What Does a CMO Do?
Suzanne Lowe consults to professional firms on marketing. Because Harding & Company consults to the same market on sales, our practices naturally complement each other. Her book (Marketplace Masters: How Professional Service Firms Compete to Win) and her blog (www.expertisemarketing.typepad.com) are must-have resources for marketers of professional services.
Our services don’t neatly abut each other. Rather, they overlap. This is hardly surprising given our market. The distinction between marketing and sales remains murky at most professional firms. This is complicate by the avoidance of the S-word at many professional firms, where “marketing” is often a euphemism for “selling,” and where the distinction has been complicated further by the injection of the term, “business development” into the mix, at first to replace the S-word. Since its appearance the meaning of b.d. (as it is commonly abbreviated) has morphed. Depending on the firm and context, it can now refer to selling, marketing and selling, lead generation or parts of all of these.
All of this makes it impossible for me to avoid meddling in Suzanne’s business. She tolerates it, as the good soul she is. So here I go again.
Suzanne is fighting to make the top marketing person (chief marketing officer, if you will, because every function must have a chief these days) as strategic a player in professional firms as is commonly the case at product companies. She has been joyously stabbing and hacking at this windmill for quite some time: it’s a big windmill and her energy is boundless.
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I would hate to see her give up, because it is a worthy cause. Her thoughtful analyses, practical experience, and hard work have helped her define the eleven competencies of a competitively-effective professional firm which a CMO is supposed to help them develop. I don’t question the desirability of getting CMOs to this level, but getting there from here will be a neat trick. That’s because of the four conflicting roles a top marketing person at a professional firm must play if a managing partner is relying on him for serious work. (The other option is the marketer-as-gopher role, which I abhor as much as Suzanne does.)
The roles are:
- The marketing strategist: In this role, the marketer conducts research on markets, clients and competitors and serves as a sparring partner and motivator to the managing partner and the marketing committee, if there is one. This is the role of the expert and deep thinker. To play this role, the marketer must have resources and access to the managing partner and relevant committee members and practice or studio heads. To play it successfully she must be seen as an intellectual equal to the partners.
- The marketing service provider: In this role, the marketer provides the various partners, practices or studios, with marketing support to their sales and marketing activities. She takes orders from the heads of teams pursuing specific markets or clients. She and her team help make brochures and other marketing documents, qualifications packages and proposals. This person and her team must work late into the night on every client submission because the professionals are always late handing in the parts of the documents they are responsible for. This is a service role in which the marketer must treat the partners as customers.
- The brand and marketing police: In this role the marketers demand, chide and threaten to keep others in the firm from damaging the firm’s brand. To this end, they read all proposals, press releases and anything that hints at being a marketing document to make sure they don’t hurt the firm or muddy its brand. It is not a role that endears them to others in the firm.
- An extension of the managing partner: When a conflict arises and the managing partner must attend two meetings at the same time, she will sometimes send a staffer to represent her at the less important meeting. In this role of borrowed authority the marketer has substantial power, but must use it adeptly. If the managing partner feels that her head of marketing makes too many mistakes when representing her, she will stop using him this way.
It is virtually impossible for one person to fill all four roles. A person can’t be the loyal, marketing service provider working uncomplainingly to 1:00 in the morning because an inconsiderate partner failed to get his portion of a proposal in until just before midnight and then be the tough brand police officer and extension of the managing partner’s power the next morning.
In big firms the problem can be reduced by assigning these functions to different people in the marketing department. The many small firms don’t have that choice. The only choice they have is which of the four roles do they most need fillerd. Unquestionably, that is the thankless job of getting proposals out the door. That is also the lowest status marketing job, preparing neither the firm nor the proposal polisher for a marketing organization with a strategic role.
September 6th, 2007 at 10:39 am
Ford, if I were a small-firm marketer reading your blog post, I’d be spitting nails right about now. Do you need an antacid, or what?
In fact, I used to be that very same small-firm marketer that you describe so sourly, staying up till one a.m. helping get those proposals out the door. Your portrayal of heartless partners, inconsiderately leaving proposal work till the last minute, ignores the very real necessity that professional firms have to leap when client opportunities present themselves.
You make it sound like most fee-earning practitioners are merrily waiting opportunities to run their marketers into the ground. Sure, there are some of these Simon Legrees, but you’ve painted a pretty dour overall picture here. I just don’t buy it. And, even if you’re right (and I’m suffering from excessively sunny delusions), it doesn’t mean that marketers and sales professionals shouldn’t change this paradigm.
Marketing and selling a professional service is always a team effort, and most small-firm marketers understand the unique balance that exists between “implementation” and “advisory” work. (The unique balance of “implementation” and “advisory” roles presents itself in large professional firms, too, but for the moment let’s stay on your theme of these small-firm marketers.)
First of all, early in your post, you mention that the distinction between sales and marketing remains murky at most professional service firms. It’s the “remains” part that needs to be challenged! Even in small firms, it’s incumbent upon marketers to help change the way the firm goes to market, and they can do that simultaneously, along with offering their implementation services. As the field of marketing and selling has become more recognized and accepted, even at small firms, fee-earners do increasingly have a more collegial attitude than adversarial. If an adversarial relationship exists, the marketer has two choices:
1) help the leaders of that firm to see how much better things could work if the firm worked toward more integration between marketing and selling, and between deploying a marketer’s implementation and advisory work. This takes professional courage, a theme that I’ve explored extensively in my 2007 monthly newsletter series, The Marketplace Master™. Using your previous example, I think it’s a mistake for marketers to accept the adversarial “brand police” role. “Brand advisor” makes much more sense. If a marketer does occupy the “brand police” function, it’s a clear sign that he or she does not have a truly collegial arrangement. Brand management (even control) is everyone’s responsibility, not just the marketer’s.
2) if working internally to make a functional change isn’t possible, to leave and seek a better cultural fit. This requires the marketer to think of his or her colleagues as “clients.” The minute this mind shift has occurred, the “taking orders” mindset ceases to work. No more marketer-as-slave! Instantly, the balance shifts toward more sharing of those roles you described above.
Second, even if the distinction between sales and marketing is currently murky, it is incumbent upon marketers to help grow their own roles professionally. Let’s say the marketer starts out as a lowly order-taker. He puts in the late hours, demonstrating his value to harried partners, and earns their trust and respect for helping the firm bring in new revenues. Eventually, and I’ve seen this happen time and again, this marketer gains in his or her own expertise, understanding of client needs, familiarity with the firm’s service offerings, observation of the firm’s targets and segments, and the like. All of these areas are indeed the purview of a more strategically astute marketing and sales professional. How many marketers or sales professionals do you know who complacently accept being pigeonholed into a non-growth function? Part of the reason that there appears to be such a high-churn in the marketing role at professional firms is that these folks need to change jobs to find a more strategic spot.
Sure, small professional firms will always need that dedicated person who doesn’t mind staying up late to get that important proposal ready for tomorrow’s meeting. But I believe this kind of “I’m the boss, you’re the slave” mindset can only be changed if the marketers themselves demand the growth of their own roles.
That’s why I have written about, and will continue to call for, an increasingly strategic role for not only the CMO, but the entire marketing and selling function. I think the entire function needs to be retooled, to recognize a more stepwise integration between marketing and sales (no more murkiness!), and, simultaneously, a more team-oriented partnership between fee earners and their marketing and selling professionals.
Now, I must go back to gleefully stabbing and hacking at windmills!
September 7th, 2007 at 5:19 pm
Suzanne:
I feel as if I have been mistaken for a windmill, and a nearsighted rider is hacking at me. I am on your side, Suzanne! What you want is desriable and right. I have only said that it will be very hard to get where you want to go, given where you are starting from.
At an annual meeting of SMPS (Society for Maraketing Professional Service, an organization made up primarliy of marketers from architecture, engineering and construction firms. For more information, go to www.SMPS.org) the executive director reported that a huge precentage of the members, 42 percent, if I remember correctly, had changed jobs over the past year. To me that doesn’t conger up an image of an idealic work place where hard working partners and marketers work sublimely together late into the night and then sit around a fire place eating marshmellows together.
Today, being a marketer at many a professional firm is a high burnout job. It’s damn hard work and under appreciated. The average professional has no idea how much hard work it is. When I was director of marking at a firm, a project that one of my colleagues, Linda Lukas, had been pursuing for over two years came in staving off a reduction in staff. When an senior member of the professional staff asked what the cheering was about, I told him and he responsed, “That’s great! And we just started going after than one a couple of months ago!” Clueless! Not Simon LeGree, or Idi Amin. Just clueless! And almost deliberately so. The professionals often have no idea of how hard the marketing staff works.
How many times have I gone to a partner and asked him for his part of a complex proposal and been told, “I’ll get to that later. I don’t write well uneless I’m under presure.,” or words to that effect. How many times have you heard that, Suzanee? I know something about writing and say whithout hesitation that this is an anssenine self-indulgence, that condemns the marketing staff to one more feverish effort, working way into the night to get the proposal out. One more night working into the wee hours that pushes a marketer that much closer to contributing to the high turnover rates.
Of course, there are partners who care and appreciate the contribution the marketers make, but not enough. In how many firms does a marketing person have a real opportunity to become a partner? Have you seen any research on this subject? If so, please let me know. But, I’d bet heavily that the percentage who make it is miniscule.
Yes, the small firm marketer should be spitting nails, but not at me. Or you. We are all on the same side. The case for making the marketing staff equal players in the firm needs to be made again and again. And no one does that better than you. The real difference between us is that I see the battle as much harder to win than you do.
Now, go back to your windmills. I’m tired of getting whacked. And you can do far more good whacking and stabbing somewhere else.
Ford Harding
September 23rd, 2007 at 9:08 am
Dear Ford, and for that matter, Susan:
A marketer, like any other member of a service firm, has to earn partnership by demonstrating that he or she adds signigicant value AND is a good team player. I suspect that many of the marketers you mention in your postings are great team players. They probably demonstate their team spirit everyday, simply by the way they act in the office.
However, proving that their efforts add significant value is harder to do, for several reasons.
1. The partners want to take credit for the big wins.
2. The partners do not want to set the precedent of elevating a mere staff member to the partnership for fear of having dozens of staff members whining at the door.
3. Marketers aren’t “professionals.” Or, if they do have a degree, not the right kind.
4. It’s extremely difficult to isolate all the variables that go into a big win. If a partner had a meeting, or played golf with a potential client, then who will give credit to the marketer for seeing the opportunity long before the first ball left the first tee?
I am more interested, naturally, in my own battle, which is that I am a sole proprietor with a virtual team. I do all the sales and marketing. I’ve been in business since 1996, and for almost all that time, it was ALL SALES, NO MARKETING!
I managed to live in a nice house in a nice town in New Jersey, send my daughter to Yale (I did not qualify for financial aid), and encourage my wife in her career as a childrens’ book author. And all by picking up the phone and saying, “Hi, this is Sims Wyeth. This is what I do. This is what it could mean to you and your company. You want to meet me and talk about it?”
It’s exhausting. I’m burned out. My entire life depends on me picking up the phone. I get lots of repeat business, but not often enough. I am the embodiment of all three–the partner, the salesman and the marketer–all at war with each other, trying to find the right balance, to make the most efficient and effective use of the limited resources, which in my case are time, money, and my own energy.
Why should I be blogging when I could be on the phone with clients? Or why should I be blogging when nobody reads my blog? Why shouldn’t I do what I have always done–come to work and pick up the phone? I would love the chance to think aloud strategically with a smart marketing guy, but I can’t afford him. I move forward by trial and error, and believe me, it’s expensive and slow.
I have to stop and go to a birthday party. I’m not complaining. I’m confessing, dramatically, to my own anxieties and frustrations.
More later,
Sims
September 23rd, 2007 at 9:41 am
Sims:
You have done better than most people who set up their own businesses do and have helped hundreds of poor speakers turn in good ones, and in so doing helped them achieve their goals. Listen closely and you will hear my applause wafting through the internet.
You have also done more marketing than you think, producing a highly readable and helpful blog and news letter. (Anyone who wants to take a look should go to www.simswyeth.com) You speak compellingly and have an ear for what sounds right better than anyone I know. So, instead of a large scale marketing effort, why not start a campaign aimed at a niche in your market. Write for this niche’s publication and speak at its association. Mail reprints of you articles and newsletters to the buyers in the niche. Then follow up with some of your cold calls.
Try this for a year and see how it affects, 1) your revenues, 2) your reputation, and 3) the revitalization of your spirit. If you do this, please let me know how it goes. I will be especially interested in item three, both as an observer and as a sufferer.
Ford
February 15th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Inventing Your Own Book-Selling Strategy
Sun Tzu once said, “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”