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Allocating resources based on line of business size is an outdated, short-term, and sub-optimal approach because it results in misaligned goals, mindsets, and tactics.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.
Get your guide to a more intelligent and effective way to allocate your precious marketing dollars.
Our Thinking on Marketing Strategy
PODCAST: Responding to the Threat of Content Marketing
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 firms think of...
Introducing the Rattle and Pedal podcast
Does the world really need another podcast? It does if it confronts the “BS of Professional Services.” That’s exactly what Jason Mlicki of Rattleback and I are doing with our new podcast, Rattle & Pedal™, conceived last year and launching today Jason and I...
How to Identify Your Ideal Client
If you want to grow faster, If you want to be more profitable, If you want to differentiate your company, If you want to deliver exceptional service, If you want to take the single action that would have the greatest impact on your firm, then, you need to identify...