CHANGE IS A RESULT – EVOLUTION IS THE PROCESS
And Why Change Is A Marketing Tool
It’s not difficult to understand, in this economic environment, why the word change looms so large in professional services dialogue. The nature of the professions, rooted as they are in history and tradition, can be fairly rigid, and resistant to innovation. But the times seem to have accelerated the need for new ideas and structures to cope with new economic and social problems and opportunities.
The accounting profession, even as we know it today, is practically pre-historic, and is now so bound by rules and regulations and laws that any suggestion of serious structural change is seen as a virtual assault on the profession. The codification of laws and the legal profession goes back about as far, and is just as resistant to innovation. In both cases, the rigidity is designed to maintain integrity and probity, as well as efficiency in firm governance. If the nature of products allows for constant and rapid change to match changing tastes and fashions, the nature of professional services requires a measure of uniformity and predictability. But now, there are cracks appearing in the wall.
Still, some things in the professions are different now than they were about a decade ago. We now have, for example, an increasing number of firms replacing hourly billing with value billing. Law firm governance is beginning to resemble corporate structure, and indeed, there is talk of law firms going public (which I predicted about a decade ago when it became clear that the growth of the professions would require infusion of more capital than could be supplied by the partnership. This is the kind of situation that begins an evolutionary process.) Where once associates who seemed not to be partner material were let go, now they are being kept for their specific talents and experience – the so-called two-tier firm.
The accounting profession, recognizing the growth of globalization, is now seriously considering international accounting standards. (I helped run a vast international conference in England on the subject some two decades ago, and wrote a book on it with Columbia University’s John Burton. And they’re just now beginning to act on it?)
These things didn’t happen by accident, nor by just an inspiration by a few bright lawyers or accountants. They are the result of an evolutionary process – the result of which is change.
What, Exactly, Is Change
In the context of professional services practice and marketing, change is alteration of a process or condition that varies from the past.
First, for all the talk about change, and all the writing and talking and hand wringing about change, it becomes clear that too many professionals see change as an event, finite, an end in itself. In fact, change is not an event that’s arbitrarily made to happen, but a process the result of which is changing something. Most often, and with exceptions and only in rare cases, that process leads to an evolution, and sometimes, even revolution (such as professional firm advertising, long forbidden – now common).
Second, change, in the professions and in marketing professional services, isn’t often deliberately made – it evolves slowly in response to external stimuli. Except for a few visionaries who anticipated the future in areas such as billing structures and firm governance, it most often comes in response to changing needs of the marketplace, which demand new practices and new structures to serve those needs. Electronic media, for example, wasn’t invented to change the practice of law or accounting – but it served to generate change in those professions. And not overnight, either. It certainly was a response to the need to compete in an increasingly competitive market. (But that competitive market was virtually created in 1977, with Bates. It’s taken all this time for responses in both the professional chambers and in marketing) Social media began as just that – social. But it evolved into a competitive tool by virtue of its ease of communication to large numbers of people. It was useful because it circumvented the rigors of external control of message, such as happens in the print media, and has a broader and more immediate reach than does the traditional media. Opportunity, then, precipitated change.
A case in point is value billing, which has been touted for decades, and is only now emerging as an acceptable practice. Firm governance, and the traditional top-down firm management that’s long been the tradition in professional firms, is slowly, slowly emerging in new forms that better serve a practice’s ability to help clients. Client service teams are emerging to replace the eat-what-you-kill culture, in which each individual in a firm is his or her own entrepreneur. On the horizon today is the corporately owned or public professional firm.
I point this out, not to carp, but to wonder, and to consider, how this process can be dealt with competitively, and whether there is an initiative that can be taken to stay ahead of the curve.
There are two main areas in which change is imminent in the professions – firm structures that allow a firm to better serve the needs of its clients, and marketing that’s consistent with the clients’ changing economic environment. Both are necessary for competitive reasons, both are imminent in order to keep a firm relevant to the dynamic changes in the world of both commerce and society. (There are, at the same time, many changes that occur daily as a result of new laws and regulations, but these are promulgated in response to external factors that precipitated the new laws, such as Sarbanes-Oxley.)
We live in a dynamic world, in which constant motion of events and social and economic structures continually alter the state of many activities and circumstances. For example, the advent of the personal computer in 1981 changed the way trade and commerce was done. This altered the nature of financial structures, industrial practices and communications. But it also gave rise to new laws and new needs in accounting and finance. It created a new business environment that affected all participants in the cycles. It’s an ongoing cycle that generates new problems and needs in many disciplines, including law and accounting. New financial instruments, new laws and regulations, new technology that accelerates the pace of doing business, growing internationalism, the expanding body of knowledge in so many areas and the rapidity with which it can be organized and retrieved, new demands from client – all substantially change the demands upon lawyers and accountants, and therefore, the structures and practices that professionals must adapt to stay abreast of their own clients.
I contend that any professional in that cycle who doesn’t react to its dynamics will fall behind those who do.
Inhibitions To Change
This is why I’m puzzled by the law or accounting firm that continues to function today as it did many decades ago – in so many areas, as if the world continues to be as it was decades ago.
At the same time, in the midst of all that’s changing in the professional world, I’m surprised that so little is changing in the marketing process for professional services.
There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is the amorphous nature of professional services management and marketing education. The quality of academic and firm marketing education in this field is dismal and retrogressive. The relationship between the marketers and the professional is often built on mutual misunderstanding. And perhaps because law and accounting firm marketing is so subsumed by a firm’s professionals with too little understanding of the process that too many marketers are either unwilling to risk innovation or else are incapable of it.
Perhaps, too, the external factors that require new vision for professionals and their marketers are happening too fast, and are overwhelming both. And perhaps the traditions and stringent (and sometimes anachronistic) ethical requirements of both law and accounting inhibit innovation.
Still, there are techniques to keep professionals relevant to the changing needs of the clients, and to keep marketing functional and successful beyond the mundane. For example, consider that while the ultimate aim of marketing professional services may be to get clients, growing a successful firm is a function of keeping a firm relevant to the changing nature of its economic environment, and particularly the needs of the clientele. Obviously, then the marketer must understand that environment, which then becomes the canvas upon which the marketing program is painted.
This is certainly true in professional services marketing, where recycling old ideas instead of bothering to come up with new ones, is a too common practice, and where the failure of professionals to fully grasp the reality of the crucial role that marketing plays in a practice tends to suppress innovation in so many firms.
It’s certainly true in the professions, which are inhibited by antiquated traditions, irrational views of ethics in the 21st century, the anachronistic thinking of state and local bar and accounting societies, and a mentality of “We have always lived in the castle.”
Possible Changes In The-Not-Too Distant Future
Predicting the future course of events can be a fool’s game, especially as an extrapolation of current trends and practices. Anticipating future events, by the way, doesn’t work well by looking at current practices alone, and except as they are tempered by external trends. Lawyers and accountants, for example, didn’t invent the internet and the social media, both of which are now an increasingly important part of professional practice. There are several areas that seem to be inconsistent with the current changing environment. Some examples...
· The fragile partnership structure , which can slow down decision making that should be responsive to changing economic decisions. What will replace it?
· Law and accounting firm billing procedures, which may have a value in informing clients of the time spent in the client’s behalf, but rarely reflects the value in the service performed.
· Value billing is emerging, but is still evolving. Who knows for sure which method will emerge as the standard?
· Partner and non-partner compensation changed radically during the current economic turndown. What will it become as the economy recovers?
· During the course of this recession, thousands of lawyers and accountants were discharged. What will be their availability as the recession recovers? What will be the shape of the accounting and law firms in the recovery?
· Growth requires capital, which may be more than a firm’s partners can contribute. Is the publicly-held law or accounting firm in the foreseeable future? When I suggested this some time ago, a lawyer said to me, “Over my dead body.” To which I answered, “Let’s talk about all the things that would happen over your dead body – that already have happened.” “How do you think it can possibly happen,” he asked. “I don’t know,” I said. “But when the need becomes imminent, you lawyers are very smart. You’ll find a way.” The same is true, by the way, of corporations owning law and accounting firms, which have already been seen in some iterations.
· The shortage of brains and talent in the world today is too acute to continue the caste system in professional firms. Talented professionals may not be “partner material” (whatever that is). But the need for their skills suggest that in the future, firms may be structured on talent, rather than on traditional methods and requirements like rainmaking abilities and longevity (the two-tier system).
· Today, law and accounting schools send their graduates into the world with little or no education about the economics of practice, nor an understanding of the crucial role modern marketing plays in firm management and growth. We see signs of change here – but only in isolated incidents. That should change – but how?
· In the three decades since Bates introduced the concept of frank competition to professional firms, a new and distinctive body of marketing technique has evolved. It has also become clear that professional marketing is integral to the growth of professional firms. Yet today, only the largest of these firms, and a few smaller ones, accept that concept. The sustaining tradition is that only lawyers and accountants have full hospitality in accounting and law firms – despite the well proven efficacy of organized marketing in practice development. How will this disconnect be resolved in the future?
· Despite three decades of experience in professional services marketing, remarkable little innovation seems to have occurred in its practice in recent years. Part of this is because of the random education in professional services marketing; part because marketing itself is an art form in the way the process is executed – and there are not that many artists. Yet another reason is the lack of formal education in professional services marketing, which is very different from product marketing. A significant factor is that accountants and lawyers have little foundation in how to hire and evaluate marketers, which often results in unsatisfactory marketing process, and failure to judge good from bad – effective from ineffective.
· Because of the disconnect between professionals and marketers, many marketers don’t innovate, even in an arena in which all marketers have the same tools. The winners know how to use those tools innovatively; the losers do not. The marketers either feel intimidated by the stature of professionals, or don’t know how to do anything except by rote. Perhaps time and competition will temper this situation.
Functioning In A Changing World
While evolution can rarely be accelerated, nor its ultimate destination be accurately foreseen, there may be ways in which it can be accommodated. Accommodation is essential, simply because control of events, when possible, mitigate unpleasant surprise.
Several things beyond outright behavior modification can make it possible for both professionals and marketers to participate in the change process...
· Learn to fathom those elements, both economic and social, that are currently changing. For example, new technology, including the new social media. Even if you don’t plan to participate, learn it. You’ll understand a great deal of the dynamics of new aspects of society and the economy. You’ll spot trends.
· Don’t insulate yourself from the marketing process if you’re a professional, or from the nature of accounting or law if you’re a marketer.
· If you’re a marketer, try to understand the lawyer or accountant. This means the people – the lawyers or accountants – as well as the process. The attitudes, the points of view on the clients, the way they think, their values. Don’t try to turn them into marketers – marketing is your job – but rather teach them how to be participants in the marketing process. As a marketer, you’re not going to change the professionals, but you can educate them within the context of their professions. For example, some years ago, at a major accounting firm, I wondered if an audit could be used as a business management or planning tool. The answer was more arcane than practical, but I learned more about auditing than most non-accountants usually know, and the auditors learned more about marketers and marketing than most of them know.
· If you’re a professional, you don’t have to be a marketing professional if you don’t want to, but you should know enough about the process to be able to participate in it as appropriate, as well as to understand the marketers and how their minds work. Ultimately, in a successful marketing program, you’re going to have to participate in the process and in bringing the prospect into the fold. Learn how to do it well. It’s a process well within your training and experience.
· Read the trade media – both the law and accounting trades and the publications serving the industries the clients are in. Not just for the news, but for the trends.
· When you spot a trend – particularly one that veers from traditional professional practice (such as moving from hourly billing to value billing, or keeping associates or accountants who are talented but not partner material) don’t make snap judgments. Not only are these strong trends, but even if you’re not ready to bring them into your practice, they may eventually be right for you.
· If you can’t innovate, at least learn to respond to external factors that can affect your practice, your firm, and your clients.
· Competitive intelligence is important. You should be aware of other firms and what they’re doing that you’re not – but should be. Or that may eventually be right for you.
Learn to question everything you do. Ask yourself the question, “This is the way I did it yesterday. Is it the best way to do it today?” You’ll be amazed at the answer.
In every aspect of life, there is nothing – not an article, not a process, not an event – that is unaffected by something else. That’s why everything you do – large or small – will ultimately change, whether you choose it or not.
Is change a marketing tool? Absolutely, if understanding and dealing with it puts you a step ahead of your competitors. And remember, evolution is constant, and change is coming – whether you participate in it or not.
IF MY MOTHER WANTED ME TO BE A SALESMAN...
What Lawyers And Other Professionals Really Have To Know About Marketing – and Why
Of the many impediments to successful marketing for lawyers and accountants, none is more toxic than the tenuous relationship between the professionals and the marketers. Granted, it was worse some thirty-seven years ago, when contemporary marketing first became legal, and granted that the growing intensity of competition has served to make many more professionals more knowledgeable and hospitable to marketing. But there still persist attitudes that prevent many professionals – the lawyers and the accountants -- from understanding the crucial role of marketing in every practice. There is, as well, a frank ignorance of both the concepts of marketing professional services and of the role that the individual professional plays in the marketing process.
A lawyer once told me, “If you’re smart enough to be a lawyer, you’re smart enough to do your own advertising.” To which I replied, “If you’re smart enough to be a lawyer you’re smart enough to be a nuclear physicist, but it doesn’t make you one.” And therein lies a significant part of the crux of the disconnect between lawyers and marketers.
Not surprisingly, many attempts have been made over the past decades to close the chasm between the professionals and the marketers, usually to no avail. Too often, there is pure exhortation at one end of the spectrum, and fruitless attempts to turn lawyers and accountants into marketers at the other end. For the most part, abject failure prevails at both ends (although slowly, more professionals are beginning to understand.) The result is that vast amounts of marketing energy is wasted by both groups, depriving both of needed competitive advantage in a burgeoning competitive environment. Solo practitioners often face the need to market on some level without outside help, but rarely have the training to do so effectively.
Judging from the many inquiries and pleas for help that I get as the editor of The Marcus Letter and in response to my writing in several industry publications, I know that many of the marketers themselves are concerned about this disconnect. I know this also from the articles that many others write in the myriad professional journals and online, and from the concerns so frequently expressed in discussions in public forums.
I know as well, from experience, that there is a solution. It resides in both focused education of professionals in sound marketing principles, and by clearly defining the nature of the separate roles of the professional and the marketers. I’ve succeeded most often by getting professionals involved in the practice. It’s important, too, that the professionals better understand the nature of the marketers themselves, and that the marketers better understand the reasons for the difficulties the professionals have in understanding the marketers.
Perhaps the most significant factor in the disconnect is that there are vast differences in the concepts and nature of marketing and the concepts and nature of legal practice. There are differences, as well, in training, professional structures, and in disparities of personalities that preclude a felicitous marriage, such as the professional’s rigorous education in thinking like a lawyer, in practice qualifications, and in legal and ethical constraints. The marketer, on the other hand, has a different arsenal, one that includes different basic marketing skills and practices, tempered by experience and a focus on the ramifications of the market and the mechanics and strategies for reaching that market. The experienced marketer knows from experience what works and what doesn’t in the marketing process. If there is a basic difference between the professional and the trained marketer, it may reside in the rigorous training and thinking process that works so well for lawyers and accountants, versus the creative concerns and experience that work so well for the marketer.
Ultimately, marketing is an art form, the mechanics of which may be readily learned. Not so easily learned is the artfulness, which uses imagination to conceptualize within the marketing process, and which demands intuition to understand and to interpret the market, plus the knowledge, experience and skills to reach and persuade prospective clients of the value of the lawyer’s services. It requires the skill to use the mechanics effectively, and the competitive urge to drive the process – all of which transcend the mundane. All marketers have access to the same marketing tools, but what really works competitively for a professional services marketer is not the mechanics – it’s the strategy in applying the mechanics. It’s a different kind of planning, and a different set of objectives.
While it takes extensive education, intensive examinations, and long apprenticeship to become a lawyer or accountant, there are three main ways that marketers learn their craft. One is rooted in previous marketing jobs in related industries, enhanced by the ability to learn the ramifications of the legal and accounting marketing process. Some of the best marketers I know come from marketing positions in major corporations. (For example, I came from a background in public relations at a time ( the 1970s and 1980s) when only a handful of us were retained by professional firms. We not only had to learn the hard way, but we had to invent many of the practices now standard today. We had to learn how professional services marketing differed from product marketing, and develop new ways to deal with those differences.)
Another marketers learn their craft is by apprenticeship to a working professional services marketer, and association with other marketers, and by reading books and articles, many of which are unfortunately inadequate. A third – and perhaps the most distorted – is from an MBA program in marketing. The distortion comes from courses that confuse marketing principles for products with the separate and distinctive principles and practices of professional services marketing. This difference, we learned, dictates the distinctive nature of many of the practices we tailored that experience showed to work most effectively in contemporary professional services marketing.
There are now few major accounting and law firms that don’t have marketing programs, and the rolls of marketing directors are vast. But yet, the problem of disconnect between marketer and professional persists, and the quality of marketing ranges from occasionally superb to more frequently dismal, unimaginative, and ineffective. (This, I suspect, is one of the reasons that turnover of marketing jobs is so prevalent in professional firms.)
A large part of this disconnect, again, comes from the failure of professionals to understand both the nature of marketing, and their role in it. They rarely know how to qualify and hire marketers. They fail to understand the distinct and often unique characteristics of professional services marketing and the marketers, and how those differences alter the nature of the marketing program itself. They often see marketing in terms of myths and misconceptions. They often fail to understand that marketing is itself a profession (or at least, can be practiced professionally), and that it’s an integral part of any successful practice. And since few law schools or MBA programs offer education in marketing for professionals, the road to accommodation for marketers in professional firms remains rocky. Unfortunately, this limited view severely inhibits competing effectively, and is patently unfair to both the professionals and the marketers by diminishing access to the best that sound marketing has to offer.
The Marketing Differences Between Products And Professional Services
The role of a corporation, as the late corporate philosopher Peter Drucker has often noted, is to make a customer. Marketing is the process used to do that. Lawyers have the same responsibility – to generate a client, but the path to it is different. For example...
· There may be a thousand people, and complex production processes, behind a product. The interface between these people and processes and the consumer is the product itself. The interface between the professional and the client is the professional.
· When a corporation’s sales person sells you a vacuum cleaner, the vacuum cleaner stays and the salesperson goes. When a lawyer sells you his or her services, the lawyer stays.
· A corporation can market test its product, and unless the product causes harm, the company can rapidly change it to adjust to customers’ tastes. The reputation of a law firm can rise or fall on the performance of one lawyer and one client.
· Products have reliable consistency. The next tube of your brand of toothpaste is exactly the same as the last tube you bought. Lawyers’ performances vary case by case.
· Product marketing has greater flexibility to meet or shape the needs of the consumer. There are flavors, colors, and bells and whistles that can be exploited to distinguish a product from its competitors. There is a broader spectrum of emotional appeals than professionals can use. Lawyers and other professionals are constrained by the law, its practice, and ethical strictures. While one lawyer may be smarter, more energetic, more reliable, and more imaginative than another, that lawyer can hardly promote that difference. You can’t say, “We write better briefs.” This is both an ethical and practical constraint.
· Product manufacturers are able to build customer need where none existed before. They see themselves in terms of the variety of ways in which they can capitalize on consumer needs and desires – and in fact, they can generate those needs and desires where none had existed before. (The software program Quicken, which automates the personal finance process in ways that had never been done before, is a case in point.) Lawyers are severely – if not totally – constrained in their ability to create a need for their services where none had existed before.
· Product marketing can produce readily measurable results. For example The efficacy of a product ad can be measured by the number of products it sells. But professional services marketing can ultimately have only two significant results – building name recognition and projecting capabilities that lend themselves to choosing one lawyer or accountant over another when a lawyer or accountant is needed, and gaining access to a prospect that affords the professional the opportunity to sell his or her services.
· A corporation’s marketing department is not responsible to other departments of the corporation but just to the CEO or COO. Lawyers and other professional firms, on the other hand, must rely on the individual professionalism of partners, each of whom is functionally entrepreneurial, to achieve a firm’s objective. While each corporate department may contribute to aspects of the marketing department, authority derives from the top of the corporation only. The vice president of marketing reports to the CEO, and the vice president of production or finance has virtually no involvement in marketing strategy The professional’s authority, on the other hand, resides in each of the firm’s partners. In most law firms, the marketing professional reports to a partner, who frequently has no experience or training in marketing.
· The product company is experienced – with a long tradition – in understanding the market. It knows that it must actively define, pursue and nurture the consumer. Lawyers and accountants know that most clients have no choice but to use their services (nobody ever woke up and said, “I think I’ll sue somebody today” or, “What I really need today is a good audit”), and thus have traditionally put little emphasis on understanding the market as a market. The product company has a long experience and tradition in competing. The word competing didn’t enter the lawyer’s lexicon until 1977 (Bates) The product marketing tradition goes back centuries. There is virtually no marketing tradition for accountants and lawyers prior to 1977.
· Lawyers are not concerned with the market – they are concerned with being lawyers and meeting their own personal needs of professionalism. That was sufficient pre-Bates, but not now, because it’s not a competitive approach in a seriously competitive environment. They too often know too little about how clients choose lawyers or accountants from the vast roster of professionals.
· The product company understands, in a sense, that no matter what the product it makes, it is really a marketing company that manufactures products to fill the channel opened by marketing activities. Lawyers and other professionals see themselves, not their consumers (clients), at the center of their universe.
· While most products may be sold directly in response to a direct mail letter or other direct response or targeted marketing techniques, the well-crafted direct campaign for lawyers and accountants has the sole objective of allowing the opportunity of the professional to make a personal presentation.
What Lawyers And Accountants Need To Know
The definition of marketing, as it concerns professionals, is important to understand. Marketing is a process to bring the services, capabilities, and services of the professional to the companies and individuals for whom those services are necessary. Ultimately, the purpose is to get clients – to grow and shape a practice. But merely getting clients is difficult without understanding that the client, not the practice itself, is at the core of the process. This approach leads to a random and shapeless practice that usually does not sustain, nor is it often profitable over the long range. Thus, the primary role of the marketing process is to demonstrate to a prospective client that you can meet his or her needs.
How, then, do these differences translate into useful knowledge about marketing that lawyers and accountants should know?
· These differences are manifested in advertising and other promotional activities that are constricted from making claims other than to demonstrate a practice’s or individual’s experience or specialty. This limitation is further compounded by the inability to claim to be superior to other firms’ with similar capabilities. Professional promotional material may not disparage other law or accounting firms. More significant than Bar Association ethical strictures, such claims are virtually impossible to prove, given the nature of professional practice.
· Because all professional firms virtually perform the same services – certainly, in the minds of the public – professional services marketing works best when it demonstrates capability and experience in specific areas, when it builds reputation for its strengths – which can only be demonstrated, but not simply claimed –and when, by being ubiquitous – it enhances name recognition. This is accomplished with specific marketing techniques, such as byline articles that demonstrate knowledge and capability, brochures, advertising, web sites, social and personal networking, and the like. Avoid self-serving and egocentric marketing that attempts to tell readers and prospects not just what the firm knows and can do, but rather exhorts the reader to accept ludicrous and unbelievable claims of integrity (that’s a given in professional firms), caring for the client, or being passionate about law or accounting. As the song goes, “Don’t speak of love – show me.”
· Marketing for lawyers and accountants can only create an environment that may educate the prospective client, but ultimately enhances the prospective client’s decision to choose one firm rather than another. This is best accomplished by focusing on the skills of the firm’s individuals, particularly in specific aspects of the practice, rather than the firm itself. It’s accomplished with a complex process that requires an understanding the specific needs and requirements of each market segment, and projecting a firm’s capabilities to serve that market’s needs and problems. Outstanding examples of this process has been the firm that projected the experience of a firm’s specific lawyers in dealing with Sarbanes-Oxley matters, or focusing on a litigation department’s recognizing that most cases are won in the preparation for litigation, rather than by just the silver tongued litigator.
Essentially, the process is...
· Define the market. This means defining the market in terms of the client’s needs, not just the lawyer’s or accountant’s wishes. This is a crucial marketing process, requiring a meticulous understanding of the client’s industry and company.
· Define your service in terms of the needs of that market. Not what you do, but what the client wants and needs.
· Define your marketing tools. The catalog of marketing tools allows choice of the appropriate tools to serve each market. The important thing to remember here is that not all marketing tools may not be appropriate to every market.
· Manage the tools, effectively, professionally, and strategically.
It’s important, as well to understand the nature and responsibilities of the professional marketers, and how they best serve the firm and its professionals. There are a substantial array of marketing techniques that the skilled and experienced marketer needs to do the job. These skills include...
· The ability to understand what lawyers and accountants do to serve their clients. The marketers need not know the legal and accounting intricacies’ and skills that the professionals use to achieve their ends, but should understand the nature of the practice. Professionals, on the other hand, need not have the skills and mechanics of the marketing process, but should understand the process itself. (The only exceptions are the solo practitioners who must do their own marketing, and the professional who is specifically and naturally talented as a rain maker.)
· The role of marketing in any law or accounting practice. At least because of increased competition, there is no legal or accounting practice of any size that doesn’t need to understand, the need to know and communicate with their various audiences. The failure to accept this has resulted in the past – as it will in the future – to being superseded by firms that do understand this principle.
The Professional Marketer
For lawyers and accountants, choosing a marketing professional requires skills not ordinarily within the ken or experience of most professionals. A trained and experienced professional marketer should know...
· How to fathom a market
· How to plan a marketing campaign in terms of the market (rather than as just a conglomeration of marketing activities)
· How to define and present the practice in terms of the client’s needs, not just the lawyers’ or accountants’ skills
· How to know what business the professionals are really in
· How to develop a position that springs from what the client needs, not from what the seller wants to sell
· How to use the marketing tools
· How to manage the marketing effort
Ideally, an experienced marketer should be...
· An excellent communicator and a skilled writer for several different kinds of media, one who understands what is to be communicated and how best to do it.
· Experienced in marketing strategy – the ability to define the markets in terms of the firm’s capabilities and objectives and how to serve those objectives
· A capable manager of others in a marketing department
· Thoughtful and imaginative. All professional firm marketers have or have access to the same skills and marketing tools, but not all can use them well or competitively
· A track record
· The ability to understand, work with, and educate professionals in their roles in the marketing process.
Practice Development
If the marketing process serves to promote the firm and its individual practitioners, the specific techniques of the practice development function serve to bring the client into the fold. They are separate functions in the marketing process, although both are part of the total marketing program, both of which the professionals should understand.
But ultimately, the last step in the process is meeting the prospective client, and persuading him or her of the professional’s ability to serve the prospect’s needs. Except for the naturally talented rain maker – the legendary professional about whom it’s said can walk into a revolving door and come out on the other side with a client, the process of client development many take some training. Essentially, though, the process is not entirely alien to a lawyer or accountant. It’s a business process that uses four distinct actions...
· Listen to the prospect, and ask questions until you understand the prospect’s problems and needs.
· When you do understand, be sure the prospect knows that you understand those problems and needs. Repeat it back to the prospect, if necessary
· Explain how and why you can help the prospect resolve his concerns.
· Let the prospect know that you’re ready to start on Monday morning.
In these difficult times, when competition is keen and aggressive, the professionalism of sound marketing practices is the best approach to growth and success. Unlike the not too distant past, where clients were gained on the golf course or with sports tickets, growing a practice is now a meticulous business process. It involves a mutual respect between the professional and the marketer. It requires a more sophisticated lawyer or accountant, working in tandem with the marketer to survive and grow. It demands an understanding that marketing is no longer optional, nor ancillary to the professional practice. It is an integral part of contemporary professional firm management.
The future for any professional firm depends upon understanding that fact.