At many professional services firms, market-ing is a four-letter word. For decades, these firms have insisted that business stems from people, not promotion. And for decades, they were right. Because relationships correlated heavily with revenue, word of mouth traditionally was the best way for lawyers, accountants, auditors, architects, consultants and other professional service providers to manage their reputation, gen-erate leads and increase profits.

Some professional service providers believe it still is — but they’re wrong, according to Jonathan Fitzgarrald, chief marketing officer at the Los Angeles law firm of Greenberg Glusker Fields Claman & Machtinger LLP. Says Fitzgarrald, “The prevailing winds of yesteryear were: Do good work; that will establish a good repu-tation; the phone will ring as a result. That’s no longer the case.”

Firms that ignore the change do so at their own peril, according to James Alexander, founder and division president of Vizibility, a New York-based producer of mobile business cards for professional services firms. Early this year, his company surveyed nearly 400 marketers from legal and accounting firms to assess their marketing practices and priorities. The results suggest that firms that leave marketing on the table leave money with it.

“We asked firms how often they’re communicating with their customers and learned that firms that have met their revenue goals are communicating far more frequently with their customers than firms that haven’t,” Alexander explains. “Twenty-seven percent of

MAKE IT RAIN RELATIONSHIPS ARE NO LONGER THE KEY TO GROWING THE PIE. IT’S TIME FOR A STRATEGY.

“ We asked firms how often they’re communicating with their customers and learned that firms that have met their revenue goals are communicating far more frequently with their customers than firms that haven’t.”— James Alexander, founder and division president of Vizibility

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A W H I T E PA P E R F R O M G L C , A M A R K E T I N G C O M M U N I C AT I O N S A G E N C Y

[ CASE STUDY ]

EVOLUTIONARY CHANGES, REVOLUTIONARY OUTCOMES

In 2007, partners at the Los Angeles law firm of Greenberg Glusker Fields Claman & Machtinger LLP had an epiphany: The world is changing — and their firm needs to change with it.

“Greenberg realized seven years ago that if they were going to stay competitive they had to continue to evolve and do things differently. They had to do things their competition hadn’t done yet,” says Chief Marketing Officer Jonathan Fitzgarrald.

One of those things was marketing. So, the firm hired Fitzgarrald to build a marketing department charged with catalyzing long-term strategic growth.

It wasn’t easy. “Of our 100 attorneys, I probably had two or three allies at the beginning who were raring to go,” Fitzgarrald says. “Lawyers by nature are pessimistic. They’re naysayers. It’s their job to look for the problem in an opportu-nity and to determine why something won’t work as opposed to why it will. So early on I had to work with the willing; by achieving small wins with them, I eventually was able to win over the masses.”

Marketing was incremental. First, Fitzgarrald launched a new website. Later, he created a blog. Next, he established a social media presence. Now, seven years later, the firm has a mature marketing department that oversees three types of activities:n Business development: Business development activities

are face-to-face activities the firm’s lawyers engage in to develop business. Examples include networking groups and beauty contests — anything that is a face-to-face opportunity with clients to expand the business.

n Visibility: Visibility is educating the marketplace on the capabilities of the law firm. It includes the firm’s website, blogs it authors, articles its attorneys publish, speaking engagements, marketing collateral, events the firm hosts — anything and everything that positions the firm in front of its target market.

n Attorney development: Attorney development consists of different training programs the firm runs in-house to teach its attorneys the skills necessary to build a practice and deliver excellent client service.

“Marketing literally touches every aspect of an organization,” Fitzgarrald explains. “Categorizing everything we do into these three buckets makes it simple enough for everyone to understand, and when it’s simple enough to understand, everyone engages with it.”

The results are self-evident, according to Fitzgarrald, who says marketing has helped the firm:n Increase revenues: Although Greenberg doesn’t publicly

share its financials, last year the firm enjoyed double-digit revenue growth. “This is in a competitive landscape where law firms are thrilled to see single-digit increases, if anything at all,” Fitzgarrald says.

n Reduce risk: Pre-marketing, Greenberg had only a few rainmakers generating new business for the firm. Post-mar-keting, it has many. “Now we have more rainmakers at the firm originating their own work and work they pass on to others,” Fitzgarrald says. “Seven years ago, if we lost one of our rainmakers, it would have been a huge detriment to the firm because so many people were counting on that individual to bring in work. Now that we have broadened our base of rainmakers, it wouldn’t have such a dramatic impact because their percentage of revenue is smaller.”

n Expand its sales pipeline: Marketing has turned even junior associates into salespeople. “Even first-year associates receive some kind of business development training so they can start from day one developing relationships that eventually will turn into business,” Fitzgarrald says. “As a result, in addition to partners who are bringing in business, I now have senior associates who are originating hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in business; that’s almost unheard of.”

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respondents who reported meeting their revenue goals are communicating 20 or more times per year with their customers and prospects; just 3 percent of respondents who didn’t meet their revenue goals are doing the same.”

Vizibility examined one marketing opportunity in particular — the bio pages on firms’ websites, which garner 60–75 percent of most firms’ website traffic — and made a remarkable discovery: Firms that integrate contemporary marketing tactics such as multimedia, social sharing and mobility into their bio pages earn an average revenue per partner of $669,499, compared to $478,529 for firms that don’t.

“Specifically, firms that have four website bio-page features — links to multimedia, a list of languages their professionals speak, the ability to share via social media and mobile websites — have an average revenue per partner that’s 40 percent higher than firms that don’t,” Alexander says. “What’s really interesting is that these are also among the least implemented features … Clearly, firms are missing out on marketing opportunities.”

Those opportunities are especially evident when you consider data from RainToday, an online resource library specializing in professional services marketing and sales. Its most recent study of B2B buyers of professional services found that fewer than half (28–48 percent) are loyal to their current provider; more than half (52–72 percent) would consider switching providers.

With loyalty lacking, it’s obvious: Relationships alone can’t sustain a business.

“While relationship selling is fine, it’s never going to win the day for an organization that wants to grow,” says Peggy Kitzmiller, director of marketing at AKT Group, an accounting, auditing and business consulting firm in Portland, Oregon. “If you want to grow, you’ve got to have a strategy. Because marketing and business development go hand in hand, a marketing plan is an important part of that strategy.”

Indeed, to retain their own loyal customers and capture disloyal customers from competitors, professional services firms must shift to a new business model that relies not only on the merit of their work, but also on their ability to tell people about it.

The shift isn’t just necessary; it’s inevitable. Following are three reasons to commence it now — before your firm gets left behind.

1. COMPETITION IS FIERCE.Employment of lawyers is projected to grow 10 percent between 2012 and 2022, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Like-wise, employment of accountants and auditors is projected to grow 13 percent, and employment of management consultants 19 percent.

Naturally, more professional service providers employed will likely translate into more professional services firms employing

them. That means increased competition — and, in turn, increased demand for differ-entiation, which marketing alone can provide.

“Old business models are no longer relevant because the business landscape has gotten way too competitive; there are too many providers of professional services and not enough clients,” Fitz-garrald says. “The pie isn’t growing anymore, so the only way to grow your firm is to take a piece of the pie away from one of your competitors, and that requires doing things differently.”

> BOTTOM LINE: MARKETING CAN HELP YOU GAIN MARKET SHARE.

2. STRATEGY BEGETS SUCCESS.The link between strategic planning and business performance is well established. A 2012 report by ALM Legal Intelligence there-fore spells trouble for professional services firms: Although they cite value and quality of service as key differentiators, nearly half (44 percent) of law firms lack a plan to build, track and measure client loyalty and satisfaction, the report found.

The same contradiction exists in many professional services firms, according to Kitzmiller, who says marketing can help close the divide between strategic planning and execution. In particular, firms that entrust marketing to partners who lack marketing exper-tise typically suffer from a knowledge gap that prevents them from reaching their goals.

Says Kitzmiller, “I’m constantly telling my colleagues, ‘You don’t want me preparing tax returns and I don’t want you questioning the strategy I’m proposing for marketing.’ Marketing is not their expertise; it’s mine.”

That expertise includes the ability to not only develop strategy, but also analyze its outcomes and measure its success. “Marketers today have the tools to demonstrate the impact that they’re having,” Kitzmiller says. “We track every marketing initiative we do. If the firm isn’t growing its top line, I’ve failed as a marketing director.”

> BOTTOM LINE: MARKETING CAN HELP YOU ACHIEVE YOUR STRATEGIC OBJECTIVES.

WHAT YOU NEED …

n Dedicated marketing talent to create and execute mar-keting strategy.

n A marketing plan that aligns marketing activities with business objectives.

n Segmentation in order to reach the right prospects, with the right message, at the right time, through the right media.

n Metrics that illustrate your return on marketing investment.

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3. CLIENTS ARE GETTING YOUNGER.Approximately 10,000 American baby boomers will turn 65 every day until the year 2030, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And while many of them will remain in the workforce — by 2022, nearly 32 percent of those aged 65 to 74 will still be working, the government projects — most of them will not. Taking their place will be a new generation of executives that has a different way of working. And more importantly, a different way of communicating.

“Each generation has its own preferences about how it wants to operate and how it wants to receive information,” explains Fitzgarrald, who says marketing is uniquely posi-tioned to help professional services firms win business from young leaders.

Put another way: Without marketing, professional services firms risk looking like dinosaurs to the next generation of cli-ents. And everyone knows what happened to the dinosaurs.

“While most Fortune 1,000 companies have already started the shift in succession planning from baby boomers to Gen Xers, professional services firms for the most part are lag-gards,” Fitzgarrald continues. “If you have a bunch of baby boomers prospecting Gen Xers for business, and those baby boomers don’t understand the nuances between the genera-tions, there is immediately going to be a disconnect, which is why those boomers will return to their organizations without winning the business. They’ll make all kinds of excuses about why they didn’t win the beauty pageant, but at the end of the day it will come down to something as simple as different communication styles.”

> BOTTOM LINE: MARKETING CAN HELP YOU ENGAGE A NEW GENERATION OF CLIENTS.

[ CASE STUDY ]

TARGETED SUCCESS

The partners at AKT Group in Portland, Ore., knew they wanted to grow, and they knew they wanted to do it quickly. There was just one problem: They didn’t know how they were going to do it.

“About four years ago I was talking with several of the partners and I asked them, ‘How are you going to grow?’” recalls Peggy Kitzmiller, who serves as director of marketing at the accounting, auditing and business consulting firm. “They really couldn’t articulate what their plan was, so I said, ‘You really need someone to do that for you.’”

The partners hired Kitzmiller to be that person. Since then, she has worked closely with the firm’s leaders to create a unique marketing plan for each of its industry verticals, including health care, construction and manufacturing, among others. Strategies have included content marketing, social media and event marketing — all targeted based on prospects’ unique characteristics and preferences.

“One of the industries we specialize in is construction,” Kitzmiller explains. “Construction company owners in their steel-toed workboots aren’t going to sit at their desk and watch a webinar because they’re on a job site. So, for them we’ll organize a face-to-face seminar at the end of the day with wine and beer, presenting on a topic that’s meaty in their world. It’s all about knowing the market — what information they want to know and how they want to receive it.”

Marketing professionals like Kitzmiller are trained to “know the market.” At AKT Group, the benefits are evident to even the most skeptical partners. Consider, for instance, the results of social media marketing within the firm’s health care vertical: Kitzmiller regularly engages industry influ-encers via Twitter. One such influencer — a health care reporter — learned that the firm not only provides account-ing services to health care networks, but also outsourced management services. The reporter therefore featured one of the firm’s experts in an article about health care reform.

“Another one of our networks saw the article; they had no idea we also managed practices, because for them we were just doing financial work,” Kitzmiller says. “They brought us into another opportunity, and now we’re running one of the largest orthopaedic groups in the state. A single tweet turned into one of our biggest clients.”

A B O U T G L C

glcdelivers.comGLC is a marketing communications agency that provides strategy, planning and content solutions for today’s marketing challenges. We deliver engagement, awareness and results that drive business relationships in all marketing channels—websites, email marketing, print, video and social media.

For more information on how GLC can help with your marketing challenges, please contact John Cimba, President & CEO, at jcimba@glcdelivers.com or 847.205.3222.

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