Point of View
Grow everything is not a strategy.
The firm’s—and, therefore, Marketing’s—number one strategic priority must be creating a healthy, profitable, and long-term growth cycle. Unfortunately, marketing priorities and investments are seldom allocated to realize this objective.
Allocating resources based on line of business size is an outdated, short-term, and sub-optimal approach because it results in misaligned goals, mindsets, and tactics.
If the firm does not make strategic choices, the firm’s performance is going to suffer.
Prudent Pedal’s Value
A prudent strategy and an action-oriented marketing structure create a virtuous growth cycle.
My approach to strategy helps assure that your marketing investment creates the highest return by building brand relevance, pursuing the highest growth opportunities, and aligning solutions with the client’s needs from beginning to end.
Firms with a documented strategy are 4.7 times more likely to be successful than those that don’t.
I help you identify, prioritize, and attack market opportunities that drive smart growth.
Strategic marketing capability, and therefore strategic impact, exists only in a few elite firms.
The world of marketing today has changed drastically from where it was ten years ago, but most professional services firms and its marketers are not keeping up. Firms were once leaders in relationship-driven marketing. Today, technology, culture, globalization, market disintermediation,
As the Economist Business Intelligence Unit stated:
“…the best marketers are five-minute-mile marathoners who combine speed and stamina. They take the customer on a journey. They need to show up at the starting line, when the people who run the business are saying, “What should we make? Who should we make it for? How do we make it in such a way that the story of our product is true?”
Ready to run faster?
Are you allocating marketing investments to be fair or to drive growth?
You can’t do both.
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Our Thinking on Marketing Strategy
What is Marketing?
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,…!”
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.
Buyer Persona Shortcomings
Has your firm’s marketing team developed “personas” yet? If you haven’t, please don’t. If you have, please throw them out. I have always had a distaste for the “persona” craze that has gripped marketing during the “content marketing” fad. Sure, I get that writing a...