April 1997 Marketer Articles

Anatomy of a 21st Century Marketer

By Bruce Lea

One day, not quite twenty years ago, my brother was meeting with a city council member from a mid-size city in middle America. He was engaged in a debriefing to learn why his company’s proposal to be awarded the franchise to provide cable TV for the city had been unsuccessful. The council member ended his rather convoluted explanation by exclaiming, “All your company offered was the best service at the lowest price!”

POLITICALLY CORRECT

While a whiff of something unsavory may be implicit in the council member’s remark, we should not be too hasty in jumping to conclusions. After all, how many times have we believed, or even been told, that we had the “best” proposal or presentation for a project, yet, it was awarded to another firm?

Perhaps our definition of best proposal is too narrow. The best proposal is the one that responds most completely to the full agendas of most, or all, decision makers and influences involved in the selection process. Each has his own impact on the outcome of the process and each has a constituency to whom he must respond, even if it is a constituency of one.

Former Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, was fond of saying that “All politics is local.” Putting my own spin on Mr. O’Neill’s phrase--here in the twilight of the 20th century, all design or construction firm selections, public or private, are political. Stop and think for a few minutes about corporate politics, neighborhood politics, and, of course, political politics. Understanding that, and being able to discern and influence the political process inherent in each project opportunity, is the fundamental talent required of a professional service marketer at the millennium

TALENT VS. SKILL

Notice I used the word talent rather than skill. A skill is a set of physical or mental activities that can be learned. Talent is a God-given ability. True, talent must be developed to realize its potential. Practical experience, alert observation, and purposeful study all develop awareness, feel, and reflexes that become an almost intuitive sense of what to do and when to do it.

In the process of developing talent, one must identify, learn, and refine the set of skills necessary to play the game. Hard work on the essential skills is a prerequisite for a player to reach his full potential. Some fail because they do not pay that price, but dedication alone is not the only differentiator. There are many youngsters who spend hour after hour dribbling and shooting a basketball, but there’s only one Michael Jordon. Both talent and skill are required to generate star quality that is so difficult to define yet so easy to recognize.

If the ability to grasp the political process is a fundamental talent, then what are the complimentary skills for our game of marketing professional services? This fusion of skills and talents make a potent combination:

With the advent of technological changes, presentation skills, both oral and written--are essential to a marketer’s success. Today, verbal skills are barren without graphics, or at least an imagination about how graphics can add impact and clarity. If one is to stay competitive, the marketer must possess at least basic graphics and conceptualization skills.

The “Stepford Marketer” also needs sales skills to get appointments, handle objections, sell unsolicited services, negotiate contracts, and close deals. Of course, computer skills for communications, word processing, graphics, and data management, along with adeptness at organizing and managing multiple tasks, are essential.

As if this was not enough to make your head spin, the 21st Century marketer also requires professional skills and knowledge in the disciplines he is selling. Clients are increasingly probing for insights into the challenges and issues they face. The marketer who cannot provide information of value is in jeopardy of losing credibility. By offering fresh perspectives and proposing new approaches, you will gain the kind of advantage that comes when a client has confidence that they have found a source for solutions.

One would think that this could only be a mythical creature who has such an array of skills, except that every now and then I get a networking call from a headhunter who has been assigned the task of finding such a person by a firm that thinks one actually exists. Perhaps someone who possesses this myriad of skills does inhabit this universe--after all, Michael Jordon exists. (Now that I think of it, there was this bionic marketer named Diane Creel.)

BE A TEAM BUILDER

Even Michael Jordan requires a team around him in order to win, however. One of his talents is that, for all his individual brilliance, he understands that basketball is a team sport. A superstar like Jordan can only be truly successful if his entire team is successful.

There is that word, talent, again.

In the professional services arena, team building is essential to best serving the needs of our clients. The quintessential marketing team is like the three legs of a stool:

1. Professional/Technical
2. Sales or Business Development
3. Marketing Support

I am so sorry that the title marketing coordinator has been devalued in some people’s minds because I think it actually describes the role of the support person quite well. Despite pejorative connotations of the term “support,” this function can exert considerable influence and control as so aptly and humorously depicted in Liz Quebe’s February 1997 Marketer article. Each member of the team may possess some degree of proficiency in all three skill sets, but each will tend to be stronger in a certain area. In addition, time requirements for the tasks involved in successful marketing may be synchronous, but they are not coincident. If each of the three performs his role optimally, the team will succeed at a high achievement level because each will be able to leverage the others’ time, talent, and skills for greater effect.

CREATING STRATEGIC ALLIANCES

No matter how skilled you are as a technical professional, business development representative, or marketing support whiz kid, your success over the long haul depends on your ability to form alliances within your firm to create this kind of team. Long rangers have no place in professional services marketing. They either:

All of these dilemmas lead to peaks and valleys in the revenue stream. If you work in a firm in which you cannot find the other two legs of the stool--recruit if you have the clout, or--you may want to consider moving on. In order for the firm to be successful, professional services marketing must be treated as a team sport.

No matter how young or inexperienced, the person who has an instinct for political strategy and team building, provides the kind of added value that leads to advancement. Those talents enable a writer or graphic designer to become vice president of marketing rather than a senior writer or graphics manager, and an engineer or architect to become a senior partner or CEO.

Those talents enabled my brother, for example, to capitalize on what he learned from the city council member some twenty years ago: The best proposals may be more or less than the “best service at the lowest price.” They are proposals that build a coalition of support, even advocacy. If those kinds of proposals are produced time-after-time over a long period, then they are the product of a well-built team.

If you possess those talents, develop them and find a place where you can make them flourish. You will be blessed with success and you may even convert a job in professional services marketing into a career that will last into the new millennium.