According to Steve Kemish, if management consultants, accountants and lawyers tend to have one thing in common, it’s a group of disparate partners with their own agendas, ways of working, and ideas for how to market ‘their’ business. The CEO of Intermedia Global (IMG) explains how moving beyond this siloed thinking can enhance marketing and a business model.
While not technically wrong, and the passion for one’s business is always welcomed, this can make the job of marketing particularly challenging. If there are 200 partners, that might mean 200 approvals needed for every piece of marketing content and thus the dreaded decision by committee.
It can also lead to, in essence, 200 SMEs under what is supposedly one brand. The structural challenges of marketing in those organisations lead to different partners driving competing priorities, campaigns happening in silos, and limited visibility on what’s working (and what’s not).
Marketers will need to develop a unifying message and, as the first step, agree on the brand positioning that works for most of those partners (ideally for all, but let’s be realistic here). As a result, in these organisations the negotiation and collaboration skills will be just as important as creative nous. After all, no-one wants 200 slightly different versions of the brand out there in the market.
Marketing for a different business model
Each partner will often have their own set of customers, which can lead to 10, 50 or 200 customer databases. Some will be in dedicated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, some in spreadsheets, and others will only exist in the head of the partner involved.
While it is undoubtedly a real data unification challenge to bring all those together, it can lead to an incredible opportunity for cross-selling (as well as potential friction, with some partners not wanting the wider business to bother ‘their’ customers).
Segmentation is vitally important to make that work. A law firm will have corporate law experts, divorce experts and litigation experts. Other partnerships have similar niches full of subject matter experts.
While that’s a great thing for thought leadership, it can lead to their marketing teams having to deal with a group of senior people who all have different customer profiles and who all think they know best.
Technology as a tool for orchestration
What that means is that the greatest challenge to professional firms’ marketing can actually be a nice one to have: usually there’s no lack of capability and expertise, the problem lies in the orchestration. Without a clear layer connecting strategy, campaigns, execution and reporting, you end up with duplicated activity, reactive requests and missed opportunities.
The end result? Marketing is seen as a cost centre rather than a growth driver.
That’s why professional services firms need to streamline their marketing technology to provide a simple overarching governance and campaign model, not just to add complexity with shiny new tech tools – we’re looking at you AI platforms!
A marketing automation tool, for example, can segment the customers to allow for nuance in how partners are targeting their part of the business. This enables the firm to talk in different ways to different customer groups in a scalable, personalised way. A specialist Content Management System (CMS) behind the firm’s website can ensure its 15 different areas of expertise are represented equally (or with the correct amount of focus on priority specialisms) in its online content.
Also, look at social media. Do you want each of your partners or business areas to have their own LinkedIn or X accounts? If so, do you need a specialist publishing tool for those thought leader partners that will either manage the account for them and publish material in the right tone of voice, or give them content to adapt as they see fit?
Marketing might even view partners as area sales managers – or more accurately, ‘topic’ sales managers. They have individual needs that need to be met under the broader brand umbrella. Some will need to raise brand awareness in their ‘area’, while others will want to focus on customer attraction or retention.
This level of organisational complexity might mean marketers taking on dedicated responsibility for certain partners or areas of the business. The trick is in developing the account management and strong overarching brand that will stop the marketers becoming siloed. Make them ‘ambassadors’ for those niches rather than being solely focused on them.
What professional services firms really need to avoid is for the noisiest partners to always get marketing support while the others get little or nothing.
Managing the tug of war
There isn’t a silver bullet that can prevent marketers in partnerships from being pulled in multiple directions at once, but there are a number of things that can help – such as workflow management tools to corral and streamline the approvals process.
More important, however, is for the head of marketing to set strong objectives and goals for the firm as a whole, that can then feed down throughout the business, and ensure their technology supports that. They need that North Star.
This target, backed up by the strategic orchestration layer, helps them avoid what some might call ‘random acts of marketing’ and stops marketing departments from becoming ‘busy fools’. The brand and style guidelines must be non-negotiable – which is why it always helps to have a head of marketing who is themselves at partner level and can thus be taken seriously by their peers.
Especially, as a side note, if the firm views its core business as all-important and anyone who doesn’t bill their hours as a cost centre only. It’s vital to establish the value and the professionalism of the marketing function and do internal PR to prove and demonstrate its worth. Because, done right, its worth will be considerable.
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