Home > Insights > Articles > 6 Keys to a Terrible Professional Services Marketing Strategy

By Mike Schultz

There must be a secret primer out there on how to build terrible marketing strategies for professional services firms. Over the past two decades I’ve come across so many marketing strategies that have failed for similar reasons, I figure everyone must be in the know and I have simply been left out of the loop.

After much research to find the source, the secret codex still eludes me. So, I am compelled to seize this moment for posterity and codify the process of building terrible marketing strategies. Here goes:

1. Build the strategy from the top down

Q. In a ham and eggs breakfast, what’s the difference between the pig and the chicken?
A. The chicken was compliant, but the pig was committed.

Nothing turns off partners, division leaders, and other leadership types more than being handed a strategy and told to, “Make it happen.” Force feed the strategies from on high and you’re likely to get compliance and not commitment. Practice leaders may take the strategy and run with it, perhaps even put a bit of effort and sweat into it, yet they can and frequently do walk away at the first sign of trouble.

Without going through the process of crafting the strategies and tactics themselves—brainstorming possibilities, performing “what if” analyses, researching best practices, and backtracking when suggested actions don’t seem like they’ll pan out—the team’s dedication to implementation will be weak.

Once the tactics feel burdensome to implement, or at the first sign senior management isn’t going to hold the team’s feet to the fire, implementation grinds to a standstill. Nothing makes a terrible strategy more terrible than one doomed to be ignored or, at best, tolerated by the team members responsible for making it a success.

2. Don’t consult with expert tacticians Equally as devastating as a top-down strategy is a strategy built without input from experts familiar with the underlying marketing and business development tactics. When you identify your specific tactics—even if the tactics are largely decent choices for a successful marketing strategy—without talking with people who have deep, relevant experience, the actual outcome will likely differ from the one you envision.

For example, you might conduct a seminar or webinar and want to fill the room with decision makers, but in reality you generate little or no attendance. Or, you manage to generate some attendance, but then you do a poor job of delivering content that will help you connect with potential clients. (Try a hard-sell approach; most decision makers really despise that.) Then you can ruin your follow-up by not doing it, doing it too late, or doing it poorly.

Maybe you set out to support lead generation and client communication with a website, but end up with a website that no one can find, no one can use, is hard on the eyes, provides no value, is not client focused, and generally reflects poorly on your company. You might then employ direct mail for lead generation and generate no response—with no idea why, and no way to find out what didn’t work!

Leave out the tactical expertise and the terrible marketing outcomes you can achieve are endless.

3. Look only at your own industry and competition
If you want your marketing strategy to never reach beyond average, make sure you look only at your own industry and competition. Let’s say your company is an accounting firm. Make sure you look only at what other accounting firms are doing for growth. Ignore law, management consulting, technology, and consumer products companies. This is a great way to miss out on all the newest marketing trends, technologies, and possibilities. Plus, if you look only at your own industry for inspiration you’ll never be a leader. Being late to the game is a great component to a terrible marketing strategy.

Make sure that when you’re studying the competition to see what they’re doing, you look only at your direct competitors. Following the accounting example, let’s say you’re in a 50-person accounting firm outside of New York City. Focus only on other mid-size accounting firms. Don’t even think about considering what KPMG or PWC are doing, and don’t worry much about what the 200-person firm might be up to. They’re too big for you to care about, and you don’t want to get too many inspirations from companies that have grown well or are larger than you.

4. Don’t create an environment of fervent execution
Even if you allow your leaders to craft the company and practice area growth plans and you have the tactical expertise to get things done, by fostering a culture where marketing and business development are “second fiddle” you will stay in the land of terrible marketing.

A great way to get started here is to set action steps and goals, and not hold people accountable to them. Professional services cultures are often great at ”making nice” and not wanting to stir things up when someone isn’t pulling their marketing and business development weight.

You might think this is a tactical versus a strategic issue. It’s not. Company strategists and leadership must make sure the environmental factors are not in place: Don’t set clear expectations or give feedback, don’t make tools and resources available, and don’t put incentives and consequences in place to guide people’s behavior. (Or, dear CIA disinformation operative in training, set incentives that will guide the wrong behaviors. See what that does.)

To end up with the terrible strategy, it’s also requisite that leadership insure the people tasked with executing do not have the skills and knowledge, are not motivated to perform, and are not, indeed, the right people for the job.

Execution must not be made a strategic priority by leadership—if it’s not a priority, your marketing strategy has a chance to be not only terrible, but tragic. It’s a fantastically terrible and devious marketing strategy that has everything in place that could allow it to succeed, and then just fails because no one gets it done. Brilliant!

5. Don’t plan for behavioral or organizational change
Professional services firms are products of the collective behaviors of the people within the firm. That’s a mouthful, but, in essence, it simply means we are what we do. Marketing strategies are most powerful when they are bold, venture into uncharted territory, are creative and new, and require lots of energy and enthusiasm to implement well.

Thus, almost without exception, a marketing strategy’s success is contingent on some level of change, be it evolutionary or revolutionary.

Regardless of what you set forth in your plan, if the strategists and leaders aren’t bent on making behavioral and organizational change happen, you’ll end up with the same thing you had last year and the year before. Doing nothing different than you have done in the past is sometimes, all by itself, a terrible marketing strategy.

6. Form a marketing committee, then take them to Abilene A family in Coleman, Texas was having a nice afternoon playing dominoes outside. The father-in-law suggests, “Let’s take a trip to Abilene for dinner.” No one really wants to go, but they don’t want to seem disagreeable so they hop in the non-air-conditioned car and make the 2 hour trip to Abilene. Five hours later the family gets back. They’re tired, sticky, cramped from the drive, and recovering from the underwhelming cafeteria meal they had in Abilene. “Wasn’t that a great trip,” one of them dishonestly remarked. Mother-in-law then says, “Actually, I didn’t really want to go but you all seemed to. I didn’t want to spoil everyone’s fun so I didn’t say anything.” Turns out no one wanted to go, even father-in-law who suggested the trip, but they all hopped in the car and went to Abilene anyway.1

Service firms tend to employ smart people. Most like to involve themselves and weigh in on important decisions, such as marketing strategy. Marketing committees form. When these lovely decision-making bodies get nice and big, two things happen.

1. Innovative and interesting ideas get squashed before they can gain momentum. With anything new or visionary, it’s difficult to get everyone to agree and easy for people to say no and poke holes in ideas. The tired, less exciting ideas remain on the table.

It’s kind of like getting 20 people to agree on the same dinner to eat. So many interesting possibilities get excluded for this reason or that. Everyone ends up with macaroni and cheese and a side of iceberg lettuce posing as a salad.

2. People begin to agree with watered-down and uninspiring ideas because they think other smart people agree with them so they must be OK, they’re sick of the ongoing committee discussion, and actions eventually need to be taken. They also know better ideas won’t make it very far, so they publicly swallow the pill and declare “I agree. Let’s go!” Privately they think, “This is a terrible idea, but I guess it’s where everyone wants to go.”

In other words, the committee decision body decides to go to Abilene, and doesn’t look back, sometimes until they’ve spent a year and a half on the trip.

What you’re hoping for here, if you want your terrible marketing strategy to come out in full force, is to encourage pluralistic ignorance, that lovely phenomena that occurs when several people in a group disagree with the norm of the group, but don’t say anything because they think everyone else agrees. Since no one says anything even when they disagree, even if everyone has second thoughts, the room stays silent and the trips to Abilene get spot numero uno on the priority list.

Even marketing strategies that could be good can become terrible marketing strategies if you set your mind to it. If you’re willing to do what you must to keep innovative ideas off the table, let other companies exploit opportunities in the market faster than you do, and structure your organization to stifle frank discussion, commitment, and execution, you’ll be able to come up with the best terrible marketing strategies on the block.

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Inspired by The Abilene Paradox and other Meditations on Management by Jerry Harvey.