Transcript
Transcript
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Professional Services Marketing Challenges
05:02 Identifying the Gaps: Where Professional Services Fall Behind
09:55 Understanding the Underlying Issues: Cost Centers and Resource Constraints
15:06 Slow Adaptation: The Impact of Changing Market Dynamics
19:57 Creative Limitations: Branding and Marketing Perceptions
24:52 Strengths of Professional Services: Trust and Relationships
29:57 Thought Leadership: A Unique Advantage in Professional Services
34:51 Consultative Selling: The Art of Personalized Client Engagement
39:57 Final Thoughts: Benchmarking and Continuous Improvement
Jeff (00:00.955)
So, Jason.
Jason Mlicki (00:04.13)
faster than I was.
Jeff (00:06.641)
I saw something the other day that just made me laugh. And then it made me mad.
Jason Mlicki (00:17.134)
That’s a complex cocktail of emotions you got going there.
Jeff (00:22.277)
Hey dude, that’s, that’s Jeff McKay in a nutshell. I was on LinkedIn and please, I’m, I’m low to go to LinkedIn very much anymore. understand. God. I, I understand its importance, but marketing ruins everything. well, I get recommendations for job opportunities and one of them was for a fractional CML.
Jason Mlicki (00:26.072)
There you go. Okay.
Jason Mlicki (00:32.406)
I was just going say that was your first mistake.
Jeff (00:51.897)
And I clicked on it. I don’t remember the company, but it essentially had in the headline or right below it, professional services marketers need not apply.
Jason Mlicki (01:10.504)
interesting. Whoa.
Jeff (01:12.547)
And I was like, whoa. I was like, I laughed. And then I was like, whoa, that upsets me. Upsets me because I’m a professional services marketer. But it also stirred my Irish heritage as well, right? Irish need not apply. And it got me thinking along the lines of
of something I’ve kind of been reflecting on anyway. And we’ve talked about on our podcast about how marketing is coming full circle to where I started in professional services. So that’s how we kind of got to this topic. I didn’t tell you that, but this was kind of how we got to it. This was the emotional dimension that got us to us. And that topic is…
Is professional services ahead or behind in its sophistication and strategies and tactics compared to other industries?
Jason Mlicki (02:20.078)
Well, time out. Is it marketing, you mean?
It’s well, you never use the word marketing in that summation, meaning that like, you know, Okay. Now I quit. Okay. Quick clarifying point. want to ask you. this random post that shows up in your LinkedIn feed, was this a posting for a position at a professional services firm?
Jeff (02:26.043)
What did I say?
Jeff (02:31.959)
yes, yes, I’m sorry. Yes, yes, I’m sorry. It was implied in my my Jeff head.
Jeff (02:52.238)
No.
Jason Mlicki (02:52.29)
where they were specifically looking for a marketer from outside the industry, or was this a software company or something?
Jeff (03:00.758)
It was a,
a fractional CMO organization, like a service organization.
Jason Mlicki (03:11.982)
Oh, Oh, so it’s an organization that actually sells fractional CMO services of some kind. OK, interesting. So basically, you are offended because they’re saying, hey, we don’t think you’re good enough. We don’t want your brethren in our club here.
Jeff (03:34.417)
Yeah, that’s what I assume they meant. They might have meant something else. But then again, I never give anybody the benefit of the doubt.
Jason Mlicki (03:36.684)
Okay.
Jason Mlicki (03:44.994)
So it’s interesting when you propose this topic, see, know, the initial prompt in the spreadsheet, by the way, was in what ways are they ahead and what ways are they behind? And so I jumped into it. And of course I was like, my God, they’re behind. And I just went through like this litany of reasons they’re behind. And that was my initial impression. And then as I did that exercise, it was kind of, you know, it’s easy and therapeutic to kind of point out all the ways that we’re getting things wrong as it always is.
Then I jumped to the, are they ahead? And I had to think a little harder, but then I actually started to realize like, actually to your point, there are meaningful dimensions where we are ahead significantly. And so it’s interesting only because…
It’s a very thought provoking exercise and it makes you really step back and think about what marketing really even is. And that’s really what it did for me. so where do you want to start? Do you want to start with ahead or behind? You know, that was my logical progression, how I did it. I went behind first and then ahead next, but that doesn’t mean that’s how we should do it. I know, I know, always leave with the negative.
Jeff (04:54.393)
You are so negative.
Jeff (05:02.797)
Let’s go that way then. Let’s go that way.
Jason Mlicki (05:04.59)
I mean, if it bleeds, leads, baby.
All right. Okay. So now what one, one semantic thing I want to throw out there is that professional services in general is almost too broad and it’s almost unfair to go after this. so there’s such a big umbrella under this context. So, I guess I’m just going to book buying this with the areas in which we work at Rattleback where I’ve worked over the years. So most of our clients fall into really two or three buckets. There’s
management consulting and IT services firms, which are one bucket. There’s like venture capital, private equity firms, which are a second bucket. Financial related entities, &A firms, that kind of stuff. And then there’s architecture engineering firms, which are a third bucket. So those are our buckets. So for me, I don’t have enough exposure or experience with law firms. I don’t do a ton with accounting firms except for their consulting businesses, their consulting practices, right? So
So my perspective kind of comes from those three spheres. So I imagine if someone that did a lot of legal marketing did this same topic, they might look at this a little differently, But anyway, I wanted to give that context and it might be helpful for you to do the same at some point. So the first one I’ll say they’re behind. The biggest thing that I’ve seen in all these years, now I will say we’ve seen inside the doors of more AE firms than we’ve seen anywhere else.
And that’s just sort of the nature of the volume of them. There’s a lot more mid-sized architecture engineering firms than there are any other tests, you know, than there are like consulting firms, IT services firms in my experience. but there’s, it, you know, first bucket I see is that marketing equals sales support, meaning that in a lot of firms, you know, they use marketing, the phrase marketing, the term marketing to describe a function that is really doing a sales support task.
Jason Mlicki (07:05.409)
they’re responding to RFPs, they’re doing interview preparation for their subject matter experts who are going to go present to win that work. That is very much sales support. And in a lot of firms, that is the totality of the effort, right? Like that is the entire marketing function. You’ve pointed out, I think there’s a second piece of this. There’s like sales support or comms, where the whole entire task is a comms function, which might be…
internal communications efforts or external communications efforts, social media management, but at a very tactical level. Right. I’ve even noticed in those firms where marketing is sales support, they’re not even really leading the pursuit or even like the idea of pursuits. Strategy is sort of new for those firms still the idea that there’s a big opportunity that they want to go after strategically. And the marketing unit is rarely leading that charge.
Um, it’s someone else that’s doing that. So, um, that was my first kind of like the one that jumped out the most that I see most frequently is that marketing is, and it’s thought of in its totality as that, um, by the senior leaders of the practice or excuse me, the seniors of the firm and leaders of the practices. That’s, that’s you ask him what marketing is. That’s what it is.
giant boom just went off somewhere around me I don’t know where
Jeff (08:32.035)
maybe Michigan’s dropping bombs.
Jason Mlicki (08:37.134)
I don’t think they’re capable. All they can do is run it up the middle, right?
Jeff (08:40.689)
Yeah, well I would agree with you. would agree with you. Generally firms fall into one of those two categorizations. It is the exception that that does not happen. I remember when I was at Anderson
Jason Mlicki (08:42.19)
Okay. So that’s my first.
Jeff (09:10.639)
which had a very sophisticated marketing operation per capita, there were more MBAs in Anderson’s marketing function than there were anywhere else in the firm. That would be atypical in most organizations. but I think that’s, I think you’re right. They’re behind. And I would describe that they’re behind because they either don’t understand marketing.
Jason Mlicki (09:27.234)
Yes.
Jeff (09:40.099)
Or because they’re fixed in the productivity school, right? It’s a cost center and they’re just designed to keep, you know, consultants who are billable, you know, high in utilization. So they’re behind, they need to change that mindset.
Jason Mlicki (09:55.246)
And your notion of the two growth schools or the two schools of marketing really dives right at that issue really well. I think you really nailed that and you’ve been saying that for years. okay. And that leads into my second way they’re behind, because you just threw out the notion that it’s a cost center. It’s under resourced. So marketing in general is generally under resourced by firms and I was often significantly under resourced. And the first reason is because it’s seen as a cost center.
in certain types of firms, it’s tucked under an administrative function alongside IT or HR or other things that are seen as cost centers. And so it’s just sort of systematically under-resourced. And that reflects itself in, I think, two ways. One is they often just don’t have the capabilities they need. They don’t have the digital skills. They don’t have the strategic thinking, the brand thinking, the measurement and the rigor. They don’t have the squadron of MBAs, good or bad, that
that Anderson had. And then frequently, they just don’t have enough. They don’t have enough of them. So even if they have some of those capabilities, there’s just not enough to go around. So there’s just more to do than they can possibly ever get to, which is always an issue. But the choices become very difficult. So so, you know, I see that as the second way they’re behind is they just don’t and they don’t parse off enough revenue dollars to.
to actually do the things that marketing can do to strategically drive the growth.
Jeff (11:29.743)
think that happens for a couple of reasons. You’re spot on. It goes back to the first one. They don’t see value in it. So they’re not investing in it and they don’t see value in it because the marketing is behind and it’s not demonstrating that value. So there’s a disconnect. So they’re not willing to invest in it. And when they do invest in it, most of the investment is in people.
Jason Mlicki (11:35.565)
Yep.
Jeff (11:58.807)
not campaigns and programs and stuff. That would probably be the second bigots bucket. And they don’t have the right people as we’ve already said, because normally it’s a junior marketer who grows with the firm and they come out of some, you know, narrow discipline. They’re not broad base, know, like MBAs and stuff like that.
And that’s why, you know, we just did an episode on why the roles are so important, right? Your resource constraint with people, you need them to do a lot and, or you need other people in the firm to get to that. I have a capabilities assessment. It’s probably the number one downloaded thing on my website. I’ll put a link into it. So firms can start to think about what skills and capabilities and roles
they need on their team.
Jason Mlicki (13:02.362)
I want to lean in real quick to something you said, though, which is in the roles discussion that we did, probably the biggest aha in there for most listeners is that many of the roles you describe of a high performing marketing organization don’t exist in the marketing functions of the firm. And this then comes back to that comment, which is that, you know, capabilities are lacking because if those are really seven core or six core roles of the marketing org,
then most of them should be in the marketing function, but they’re not. In fact, most of them are not in the marketing function. And that’s a problem, right? That’s a problem. So anyway.
Jeff (13:44.313)
And it’s a down, it’s, it’s, there’s a kind of a downward spiral associated with this too, because they’re not strategic thinkers because there is a vacuum and other people are doing the thinking and the marketing outside of it. The function becomes order takers and nobody’s saying stop. We’re not doing that. They just keep doing whatever’s thrown their way. They’re tactical. They dabble. There’s nothing sustained.
Jason Mlicki (14:01.517)
Yes.
Jeff (14:14.001)
And if anything is damaging to a firm’s growth, it’s this, right? It’s that just decentralized, disconnected, grow everything, just throw stuff at an overwhelmed marketing function and then blame that function for being too tactical. It’s, it, it, that’s the nature of the beast until somebody steps in and says, no, that’s not the way we’re.
Jason Mlicki (14:43.022)
That’s how we’re gonna do it. Three, I wrote that they’re slow to adapt and slow to adopt. And what I mean is that as the world’s changing, as marketing is changing, as the way people seek out information and buy things changes, they’re just really slow to adapt and say, yeah, that’s a thing.
Jeff (14:44.495)
Alright, number three.
Jason Mlicki (15:06.894)
that’s affecting us and we need to make investments there. And the example I’ve given again and again is that like, I think I explained the efficacy of Google for almost 10 years. So from 2005 to 2015, I would go speak at conferences and I would spend a lot of time telling managing partners, practice leaders, that your clients are going on Google and searching for either firms like yours or solutions to problems that you can solve. And they wouldn’t believe me.
They were like, oh, our clients don’t do that. mean, it took literally 10 years to bend that curve and get them to understand, which meant as firms, they were super slow to embrace content marketing and some of the downstream kind of SEO tactics that they needed to be there, to be positioned in Google. And I think the same thing’s happening with AI, but I think the exact same thing is going to play out. You’re to have the same incredibly slow, you know,
adoption pattern because they’re so slow to adapt to what’s changing and so slow to believe that what’s changing is actually going to affect them. They’re somehow they’re in this little bubble that is impenetrable that doesn’t, know, everything going on in the world around them, it’s affecting all their clients, but it’s not going to affect them. You know, it’s always going to be about the relationship this way. so yeah, that’s one that I’ve definitely seen.
Jeff (16:26.095)
I think that’s a great one. And it actually illustrates the prior two.
Jason Mlicki (16:34.019)
Yes.
Jeff (16:35.471)
because I’ve seen that live in the firms I’ve worked for, for sure. But I’m going to make a distinction. Because the big marketing is happening outside of the little function, but you don’t have strategic marketers doing that marketing, they’re going to respond like you just said, right?
They’re not sophisticated marketers that they would comprehend where Google Ads might fit in, right? Or what AI is doing to search now. They wouldn’t understand that. I think that is spot on. I’m going to give them a little credit as firms, though, in my experience, they adopt technology internally very quickly. But they don’t.
adopt the application of that technology as quickly to sales and marketing as you said.
Because I know firms are really embracing AI internally because they see it as a cost savings and a productivity issue. Again, the line does not see the value of marketing, therefore they don’t engage as fast in making those changes, but they do see the value of cost cutting and productivity gains. So they invest in that quickly. So I think your point is a good one. I would just make that distinction.
Jason Mlicki (18:07.65)
which circles back near. Well, it circles back to your notion of the two schools, productivity, the productivity school. So it’s like, my gosh, this can save us a bunch of money. But what are the third order effects of, of how it’s changing our clients behaviors? We don’t want to have that conversation because that’s a really sticky, hard conversation and we don’t want to buy into it. I think the fourth, probably like most obvious criticism and ways they’re behind, especially for, people that are not in the industry is it just.
creatively, they always look a little dated. You look at any outward expression of most firms and it just doesn’t look current or contemporary relative to what you’re seeing in other industries, software companies or consumer products companies or retail companies. And I think that’s just a reflection of the fact that they’re just not good at managing their brand assets. I always talk about this idea of investing in maintenance and evolution. They just don’t do it.
They sort of let them just atrophy and just kind of hang on the vine forever. And then they get so out of date that then they’re forced to do a big expensive, like jarring creative refresh, a rebrand that then makes them kind of reset. And then they just sit on it again. And when you look at other marketers, consumer products, marketers, or software marketers, they don’t let that happen. just, they evolve frequently over time.
avoid that so they never look out of touch. They always just feel like whatever it is that they’re trying to evoke. And you and I have talked about this and we’ve disagreed a little bit. I’m right, you’re wrong, but we can cover that in a little bit. But that’s probably the biggest criticism I think from the outside where people would say, they’re way behind. I think that’s where the impression that they’re way behind comes from really.
Jeff (19:57.457)
I’m not going to argue with that. I think that’s a result of those cultures traditionally being conservative and risk averse. And we see the exact same thing when it comes to developing a point of view, right? You need a point of view that makes you stand out, which means it needs to be different, which means it’s risky. And most people don’t want to do that.
The brand, the color, the language is just the physical manifestation of that fear. So yeah, I’m not going to argue with you at all on that front.
Jason Mlicki (20:35.438)
listeners I won. Just we’re going to chalk that up to Jason. you’re keeping a board at home of wins and losses, this is the Jason wins column. Okay. So let’s flip it to the other side. And what ways are they ahead? Now, as I said, I did behind first. I started with like ways they’re behind. I did that exercise and then I flipped to the ways they’re ahead. I had to think a little harder, but it led me to some, I think really good ways.
the first was actually the essence of what you said in the very outline of the, of the, of the episode. You know, you said the ideal brand is built on trust and personal relationships. And that’s something that that’s the skeleton that they have that other organizations just simply don’t. You know, no one trusts software companies, especially with their aggressive kind of cold push strategies. don’t trust consumer products companies that much. They don’t trust retailers that much.
So there’s just, you know, there’s an inherent nature of the business model that, that they have a significant advantage. because the thing that marketers want most trust and relationships is like baked into the DNA. It’s built into the business model. It’s built into what you’ve built as a firm and nobody else gets to start from that place. So you’re sort of starting. Like if this is a race and you were racing, you’re starting at, you know,
Position nine or something, right? Like you’re, further down the path and you have a shorter way to run to get to where you want to be. And that is hugely important.
Jeff (22:18.947)
I agree.
I can’t say any more on that. I think you articulated that that well. And it is a gift. I wonder if firms fully appreciate when they’re feeling down about themselves because their brand isn’t as cool as Apple. That they have that going for them and some firms have it stronger than others. That’s why they may have brand preference.
Jason Mlicki (22:23.457)
you
Jason Mlicki (22:29.475)
Yes.
Jeff (22:50.235)
But I think to a large degree, there is a halo effect in these industries that firms can build from, right? If you look at a car dealer, they don’t have that trust and relationship. You know, there may be some brands that gravitate a little higher on the list, but for the most part, people don’t trust car manufacturers and car dealers.
And that’s just one example. So I definitely think they’re well ahead on that and they need to take care of that family jewels, so to speak.
Jason Mlicki (23:30.912)
Yeah. Well, you said earlier, where they struggle with that is that they don’t scale it well enough. They don’t, they’re not really great at scaling that trust and those relationships. And I’m not saying that’s easy. It’s not like it’s super easy thing to do. But it’s, but it’s, it’s where their opportunities, best opportunities lie. Right. Whereas a software company is, is trying to earn trust, right? Like that’s
pretty much the entire marketing effort is trying to get trust and they don’t have it. And most firms do, and they can build out from that. And it’s a lot easier to, I mean, I’m gonna say it’s easy, but I think it’s easier to scale trust you have than it is to build trust you don’t, right?
Jeff (24:22.361)
And I would argue it’s easier to build trust if you’re focused, right? Building trust with whom versus the entire market. So if the fundamental issue is we can’t scale this trust that we have, the answer is focus on whom you want to have trust you. And to me, that’s a secret sauce right there.
Jason Mlicki (24:27.63)
100%.
Jeff (24:52.057)
And it’s so hard for firms. And I would say, I’m going to throw this one out is where they’re behind. They have trouble making strategic decisions and then attacking them with resolute execution. They, they’re, they’re everything to everybody. They think they have some focus. They go, they don’t see the results fast enough. And then they move on. They don’t have that marketing.
discipline and fortitude to actually reach the value that they really would like to see.
Jason Mlicki (25:28.302)
Well, and that’s a business model problem. I’ve said this for years. You know, if you work in a product company, costs a lot of money to create a new product, right? To build a highly differentiated product. And for a services firm, it’s like, we can just like roll one up on Tuesday and then take it down on Thursday. And that’s how it’s looked at. It’s like these things are disposable. There’s not anybody working in the R &D lab usually to develop these things, even though there should be and they’re
there frequently is often I’m saying frequently and often on two dimensions at the same time that’s not right but often there’s there’s not that’s not there but okay the next thing that where I think they’re way ahead is on thought leadership you know so there’s a I always talk about like I believe that thought leadership was sort of born out of the McKinsey quarterly somewhere in the 50s and 60s right and there’s a direct through line
between that sort of like initiative and the content marketing movement of the 2010, 2010s. Like, so content marketing becoming this pervasive tactic to drive marketing programs for companies of all shapes and sizes, all it goes roots itself back to thought leadership, which came out of this industry. and so no matter how you slice it, they’re just decades ahead of their time.
on this dimension of developing IP and turning it into highly valuable, useful insight. And so that is just, you think about firms in general is I’ve said this for years. You’re kind of selling air sometimes, right? You’re, you’re selling nothing. And so in order to sell nothing, you have to have a compelling point of view that gets people to follow. And, I mean, most B2B orgs would love to have the reputation for.
high quality thinking that comes out of tier one firms. They would give anything to get to that place. And they’re light years behind them in reality. So.
Jeff (27:37.041)
Do you know why that happens?
Jason Mlicki (27:41.026)
Well, what happens?
Jeff (27:42.801)
I guess I should have defined the it there. The it.
Jason Mlicki (27:47.618)
The what?
Jeff (27:51.921)
But let me go another direction with that.
Jeff (27:57.019)
There are lot of B2B firms that put together quote unquote thought leadership. You can go to Salesforce, SAP, HubSpot. They have thought leadership. Generally it’s how to type of thought leadership. But the success of thought, what’s that?
Jason Mlicki (28:17.12)
or state of, I like to call it state of. Salesforce is big on state of, state of sales, state of marketing. It doesn’t actually have a point of view. All it does is say, this is the state of, this is what’s going on, not what you should do, it’s just what’s going on. All right, keep going, sorry.
Jeff (28:23.312)
Yes.
Jeff (28:34.961)
So the difference, I think, between professional services and those B2B, and particularly SaaS companies, go back to your earlier point about the trust that they’ve built, is when you look at thought leadership coming out of B2B firms, it really is the rationalization for their software product. So it’s not neutral. It’s biased.
What makes professional services firms so successful is their objectivity and they don’t have that bias. And it’s important not to lose that. And if you go back and listen to our Blair Ends, I love his thinking, right? You need to educate. And it’s a challenge or sale too, right? Point of view that directs people in a certain direction.
But you don’t make decisions, you don’t press them for the decisions. But this is why ideal client is so important because that’s where you’re aligned, Simpatico, and it’s not hard sell and you maintain that trust versus the SaaS where they want to sell everything to everybody, which is like all other industries. It’s mass market.
Jason Mlicki (29:51.246)
And I, yeah.
Jason Mlicki (29:57.538)
Yeah, and I always like to use the phrase that modern marketing is educating and modern selling is helping. And that’s what firms can do better than anybody else and do better than anybody else is that they can be selfless. They can show up and say, hey, here’s what’s going on. Here are your options. This is my point of view on what I believe you should do, but it’s entirely your choice.
Product companies, software companies have a really hard time with that. I mean, they can embrace that mantra that I just gave you really well, but it’s like that, that, that helping part of the sales experience is about 15 minutes and call one. And then that’s a aggressive spawn, a hard sale push, like pedal to the metal. You know, we have a promotion idea. You got to sign by Friday, right? Like just, like, just comes aggressively from there on out. And, um, that’s not always potentially true in enterprise, great software, but.
But it’s, know, and that’s, I guess that’s a huge advantage, which goes back to the trust piece. It’s like, that’s where the trust comes from is because at the end of the day, most firms when they engage with a client are extremely selfless in terms of how they approach the conversation and what the client needs to accomplish. It’s extremely rare where they’re going to aggressively push a solution.
In my experience, all the firms we’ve worked with over 20 plus years, it’s extremely rare where I encounter a firm that’s just going to aggressively try to force a client in one dimension. So OK, I’ve got one more. One more way they’re ahead. You may have more than that. I don’t know. But one more big one. And this one to me is sort of, I don’t even know how to describe it. I call it experiences in co-creation. And what it is to me is that
Some of the best firms I’ve got to know over the years, they’re just really good at sort of knowing how to program, host, stage amazing events and sort of co-create. They know how to recognize that the things that they do with clients, they do with them, not to them. Right. And that comes out in everything that they do. And this can manifest itself as
Jason Mlicki (32:12.162)
thought leadership where they’ve their co-authoring pieces or they’re working together to learn about how to really solve best practices. There’s a huge misnomer about what best practices are. People in the general business world think that best practices are, you know, ivory tower insights that are dropped down upon the world by experts in a corner. And that’s not at all what best practices are. Best practices are discovered. There are things that companies are already doing on their own and consultants figure them out.
codify them and then translate them to the masses, right? And so that’s where they’re so great. And anyway, as I said, this manifests itself as events. see like many of our clients doing like just really great experiences, right? It’s a, know, I put in here the Rusko-Brien Guido Growth and Ownership Conference. I’ve spoken there through the years. It’s a great event. They bring together owners of AE firms from all across the country and the world. And it’s just an open dialogue about value creation and exit and
And it’s a great experience. It’s highly memorable. People learn and they have a great time together. They get to make relationships. They make connections. They get to know each other. Stuff that just, they’re just really good at that. So this notion of co-creation, I think, is the essence of what I’m trying to say. That firms just excel at. They’re really good at.
Jeff (33:33.403)
That really is just the physical manifestation of all the attributes that came before. When you go to execute, you execute in a way, cause this is who you are. And this is the result that you want from your values. So I think that makes perfect sense. Yeah. Yeah. I, that’s one of the things I miss the most about not being at a big firm like Anderson is doing those.
Jason Mlicki (33:38.477)
Yeah.
Jeff (34:02.501)
joint ventures and big events and stuff like that, because you get to learn so much and meet so many great people and develop relationships. It’s cool. All right, we’re getting up almost up on time. I’m going to combine my last two into one, because I want to give kudos to these firms, because I think where they really exceed
And this goes back to something you said earlier about being the nature of the professional services industry. But one of the things that they do really well is operate in and manage complex selling cycles.
And as a result of that, they do consultative selling versus hardcore selling. And they are delivering highly customized solutions, if you will. So I guess I would kind of encapsulate that into a very consultative sales approach and very personalized service delivery.
There aren’t many organizations or industries, I think, that can compete with professional services on that front. And that really comes down to, as I say, that integration of sales, marketing, and delivery into one thing called client experience, which I think kind of alludes to what you said before. I just don’t think many firms do client experience as well as professional services. I’m not saying they’re perfect.
I’m not saying they can’t take their game up, but they have the ethos and the motivation and the experience. And I think that’s ahead of a lot of industries.
Jason Mlicki (36:01.528)
Well, there’s always a personal relationship that is formed in some way, shape or form between the service provider and the client at the point of interaction, you know, the account manager or whatever you want to call it. You know, some are better than others, but regardless to your point, this notion of, you know, there’s a superhuman relationship that’s the foundation of every client engagement.
that most organizations just don’t have, right? And that’s incredibly rare thing. I sort of came to this conclusion that firms are inherently, most of them, they’re ahead in the big marketing that you’ve talked about, this idea of marketing as a mindset or something, or the marketing organization, as you’ve described it. But they’re sort of behind in the small marketing. The function is under-resourced. The function is underutilized.
doesn’t have the right capabilities that it needs to really drive the ship forward the way that marketing can in other organizations. So I guess it’s like they’re ahead and behind. Like we’re ahead and behind at the same time. It just sort of depends on what you’re looking at.
Jeff (37:17.465)
And that answers the question, why? Right? You have non-marketers owning responsibility for strategic marketing and it’s not scalable. And if you want scalability and a higher sophistication in these other areas, you need to take that marketing that I’m putting up air quotes that the line is doing and move it to
Jason Mlicki (37:29.41)
Yes.
Jeff (37:45.049)
a more sophisticated and capable marketing function so that you can scale and that people are working in the areas of their greatest strength, comparative advantage, if you will, where they’re doing what they do best. Yes, lying people can do some marketing, but is that where they should be investing their time? No, you should be investing your time here because there’s a higher return.
on it. And I think that’s an important distinction lots of firms don’t make. They may think they make it, but they don’t.
Jason Mlicki (38:19.362)
Yeah, 100%. All right, any final advice before we wrap? Words of wisdom.
Jeff (38:26.725)
Final advice. This has been a fun conversation. I think it’s valid. I could have talked about this all day, but the takeaway for people listening is don’t go out and just benchmark yourself against Procter and Gamble or, you know, Ford Motor Company or Apple. That’s not useful. You can learn from them, but those industries are so different.
benchmark and measure yourself against where you stand today and where you’re going to stand tomorrow and the day after that. And are you doing the things to take your game up? Don’t go out and compare yourself. I see that happened too much in it and it just leads to a lot of dysfunction throughout the firm. I didn’t even wrote a blog post on it about trying to be like Apple. Don’t do that.
Be your best selves.
Jason Mlicki (39:28.718)
Yeah, I like what you said in the sense of one of the things that used to happen to me over the years is people would ask me to benchmark them. And we do some of that. Right. And I would always caveat with saying, but your numbers are your numbers. It doesn’t really matter what someone else’s numbers are because their business is different than yours. Their clients are different than yours. Their solutions are different than yours. So just focus on your numbers and making your numbers better. Whatever the numbers are that matter to you, whatever the KPIs you care about.
and just make those better and don’t worry about how you sit relative to someone else on those dimensions because you don’t understand the context of their situation any better than they understand yours. So, well, this was great fun. It was a good topic. It was a good topic. So thanks for selecting it, LinkedIn.
Jeff (40:19.025)
you
Professional services marketers. Ra-Ra.
Jason Mlicki (40:24.802)
Yeah.
Jeff (40:27.131)
See you, buddy.
Jason Mlicki (40:27.992)
See you.
