Thought Leader

THE BUSINESS environment in which our clients operate continues to evolve. This has had a marked effect on the culture and structure of marketing departments within professional-services firms.
Creativity and innovation are increasingly called for in an attempt to create sustained differentiation, which is transient in our current climate. Competitive advantage exists only as long as it takes the next firm to replicate it. Marketers must work closely with firm leadership to determine sources of competitive advantage across sectors and geographies and those products or services which the firm should deliver based on core competencies. Marketers must be instrumental in driving strategy formulation and in its execution. As a result, we are seeing growth in the seniority of marketing roles, and recruitment from outside the sphere of professional services, to obtain a fresh perspective.
Commoditisation and procurement-based purchasing has driven a raft of panel reviews, with clients seeking to reduce the number of firms they instruct and obtain ever greater value from those they do. So-called ‘value added’ services are now perceived as standard to many corporations. Marketers must liaise closely with their finance colleagues to ensure that their bids and proposals are based on sound financial modelling, which makes sense for the future of the firm against a backdrop of ‘fee squeezing’.
Firms are also keen to witness value creation from their marketing teams and we are under scrutiny like never before to set objectives, benchmark progress and deliver results. Cross-sell revenues and the direction and nature of work flows are being more thoroughly investigated, for example. Pitch training has been superseded by cross selling and sales training to help fee earners develop the requisite skills to ensure clients are well disposed towards purchasing additional services.
Our challenge is to understand how to read and interpret external signals of change and factor those into our strategies and working practices. Many firms have switched from having business development resources embedded within practice groups, to a sector model based on the way clients prefer their services to be delivered. Note too the recent restructuring programmes that many of the leading international law firms have undertaken – breaking down arbitrary divides between knowledge management (KM) and business-development staff to help institutionalise the sharing of client information. Moving forward, the ability to nurture mutually beneficial, knowledge-based relationships will set certain firms apart. The leaders of the pack are likely to be: embracing new disciplines, such as NLP, and formulating clever KM and CRM strategies; obtaining feedback from clients and using it to make tangible differences to the client relationship; harnessing technology to enable broader, deeper relationships across borders; focusing hard on strategy implementation and making informed decisions based on research and analysis; improving HR functions to harness talent and recruit professionals to get ahead of the curve, building the integrated teams of the future; and, welcoming change and embracing it.