Organising for success
Getting the best out of your Marketing function
What are the key factors that should determine how you structure your business development and communications function? If only I had the luxury of enough marketing people to make it an issue, I hear some of you cry. Actually it isn't only a question for those global firms with seemingly hundreds of support staff. Those with limited resource have an obvious need to marshal their forces as effectively as possible.
There are some golden guidelines that we at Gracechurch Consulting have learnt, often rather painfully, over the years. Firstly, establish the ground rules:
What stage of development is your firm at on this continuum?
Firm evolution
1: Demonstrating
expertise
Technical (eg. legal, accounting, insurance)
2: Managing technical director relationships
Technical issues as affect individual clients
3: Managing board relationships
Consultancy selling based on business issues
This will absolutely dictate the types of marketing and business development activities your firm should be engaged in. For example, articles in technical journals are a good way of demonstrating technical expertise and upscale corporate hospitality events are useful in developing board relationships.
How clear is your business strategy? Are you predominantly developing existing clients or targeting new ones? And where are they based?
What's the culture of your firm in terms sales orientation of the partners? Is decision making getting more centralised?
Once this is all clear you can start to build your organisation structure based on your business and marketing objectives and using the following principles:
- Place the marketing or business development support at the point of decision making. This helps build understanding, rapport and trust. Clearly where this is dispersed you need to check that your budget allows it. For shared resources, one of the ways round might be hot desking at 2 or 3 locations. And don't forget to put in place mechanisms to ensure this decentralised marketing team still learn from each other, enforce central policies and share best practice. If your budget won't run to any real degree of decentralisation, then at least allocate named marketing or business development individuals to groups and solicit feedback on their performance from the group heads at regular intervals.
- Where scale allows, separate 'communications' from 'business development'. Both functions are equally important and certainly the plans MUST be integrated - indeed the communications plan objectives should fall out of the business development plan - but it is highly unusual to find both skill sets in one individual. And it's human nature to allow short term, urgent tasks to take precedence over the longer term ones which are more likely to be the business development activities.
- Outsource as much as you can, particularly if you're in the initial stages of developing the function but make sure you've got the skills and resource internally to manage these contracts effectively. Areas that, in our experience, seem to be particularly well suited to outsourcing are PR, event management and publications' production but it's all too easy to underestimate the internal resource required to manage the suppliers in the rush to realise the business case savings. There are also other areas, like client research and key client satisfaction surveys where an independent view adds hugely to the objectivity of the feedback and quality of the analysis. But we would say that, wouldn't we?
- Avoid having a 'Marketing Partner' at all costs. In our experience they are the kiss of death. Either this type of activity is worth senior management time or it's not worth having - always assuming you've empowered the head of marketing/business development to deal with the mainstream stuff.
And finally, unless your senior management is publicly committed to marketing and business development and prepared to lead by example, save your budget to spend on useful stuff like more wine at the Christmas party...
For more information on this, please contact one of our directors on +44 (0)207 220 4480.
