Point 1 : Who is responsible for marketing?
Marketing of professional services cannot be the responsibility of the marketing department (includes sales department too) alone. This article will give you an idea about how to organize your marketing function. Please note that in most cases the marketing department does NOT handle ALL marketing functions. All the marketing functions are shown below in the marketing process diagram.
- consulting
- advertising
- legal advice
- turnkey solutions of infrastructure, manufacturing, IT
The difference between Product marketing and the marketing of professional services and solutions is best understood by a concept called SNTBRE. It stands for
- Size and access to market
- Need
- Timeframe
- Budget
- Responsibility
- Experience.
- Size of the market : almost everyone buys soap every month
- Almost everyone needs a soap
- Most buyers will buy a soap over the "next 1 month" time
- They will have kept a budget aside for buying a certain number of cakes
- They would have allocated the responsibility for buying soap to the housewife
- They all have an experience of buying a soap - so they already know a lot about who sells it, what is on offer and what are the prevailing prices.
- A handful / few companies need ERP at any one point of time
- They themselves do not know that they need an
ERP because
they do not truly understand the costs attached to their current manual system - They do not have (obviously) have a time frame in which to buy an ERP
- They do not (obviously) have a budget for an ERP
- Clearly there is no one assigned as responsible to look into the buying of ERP
- They have no experience and do not know who sells, what is on offer, or prices.
- Soap is used by everybody and hence you can use "mass advertising".
Looking for firms needing ERP means searching for "a needle in a haystack" - Since SNTBRE already exists, soap marketing involves explaining "superiority".
For ERP you need to meet the top brass who can create "SNTBRE" first. - In short, for soap, you do "Product Marketing"
For an ERP you do "Concept Selling"
Organizing for selling soap is almost entirely in the hands of the marketing and sales departments because both the input and output is visible to them and is largely within their sphere of influence. The results of the money and time spent in a marketing campaign / effort a standard boxed product can be measured by the number of units sold or by the awareness created by an ad campaign over a relatively short period of time – like a given a quarter.
- speculative and non-billable business development activity.
- business activities which are billable to a client.
In view of all this it is absolutely necessary to define the BD objectives in a professional services firm so that it is clear who needs to do it. The following is a possible list
- The recognition and recall of your name
- Knowledge of your firm's capabilities
- Knowledge of what problems your firm helps to solve
- Circumstances under which you may called to help
- Belief that you can understand and solve the problem
- Belief that you are responsive, concerned and trustworthy
- Willingness to respond to take a call and give an appointment
- That your firm is responsive, concerned, and trustworthy
- That your client retention rates are high
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ReplyDeleteOnkar Chattoraj,Batch 37- PGEMP
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Sir,
ReplyDeleteI found your article to be very crisp and clear.
-SPJIMR Student