The Double Helix that is Professional Services Marketing

Do you remember your first job when you began marketing professional services? Perhaps you were a design professional who moved over to marketing. Many of you were like me, a marketing professional who was connected to professional services.

Either way, the first months were a baptism by fire. Insiders needed to bring marketing into their world and outsiders needed to become translators for the professionals in the firm.

Change often creates an environment of friction. Successful careers take the sparks and turn it into a flame. Others see the sparks and burn out. You have succeeded in a special industry.

Marketing professional services is very different than marketing commercial products. Marketing an intangible service is really about marketing a promise. This is where the double helix of professional services marketing takes hold. Some of you might be thinking this is the parallel and intertwined paths of marketing and business development. You are partially correct. Let me illustrate what I mean.

A professional services firm can be compared to the human body. The hand is very important, but not everyone is a hand or should be a hand. The hand needs to rely on the other parts in order to be effective. The elbow might not seem important until the hand needs it to complete a task. However, none of the parts work without blood flowing through the veins and, of course, oxygen. Consider marketing the blood and business development the oxygen. Professional services firms can be very complex.

Now we need to drill down to the double helix of marketing. One strand of the helix is everything we normally consider as marketing. It is the essence of promoting our services. I like the way one of my friends put his role,"I get to work with geniuses and my only contribution is the ability to put a few words together.” This statement probably means more to the people who entered the industry from the outside, but it is still relevant. When we develop a proposal, write a press release, prepare project sheets, modify a website, or create a presentation, we are “stringing a few words together.” Our success is dependent upon stringing the right words together. This is where we need to be aware of the other string of the helix.

Life cannot exist without both strands of the double helix. Marketing professional services is the same.

What would all of your marketing resources be without strategy? You could win awards for content and graphic design, but what would that mean for your firm. Management would congratulate you, but what would they say at the end of the day when they were looking for a return on their marketing investment. This is why the other strand is intertwined with our marketing resources. Do you join social media groups like LinkedIn to place witty comments in the discussion areas? This is, in the words of Shakespeare, “a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

When marketing becomes strategic is it focusing on clients. Since clients are not all the same and don’t buy cookie cutter marketing solutions, the other strand of the helix takes on added importance. Just like the marketing resources strand can’t exist alone, the client-centric strand needs the power of our marketing resources in order to create new projects for our firm. When marketing operates this way, the job of business development is much easier.

A number of years ago a municipal client asked me a question about why we were searching for a partnering architect for a project. He said, “Your firm is the most qualified firm in the country for our project. Teaming with a local architect is like rolling the dice.” I replied, “Without a local architect on our team, we won’t have any dice to roll.” Our market research had told us that this client only hired local architects. My mission was to find out who was the preferred architect. At the end of the meeting I had a couple of names. Without the market research we would have listened to this decision maker and gone after the project alone. We would have lost.

People often misquote Vince Lombardi on his comment about winning. He didn’t say, “Winning is everything.” He said, “Preparing to win is everything.” When professional services firms understand the nature of the double helix in marketing they are preparing to win. When their business development team takes the field, the only question is the final score. Have you put your firm in this position?