Transcript

In this episode, Jason and Jeff discuss the list of smart things marketing should be doing in professional services firms. See last week’s list of stupid things and download both of the infographics that inspired these episodes to see the full list and follow along with the discussion.

Stupid Sh*t Marketing Should Not Do Infographic
Smart Sh*t Marketing Should Do Infographic

The list of 29 smart things can be grouped into three categories:

– Strategy
– ROI
– Reputation

“So you grouped these into three categories? How did you pick that those are the three categories?”

Strategy
“Strategy is really important. And most marketers are not operating at that level. So it makes sense that more of the things to do are going to be strategy related because they’re not already doing them. And strategy sets up the effectiveness and efficiency down stream. So strategy dictates everything that comes after.”

ROI
“The second section, ROI, really is about marketing effectiveness. And it’s a gross school mindset because gross school looks at strategic impact. And I probably could have labeled this strategic impact or just impact instead of ROI, but it’s about what’s the firm’s return on the investment of these dollars in the marketing function.”

Reputation
“And then the last section is, reputation. And to me that was probably the outlier and it’s the shortest of the sections. But I added that because I think so many firms hone in on brand and brand reputation and brand identity and all things brand, because it’s easy and that’s the most basic understanding for partners of what marketing should be doing in a professional services firm.”

“And I specifically named that section reputation instead of brand, because marketers should be thinking in terms of the firm’s reputation. Its reputation for character, virtue, integrity. Its reputation for expertise. Its reputation for delivering results. Its reputation for building relationships with clients. Brand has just become such a trite word. Reputation to me just brings it back to people. Where brand is something outside of people, at least on the surface.”

“When you look at this list of 29, where do you actually see the typical points of weaknesses in firms?

“I guess when I look at this list, you have strategic issues and you have tactical issues, but above both of those, I think are the cultural issues.”

“And cultural issues, the BS of PS, if you will, is the umbrella that overarches this, ’cause it sets the tone. It’s the lens through which leadership looks not only at marketing and business development in client service delivery, but the firm and its people as a whole.”

Let’s take a look at some things on the list from each category.

Strategy – Take some new risk, fail and learn something new.

“The first one on the list is to Take some new risk, fail and learn something new. And just start putting yourself out there more. Because doing that sets a tone and it demonstrates challenging the culture. And almost every one of these, in some respects, challenges conventional wisdom in most professional services.”

ROI – Tell more practice leaders “No” when asked to do items on the stupid shenanigans list.

“You have one under ROI, it says, Tell more practice leaders “No” when asked to do items on the stupid shenanigans list. And I guess my question would be, what happens when a marketer has never done that before? What is the response they’re going to get from the practice leader?”

“I think the most obvious one is gonna be dumbfounded. And depending on the partner, it might be anger. Or it might be, well tell me why? But marketers when they say “No” should never just say “No” like a recalcitrant child. They should say, “No, we’re not gonna do that thing on the stupid shine-ola list. There’s a better way and here’s how I recommend we do it and here’s the data to substantiate it. How about if we do this this way and this is how we’ll measure the effectiveness of it.”

Reputation – Increase client loyalty.

“There’s one in there where you say, Increase client loyalty. And my sense is that’s a controversial one, because my hunch is in a lot of firms they don’t see marketing as having any responsibility or any even ability to influence client loyalties. So let’s dive into that. How should the marketing function affect client loyalty at the firm level?”

“Great question. Clients do not distinguish, in my experience, between business development, marketing and service delivery. It’s all one integrated perspective that today we call, client experience. But it really is about doing what you said you were going to do, better than anyone else. And everybody plays a role in that. If you don’t have client loyalty and you have defections, marketing has an almost impossible job in growing the firm, because they have to climb out of a hole in order just to start adding new clients to the firm. So without client loyalty, you’re just burning money in marketing. And once you have client loyalty, you create a flywheel of referrals and happy customers. So it all goes together in my mind.”

Strategy – Demonstrate the strategic difference between corporate communications and marketing.

I’m gonna pull us up the list to something that’s under strategy, because I think it’s germane to this particular topic of client loyalty. Demonstrate the strategic difference between corporate communications and marketing. In your mind, what is the difference between those two disciplines?”

“The main difference between corporate communications and marketing in my mind, is that corporate communication informs stakeholders on corporate initiatives. Marketing on the other hand is tasked with driving profitable growth.”

“Where the two cross over, is the area that we talked about earlier, and that’s managing the firm’s reputation. Corporate communication manages the risk associated with the negative events that fall outside of normal clients delivery. Marketing manages the reputational risks created by a gap, if you will, between the brand’s promise and the firm’s ability to deliver on that promise.”

“Before we wrap up, I want to point out something that I actually thought was noticeably absent from the list. And I’m not saying it’s entirely absent, but I’m curious if there’s a reason for it. Nowhere under strategy do you necessarily point out the act of positioning the firm. Is that a purposeful, leave it off?”

“I love the word, positioning. But I believe it’s folded in to multiple things in here.”

“So for example, Defining your real competitive set, alludes to, How are you positioning vis-a-vis the people that you know are in your competitive set?”

“Developing a cross-practice solution is another one of those that requires us to think through client issues and competitive set, in order to take something to market.”

“The practice point of view around Differentiating your firm from the others I think also gets to positioning of what’s unique about our point of view to the others. So I think the positioning is kind of folded into these.”

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Transcript

Jason Mlicki: So Jeff, the last time we met, we talked about all the stupid shenanigans that marketers do and professional services firms.

And this time we’re going to invert that. We’re gonna go to the bizarro world. Jeff’s bizarro world, I’m gonna call it. We’re gonna look at all the smart shine-ola marketers should be doing?

So I guess we’re gonna do the inverse. So full disclosure for everyone listening, Jeff has two separate infographics that govern these two topics and their reference points for this. I would actually recommend going and downloading both of them right now as you listen to this podcast, because it helps you really kind of understand the nuances in these things.

Stupid Sh*t Marketing Should Not Do Infographic
Smart Sh*t Marketing Should Do Infographic

So let’s start with, how did this particular list, the smart list, how did this come to be? What was your process for developing it? I guess would be my first kind of curiosity question.

Jeff McKay: I guess I developed the smart one in the same post that I did with the stupid one. I didn’t think it was fair to just criticize and condemn traditional professional service’s marketing tactics without providing an alternative.

And that original post was not geared to marketers. It was geared to practice leaders and managing partners to have them ask marketing to take their game up. And to get them thinking differently about marketing. It wasn’t even originally geared towards marketers.

But I shared the post, I think it was at an Association of Accounting Marketing luncheon. And when I used the title people just, I mean it was just uproarious laughter and people were like, “How do I get that? Where do I get that? Where can I see that?” And that’s when I said, “I have to turn these into infographics.” Because people wanted to post, print ’em out and put ’em up in their cubicles, in their offices.

So it kind of evolved organically out of a post to practice leaders, to help marketers take their game up another level.

Jason Mlicki: When you had the list of smart stuff, when that emerged, how did that feel in developing it for you? Was it like, “Hey, I have a thousand things and I want to try to pare them down to 29.” Because there’s 29 in this list. Or was it just a rapid fire brainstorm? Like, I’m just gonna brainstorm a bunch of stuff that should be happening and is not, and you ended up with 29? I’m just curious if there was a rationale that led you to the outcome you have, which is a list of 29 smart things grouped into three separate categories of strategy, ROI and reputation.

Jeff McKay: Probably a combination of both those things that you said. First, it was about, if you’re gonna stop doing this stupid thing, do this instead. So it was the opposite side of the same coin of the stupid list.

That’s the way it kind of started and then it just kept kind of evolving out of, if somebody wanted to move from the productivity school, which we’ve talked about in many podcasts and blog posts, to the gross school, what would be some of the things on a marketer’s or firm’s to do list to start increasing the strategic impact of marketing?

And I just started building it out in those terms. We also do a marketing assessment, a growth readiness assessment if you will, that looks at marketing and growth foundational items within firms. And this also built on some of those elements that we see are the greatest weaknesses in firms. And would be easy steps people could start taking to address some of those weak points that we see time and time again in our marketing assessments.

I have to say since we started talking, it almost is kind of a manifesto for me too. Even though I have the prudent manifesto and the messy manifesto on my website, I think this one kind of folds into another Jeff manifesto? I think I have too many manifestos.

Jason Mlicki: I was gonna say, you need a manifesto for your manifestos. I declare I will have less manifestos.

I wanna lead into something that you said. You said that when you do assessments along these dimensions, that there are some typical points of weakness. So maybe a good place to start when you look at this list of 29, where do you actually see the typical points of weaknesses in firms? What are some of the things on this list that either they just don’t do and they really need to be doing it, or they really struggle to do for some reason or another?

Jeff McKay: That’s a great question. We probably should do a podcast on assessments and weaknesses because I know Rattleback does something similar as well.

Jason Mlicki: Yeah, we do. And you’re right, that would be a great podcast. Just sort of the typical mistakes. Mistakes is the wrong word. Typical weaknesses firms have.

Jeff McKay: Yeah. I guess when I look at this list as compared to one of our assessments, you have strategic issues and you have tactical issues, but above both of those, I think are the cultural issues.

And cultural issues, the BS of PS, if you will, is the umbrella that overarches this, ’cause it sets the tone. It’s the lens through which leadership looks not only at marketing and business development in client service delivery, but the firm and its people as a whole.

And I’ve written quite a bit about culture. But on this list, looking at those things that begin to challenge the status quo of a culture. So the first one on the list, and it’s already checked in the infographic because I think the mere action of going out and downloading a list and posting it in your office or cubicle, warrants checking off this to do. And that’s to take some new risk, fail and learn something new. And just start putting yourself out there more.

Because doing that sets a tone and it demonstrates challenging the culture. And almost every one of these, in some respects, challenges conventional wisdom in most professional services. You might argue, to what degree do you push on some of these? But then, that again comes back to your culture, your leadership style and your starting point.

Jason Mlicki: Well, so I’m gonna jump to one because I liked your point on culture. You have one under ROI, I’m not sure it really belongs in ROI, but it says, “Tell more practice leaders No when asked to do items on the stupid shenanigans list. And I guess my question would be, what happens when a marketer has never done that before? And they do that? What is the response they’re going to get from the practice leader when they say, no, I don’t think that’s a good idea and I’m not gonna do that? If they’ve never behaved that way prior?

Jeff McKay: I think the most obvious one is gonna be dumbfounded.

Jason Mlicki: Yeah. What did you just say?

Jeff McKay: And depending on the partner, it might be anger. Or it might be, well tell me why? But marketers when they say no, should never just say no like a recalcitrant child. They should say, no, we’re not gonna do that thing on the stupid shine-ola list. There’s a better way and here’s how I recommend we do it and here’s the data to substantiate it. How about if we do this this way and this is how we’ll measure the effectiveness of it.

That’s just a simple way to kind of wade into those waters of saying no. And some partners are just gonna say, nope, just do it. And you’re not gonna change their mind. But I think the majority of partners that I have dealt with are very intelligent, rational people. And there’s a mantra that Warren Bennis, I’ve turned it into a mantra, he just had a quote in a book. And that’s, “Intelligent people prefer to agree rather than be told.” So having a rational conversation with data, you can have those conversations, and they’re normally healthy, but a lot of marketers don’t want to wade into that because it’s just not culturally appropriate to challenge a partner request or thinking in most firms.

Jason Mlicki: Yeah, we have a client right now, the conversation just struck me as odd because I have a hunch that this happens in firms left and right all the time. And we were talking about working with subject matter experts on thought leadership development and developing case stories. And a number of other topics.

And the comment was along the lines of, “These people are really busy and getting their time is really difficult and we have to be very mindful of not using their time too much.” And I didn’t like the comment culturally, because I’m like, “Well your time’s valuable too, my time’s valuable too, partner in the corner is no more valuable or critical a resource than you or me or anybody on this team.” And we culturally need to have a relationship with the subject matter experts in the firm, as the marketers and the agency partners. That is one of mutual respect, that everyone values everyone’s time.

And I find it so interesting how frequently marketers let themselves essentially be treated that way, where they’re almost like a second class citizen inside the firm. And I just don’t think that’s healthy at all for anyone involved. So anyway, that’s a real random sidebar.

Jeff McKay: And that again is cultural. And it’s the productivity mindset. Marketing exists to keep utilization high. And if you’re gonna say no, one of the arguments that a marketer could make is, that will consume too many resources, yours and mine. If we take a step back and we did it this way instead, it may only cost you Mr. Consultant, five hours of time instead of 15 hours of time.
But you’ve gotta build that argument and understanding and process that enables that. And I mean what partner isn’t gonna slow down to go fast? I think most will if you can demonstrate that your way is better.

Jason Mlicki: Yeah. Let’s change course for one second. So you grouped this into three categories and I shared them real briefly. Why these particular three categories? Strategy, ROI and Reputation? How did you pick that those are the three categories that you wanted to group these into and is that important or not?

Jeff McKay: They are important. We are a strategy consulting firm. And my career as a CMO has always been at the strategic level of the business. So strategy is really important. And most marketers are not operating at that level. So it makes sense that more of the things to do are going to be strategy related because they’re not already doing them. And strategy sets up the effectiveness and efficiency down stream. So strategy dictates everything that comes after.

The second section, ROI, really is about marketing effectiveness. And it’s a gross school mindset because gross school looks at strategic impact. And I probably could have labeled this strategic impact or just impact instead of ROI, but it’s about what’s the firm’s return on the investment of these dollars in the marketing function.

And then the last section is, reputation. And to me that was probably the outlier and it’s the shortest of the sections. But I added that because I think so many firms hone in on brand and brand reputation and brand identity and all things brand, because it’s easy and that’s the most basic understanding for partners of what marketing should be doing in a professional services firm.

And the items in this we’re really built out of the 20 biggest mistakes firms make in managing their brand. That says don’t do those mistakes, do these instead. And these were the five biggest things I think marketing could do to add strategic impact.

Jason Mlicki: You failed in the last one on the list. You just used the word brand like 12 times in the last 30 seconds. Go a whole month without uttering the word brand. Actually, while we’re on the reputation piece of this, when you say reputation in this context, what do you mean by that? You mean the reputation in the marketplace? Reputation within the client base? Is it both? How are you trying to frame that piece of the list?

Jeff McKay: All of the above. And I specifically named that section reputation instead of brand, because marketers should be thinking in terms of the firm’s reputation. Its reputation for character, virtue, integrity. Its reputation for expertise. Its reputation for delivering results. Its reputation for building relationships with clients. Brand has just become such a trite word. Reputation to me just brings it back to people. Where brand is something outside of people, at least on the surface.

Jason Mlicki: Yeah I agree with you. It’s funny, I wrote an article a long time ago where, I think it was one of our brand strategy models, where we kind of mapped out our brand strategy. And one of the opening statements of the article was, “If you’ve got a room of 30 marketers and threw the word brand at them, I can promise you that you will have a big healthy, vibrant discussion and you would be unable to walk out of the room with an agreed definition on what a brand is. Which is why it’s such an annoying word. Whereas reputation, you would get agreement on what that word means within about five minutes. And it is just such a fascinating thing.

Jason Mlicki: While we’re in the reputation section, I actually want to dive into one of those. Because there’s one in there where you say, increase client loyalty. And my sense is that’s a controversial one, because my hunch is in a lot of firms they don’t see marketing as having any responsibility or any even ability to influence client loyalties. So let’s dive into that. How should the marketing function affect client loyalty at the firm level?

Jeff McKay: Great question. Clients do not distinguish, in my experience, between business development, marketing and service delivery. It’s all one integrated perspective that today we call, client experience. And everyone plays a role in that. While functional groups have specific jobs that they have to do, to steal a line from Bill Belichick, “Do your job.”

Jason Mlicki: What has that guy ever done though?

Jeff McKay: Huh?

Jason Mlicki: I said, what has that guy ever done though?

Jeff McKay: They operate as a team and they need to be unified around one specific goal that transcends everything that each of them is doing. And that, as Drucker says is to get and keep a client. And you do that by increasing client loyalty. And what impacts client loyalty is gonna differ by client, is gonna differ by firm, gonna differ by industry.

But it really is about doing what you said you were going to do, better than anyone else. And everybody plays a role in that. I mean marketing could run the client loyalty process, the survey process. They could run the technology that undergirds it. They could be the voice of the client that keeps all the other groups above board and focused on that.

But if you don’t have client loyalty and you have defections. Marketing has an almost impossible job in growing the firm, because they have to climb out of a hole in order just to start adding new clients to the firm. Because the clients that aren’t loyal are either indifferent or they’re out there saying negative things about the firm, that is just creating such a headwind for marketing to overcome.

So without client loyalty, you’re just burning money in marketing. And once you have client loyalty, you create a flywheel of referrals and happy customers. So it all goes together in my mind.

Jason Mlicki: Well yeah, it’s interesting in that, this kind of slides up to one of the other topics on your list in a way. At least in my mind.

I had a faculty member in business school, she would always say, “If I have only five dollars to spend on marketing, I would spend it internally.” Because she always felt you needed to start inside the business, inside, in this case, inside the firm to firm up really client experience and client loyalty to make sure that you’re doing the best you possibly can to deliver on client expectations.

So actually, I guess I’m gonna pull us up the list to something that’s under strategy, because I think it’s germane to this particular topic of client loyalty. Is, “Demonstrate the strategic difference between corporate communications and marketing.”

Let’s just talk about that for a minute. In your mind, what is the difference between those two disciplines? So someone on the line is thinking, I don’t know what the difference is between those two things, and why that matters. What do you want to articulate about the critical pieces of those things?

Jeff McKay: The main difference between corporate communications and marketing in my mind, is that corporate communication informs stakeholders on corporate initiatives. It manages executive and board risks and exists to kind of spin any story about the firm to a positive.

Marketing on the other hand is tasked with driving profitable growth. Of representing the voice of the client. Uncovering market needs. Developing solutions to meet them. Generating demand, generating leads. Managing client loyalty. To me that’s the bailiwick of marketing.

Where the two cross over, is the area that we talked about earlier, and that’s managing the firm’s reputation. Corporate communication manages the risk associated with the negative events that fall outside of normal clients delivery. Litigation, acquisitions, partner behavior. Marketing manages the reputational risks created by a gap, if you will, between the brand’s promise and the firm’s ability to deliver on that promise. Does that make sense?

Jason Mlicki: Yeah. I mean, one of the interesting things about the last part of what you said to me is that I always feel like a great marketing function, and this kind of leads back to your client loyalty piece, should be unlocking compelling new ground for the firm to explore in the future.

So it’s almost casting a future vision of the types of big topics and big solutions to those topics that the firms should own. And then the firm needs to close and deliver on those promises. So I don’t know if I added to your thinking or not there. But to me, that’s the way I’ve always seen it. Is that I want marketing to be about a step or two ahead of where each individual practice is in terms of getting the marketplace to think about the most pressing issues and then ensuring that the firm can deliver on those things.

Now you astutely point out that there’s a risk associated with that. But the marketing function has the ability to get out in front of the practice a little bit and can the practice deliver on the promise that’s been made. Maybe it’s around a big topic like business intelligence or analytics. Things that the firm is saying should be happening inside the client base, but the practice isn’t entirely yet tooled to deliver on. But I think that’s healthy, personally.

Jeff McKay: I agree.

Jason Mlicki: We’re about out of time. Before we wrap up, I want to point out something that I actually thought was noticeably absent from the list. And I’m not saying it’s entirely absent, but I’m curious if there’s a reason for it.

Nowhere under strategy do you necessarily point out the act of positioning the firm. Determining where we choose to compete, what markets, what areas of expertise. There are pieces where you’ll kind of hint at, well maybe they should build a business case to kill a specific service or product. But there’s never a making that formal definition.

Is that a purposeful, leave it off? Meaning that you don’t feel that’s the domain of marketing team or is it just that you see some of these items all kind of wrapping together to answer that question? Which I think you could make the case that that’s in there.

Jeff McKay: That’s a great observation. I love the word, positioning. And one of the best marketing books I ever read in college was a book called Positioning. And it is something in terms of the use of the term that’s not on here. But I believe it’s folded in to multiple things in here.

So for example, defining your real competitive set, alludes to, How are you positioning vis-a-vis the people that you know are in your competitive set? I.e. If you’re big four, the other big three, or if you’re strategy consulting, the other strategy arms, but those competitors nipping at your heels or some other new competitor coming from a different industry. The dissecting the buyer’s journey, again to me, is about understanding your buyer so well and how you position how you talk about your firm, our solution, in their mind.

Developing a cross-practice solution is another one of those that requires us to think through client issues and competitive set, in order to take something to market. Intelligently segmenting your markets to improve targeting again gets to positioning what messages align best with our strengths.

The practice point of view around differentiating your firm from the others. I think also gets to positioning of what’s unique about our point of view to the others. So I think the positioning is kind of folded into these.

It probably isn’t on the list because it’s so big and such a political battle to fight. That it would slow down some of the to do’s on this and probably overwhelm most people. And they might misconstrue it as rebrand the firm. I think you and I are saying the same thing differently,

Jason Mlicki: No, I 100% agree, which is why I wanted to point it out, because I think it’s interesting that it’s noticeably not there and my hunch was that you were gonna answer it the way you did. Which is just that when you look at positioning at the macro sense, at the highest form, it’s almost a debilitating topic for a lot of practice leaders. The idea that we should choose not to compete in certain places, makes them extremely uncomfortable, and they usually shut down. And it’s almost like you’ve baked positioning into five or six things you could be doing to really solve the positioning, conundrum. Lack of focus, which is really one of the number one blocks into growth, in our experience, by sort of picking at it on the edges and gradually getting to a better place of positioning.

Jeff McKay: That was the last item on the stupid list.

Jason Mlicki: What was the last item on the stupid list?

Jeff McKay: Stop asking your marketing team to build a strategic growth plan or marketing plan without a coherent and realistic business strategy as a foundation.

Jason Mlicki: Yeah.

Jeff McKay: And I think having a realistic business strategy is a precursor for doing the smart stuff on this list.

Jason Mlicki: Yeah. And it’s alarming how many firms don’t have clarity on which parts of the practice they want to grow or they anticipate have growth opportunity. I say parts of the firm, I mean I think it’s a real problem for a lot of firms.

So we really gotta probably give it a wrap. So I really enjoyed diving into these two assets that you built. These two pieces of intellectual property, both the stupid things and the smart things that marketers should or should not be doing. They’re really useful tools and they’re really helpful, I think for marketers to think about where they should be spending their time, what types of activities, where should they be putting their energy and how should they be behaving with their partners and firm leaders.

So thanks for going through these with us. I think we’ll spend more time on these lists as we go forward because there’s so many things inside these lists that we can talk about individually and really should if we haven’t already. So thanks, Jeff.

Jeff McKay: Thanks Jason.

Jason Mlicki: All right, see ya.