Perhaps you don’t.
Marketing to increase business volume so you can work harder doesn’t sound appealing if you’re already at capacity. However, even if you don’t want more work, you may still want to increase your firm’s health and improve morale. Beefing up the marketing function can help you do these things.
One way to tell if marketing will benefit your firm is to ask yourself these questions:
• Are we meeting our profitability goals?
• Are we in heaviest demand by our ideal client-types?
• Do we receive frequent referrals from our clients?
• Is the work that we do stimulating and enjoyable?
• Is our personnel retention above average?
• Are we attracting personnel whom we trust to succeed us?
• Are we attractively positioned for acquisition?
If you answered “no” to any of the above, marketing can help.
• Do we serve too many problem clients?
• Are we doing too much low realization work and not enough high realization work?
• Do we ever set (or reduce) the price after we’ve done the work?
• Are some partners eager to market while others are content, or even complacent?
If you answered “yes” to any of the above, marketing can help.
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Right on, Michelle!
Great blog, particularly that comment about too many problem clients. A friend told me about a practice at their firm: they would get the staff together once a quarter and vote one client "off the island". It didn't mean necessarily severing relations with that client, but it told the partners that they needed to pay some attention to that relationship.
Accounting vs. Marketing, round 2
Funny, reading this post, I'm reminded of a funny 'top ten' list on the differences between marketing and accounting. Generally, they spend, we save. It's funny to think of the list in the context of this story. I'll try to track down the top ten.
-- Geoff D Community Advocate, Indicee.com