"What business are you really in?"
Tis the season when marketers and firm leaders dive deep into excel and power point exercises, as they conduct year-end performance reviews and look ahead towards 2015 planning. I wonder how many will stop for a moment and ask: “what business are we really in?” and take a different approach to short and long term strategy development.
Nearly 55 years ago, Theodore Levitt, a professor at Harvard Business School, articulated the importance of businesses focusing on clients’ needs in an article titled “Marketing Myopia,” which is a Harvard Business Review (HBR) favorite. He posed the question “what business are we really in” and provided a number of case studies, illustrating the peril facing organizations, which have ignored that question. I was recently reminded of this timeless concept not only by re-reading the re-published article, but also because I am beginning to see it more often in professional services firms in the form of marketing officers and firm leadership working together for the benefit of the client. It’s about time, one might say.
Thanks to this “clients first” concept, professional services marketing functions are enjoying a renaissance period. Professional services firms are recognizing the importance of “client centric approach” to their businesses, and thus their business growth strategies, and with that they are changing their historical definitions of marketing to encompass a more strategic and intelligent function. On their end, marketers are doing their part in raising their profiles by utilizing client data and analytics to drive growth and demonstrate their value in terms of dollars and cents. It’s a push - pull process that is leading the way and changing internal growth organizations. This trend is highlighted by the increasing tenure of CMO’s, according to leading executive search firms.
“An industry begins with the customer and his / her needs, not with a patent, a raw material, or a selling skill,” writes Levitt in the aforementioned article. Let that be a reminder that now that the marketing and strategy functions are finally working alongside, it is important to stay focused on what brought them together: the client. While it’s easy to get distracted by budgets, operations and tactics of delivering strategy and business growth plans, put your clients’ agenda first this year.
Consider changing your annual strategic planning process. Facilitate a session to answer the question “what business are we really in,” as well as how have your clients and their needs changed, and whether your business is still in line with them. Put aside the internal political minutiae. Shift your focus from developing new services or re-packaging existing ones to your clients. Expand the scope of the process to include a wider input pool: internal professionals across functions and external industry leaders, and most importantly, your clients. Think innovation, not preservation. Be prepared to reallocate resources in your budgets. And last but not least, make it a dynamic strategic planning / review process that takes place throughout the year.
If all else fails, at least go back through your client satisfaction surveys / interviews and outline just one additional initiative that you are going to undertake in 2015, which will focus on your clients’ needs. It might just help you outpace your competition and re-define your market.
By Mira Ilieva-Leonard
Mira.ilieva-leonard@istile.com
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