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By Patrick McLoughlin
Ask your team what marketing means to them you’ll likely hear a range of different answers. The website will get a mention, no doubt Social Media and branding will too. Somewhere further down the list you might just find attracting new clients.
That’s the problem with marketing.
There was a discussion in an online marketing group recently where half a dozen partners congratulated themselves on their natural talent for marketing. Whilst they awarded themselves full marks for marketing the majority commented that sales was not their forte.
It begs the question: Just what do they think marketing is? Marketing without lead generation and conversion will not grow your client list. You might win awards but you won’t win new business.
Does your marketing win you business?
Gale Crossley and Debbie Stover point out in their excellent book, At the Crossroads: ‘A few years ago Inside Public Accounting’s Benchmarking Report noted that the average fee growth in the survey was approximately the same, whether the firm had marketing professionals on board or not.’
A while back I interviewed an experienced marketing manager for a client. I asked her to tell me about the work she was most proud of. She dipped into her briefcase and pulled out a form she had designed.
More recently I asked the regional head of marketing from a Top 10 firm to describe their ideal client. He walked out of the room and returned with a part-qualified accountant: “she can tell you.” He had absolutely no idea, worse still it was clearly a question he had never considered!
Strategic business development beats tactical marketing
From my experience the vast majority of marketing staff employed by UK accountancy firms focus on marketing communications, not growing your client list. Fast growth firms focus on winning quality new business, not marketing their services.
This is called the Practice Growth blog for a reason. The ‘Accountancy Marketing Blog’ would attract more visitors, accountancy marketing is a far more popular search term, but it would send out the wrong message.
Like all your employees, your marketing staff take the lead from the firm’s senior management. You, the leaders, must give them the opportunity to deliver growth. Give them the authority and status to help your senior team to build a pipeline of quality new clients.
As Gale Crossley suggests in the book, changing the job title from Marketing to Practice Growth is a good start: ‘Next include him or her in all partner meetings of strategic content, even if only as an observer.’ She continues: “Ask your renamed director of practice growth to rewrite the job description, including goals and compensation scheme. Tie the person’s goals and compensation directly to practice growth. This will get rid of the nice-to-have marketing initiatives that don’t contribute to increasing revenue.’
Questions to ask yourself
Are your marketing people involved in strategic planning? Do they have a seat at the head table?
Do you measure the effectiveness of your marketing by Return On Investment?
Do you judge your website by how attractive or ‘professional’ it looks or the leads and revenue it’s delivered?
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Email me at mailto:patrick@a4g.co.uk with ROI in the subject line. I’ll give you a call and if we are a good fit, you get a free, half day ‘Grow your client list’ training session.
Do it now before you get distracted.
Dear Patrick,
That’s a very interesting and quite complex issue.
In my experience, the senior management of any company (accounting or not) thinks about marketing every day. But many senior managers are just not aware that this actually is « marketing ». If you ask them what marketing means, many of them would describe something which more or less resembles « advertising ». As accounting firms deal with highly confidential financial and legal client information, naturally, the senior management does not want the marketing staff to get any insight into client cases.
A second important issue is the comprehensive regulated framework, accounting firms have to comply with. The marketing staff has to face a lot of constraints and this gets even more difficult if the firm operates at an international scale. The marketing staff needs to be very well informed about laws, best practices, ethical guidelines, etc. and has to know how to implement them in their working area.
In my opinion, the most difficult problem in accounting firms (just like in law firms) is the fact that they are service firms which do require service marketing strategies. And service marketing requires that the marketing staff gets involved into the very heart of the company and works hand in hand with the HR department AND all the staff who plans and oversees AND produces the services.
Not an easy task for the marketing staff….
Thanks for your thoughts Susanne. For marketing people to achieve practice growth they must understand the firm’s ideal clients. Otherwise how can they appeal to them?
So the management team has to encourage them to get a real insight into their clients’ pains and challenges. It all goes wrong when marketing is held at arm’s length.
If the focus is on Return On Investment, specialist service / sector teams must work closely with marketing to identify and win new business opportunities. As you say, not an easy task for marketing if the partners aren’t focusing on growth.
Our firm is O’Neill Foley based in Kilkenny in Ireland, we have 38 quality staff including 16 qualified Chartered Accountants, 15 trainees plus support staff. There are 5 dedicated and hard working partners. We have an extraordinary breath of experience and expertise in comparison to our sieze. The firm is in existence for 56 years and has an extensive client base covering a wide range of business activity, retail/ hospitality , manufacturing, agri & food and profession practices. The practice has been extremely resilent and stable right through the most recent economic down turn.
The firm now wishes to re energise and develop a growth strategy for the next five to ten years, the firm wishes to be at the forefront of business development based on recognition of the range and quality of services provided to clients
Interesting post. I posted a blog along similar lines here…
http://www.stevebillingham.com/whats-the-point-of-marketing/
For me, the point of marketing is to make your business stand out from “the rest” in the mind of your target market. It starts by looking at your business through the clients lens and being crystal clear about what problem you are solving and for whom.