The professional body dedicated to raising the standards and enhancing the credibility of marketers working in the professions

By Caroline Baynes

Contributing to the world or at least to our organisations

Caroline Baynes looks at how marketing leaders should be contributing to their firm’s management committees and asks whether these contributions are being recognised.

If we are a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) or a regional marketing director, we are likely accountable to a management team or an executive committee. How are we as marketing leaders contributing to these committees and are these contributions recognised?

Taking the strategy of each of our professional services firms and creating an impression that our clients can tangibly wrap their minds and wallets around is a challenge. As we sit at the executive or management committee table (and I hope that as leaders we do), the daunting task of portraying marketing’s value to the organisation is also a challenge.

As a result of the difficulty of quantifying or even measuring results (there are many articles written about return on investment (ROI) so I will not cover it here), marketing’s contribution can be perceived as possessing little value with a high cost attached. This is a viewpoint that may haunt some marketing professionals. Fortunately, marketing departments in professional services firms have not disappeared and in some cases are flourishing; the executive recognises the value of marketing’s contribution.

With the continued shift in power from the seller to the buyer, as a result of the Internet, social media and social networks, the call for marketing escalates. Marketing strategies today cannot look the same as 20 years ago. We have multitasking, information inundated lives where we often want to block out the noise. Marketing professionals need to filter creatively through the noise to reach target markets with the organisation’s message, which will need to ‘pull’ the client.

Marketing’s value to the management committee

1 Achievement of strategic goals. By being at the table, marketing investment aligns with the goals of the organisation. In addition, we can make sure that the organisation’s investment in marketing aligns with the brand drivers and the message we want to send.

Imagine opening up a medical equipment store that sells items focused on senior persons in a geographic community of young families. The goal of the store is to break-even the first year; however, there is no type promotion of the store. The store would find it difficult to survive without changing its strategy.

It still astounds me how many organisations hold business planning sessions without marketing at the table. Planning in isolation without a marketing view can lead to disconnected or unrealistic business goals.

2 Change agents. Marketing is a philosophy as every employee is ultimately a part-time ‘marketer’. If marketing in your organisation is only another functional department, a disservice to the firm is occurring. We contribute value to professional service firms by driving change, it can include reactionary to the market and other times proactively to lead the market. Examples of organisations that failed to change led to their disappearance.

If the market is always changing, why do some organisations believe it is not necessary to adjust? Change can come in the form of a professional service becoming a commodity with low price providers offering an alternative. For example, Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) is an area of growth, and there are a number of non-law firms offering this service. Either change is embraced and leveraged, or opposed, and potentially the battle is lost.

3 Managing risks. Investment in marketing requires some risk-taking to help keep your organisation ahead of the curve. We need to manage risk by putting aside a small percentage of the marketing budget for experimentation and allocating the rest of the budget to successful results-driven spend. vThrough experimentation, opportunities may arise that offer new markets, new services, or new ways of doing business, without opening the organisation to too much risk.

4 Building brand equity. We know what it means to build a brand and the goodwill that surrounds the brand. With the instant feedback that we can obtain through blog posts, Twitter®, Facebook® and other social media websites, managing our brand reputation has become much more important than in our world prior to the extensive use of Internet technologies. We have seen examples of brands being ruined in a day because a negative influence after taking many years to build. A safety-related recall from a car manufacturer had an instant impact on the car’s perceived safety and hurt the brand. Rebuilding the reputation of safety will take longer than the instant impact of the recall.

We not only need to focus on building brand equity but also on managing risks relating to the brand. As the managers of the brand, marketing sets the standards of the brand and everyone within the organisation needs to follow, otherwise the brand can become diluted or worse, tarnished beyond repair.

5 New revenue streams. We find it thrilling to hear, for example, a legislation change has opened up a new service potential for organisations to leverage. This type of opportunity does not occur often, and being creative in devising a new stream is the usual case. Though it may be easier to leverage a new market, these markets seldom transpire. Identifying new revenue streams within a mature market is much more challenging but often necessary if the organisation’s market share is already high and growth targets are driving the need for new revenue opportunities.

We have experienced the downward spiral of revenue streams as a result of the economic slowdown over the past few years. Cost and resource cutting is always a primary reaction to downturns; however, marketing’s contribution is about proactively generating revenue from new sources. With key market research and intelligence, marketing identifies opportunities, assesses the feasibility of the revenue source, and its likely profit, and marketing also determines the appropriateness of the revenue stream for the professional service firm.

6 Client perspective. As we look around the table and focus in on the key decision makers within the organisation, we know that everyone has a different viewpoint of the business and consequently may drive independent agendas. Marketing’s role is to accentuate the client’s outlook and plug it into the mix of perspectives to ensure the decision-making process reflects the variety of opinions. We may need to push harder so the client’s side is the driver behind the decision and not only the organisation’s agenda.

7 Relationship building. The ability to know the external clients helps the organisation in assessing their needs, identifying gaps, prioritising for the organisation’s marketing resources and spend. As a marketing leader our goal is to represent the whole organisation and not a specific practice or functional area. This is an advantage for us as we are not limited with a narrow point of view. We have competitive intelligence to grow our external client relationships and increase exit barriers. Marketing helps to provide value to external clients through the social exchange shared with them, and we help to provide value to our organisation by assessing client profitability.

Marketing also contributes to the organisation by imparting knowledge and insight gained from our internal client. Understanding the goals of the organisation, marketing can link in the individual service areas to ensure those individual groups are contributing to the organisation strategy. Relationship building is significant in understanding the needs and preferences of the professionals and connecting it back to the organisation and the organisation’s clients.

8 Building client loyalty. By being the voice of the client and responding with an underpinning goal of being attentive to their needs, marketing’s relationships help to build client loyalty. Relationships are only part of the puzzle in driving loyalty; exit barriers, alternative providers and critical incidents can also impact loyalty.

Part of marketing’s contribution is to identify the exit barriers and work with others to ensure they are kept high. Additionally, client intelligence gathering through interviews and surveys offers information on how we as an organisation manage client issues. Goodwill in relationships can manage the critical incidents, and maintaining strong relationships and mitigating issues can continue that good will. Competitor intelligence helps us recognise the alternatives that are available to our clients and allows us to plan against their infiltration. Without marketing’s contribution, most organisations would be relying on ad hoc information and tactics.

9 Assessing market demand. As many of us start our planning for the new fiscal year and identify business goals, one of the determinants that marketing contributes to the process is market demand. The assessment of demand provides finance, human resources and other departments with the needed information that influences budgets and recruiting. Without marketing’s input, business would be planning in a vacuum.

10 Relevancy to the marketplace. With the understanding of market demand, creating an offering relevant to the market is our role. Relevancy to the market demand will bring the returns that the organisation is looking for rather than ‘hoping for the best’. With a historical internal and market perspective and current research and intelligence, we can focus our organisation on the right markets and clients.

The above contributions are not an exhaustive list of how marketing provides value to their organisations. Each element could be explored further and have its own article showcasing the effect and return on investment provided. As each of us assesses our own contributions, we need to acknowledge that the perception of contribution or lack of results from communication. As marketing leaders, we need to ensure that we are reporting back on results, celebrating marketing successes, and keeping our leaders abreast of the internal and external environment.

Caroline Baynes is a business development and marketing professional at Gowlings, a Canadian full-service law firm. Caroline encourages networking and can be reached at caroline.baynes@gowlings.com, LinkedIn profile carolinebaynes or @senyab on Twitter.