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Allocating resources based on line of business size is an outdated, short-term, and sub-optimal approach because it results in misaligned goals, mindsets, and tactics.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?”
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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
You Don’t Need More Marketers. You Need These Six Roles—Reimagined for AI
The 6 Professional Services "Marketing" Roles that Matter Several years ago, I began describing six essential marketing roles that every growth-focused professional services firm needs. Not job titles. Not skillsets. But roles—archetypes that show up across the...
What’s Your Growth DNA? Decoding Your Firm’s Thinker–Seller–Doer Mix
Most professional services firms don’t stall just because of poor strategy. They stall because no one is effectively managing the go-to-market system—or the wrong people are shaping it by default rather than design. Every firm consists of Thinkers, Sellers, and...
Professional Services Brand Architecture: Curing “I-didn’t-know-you-did-thatitis.”
Why do your clients buy services you offer from other firms? It happens time and time again. You learn through the grapevine or a loyal client that another client has just chosen a competitor for a service that you provide. When you ask your client why he chose a...