3 things to stop marketing directors becoming house-trained poodles.
It’s very easy for marketing directors in a law firm to lose the plot. A marketing director who wants to keep their often becomes focused on internal clients. Paymasters become the audience, but the partners’ satisfaction is the potential clients’ loss. Marketing is at its best when it is trying to shape the firm’s offerings to meet the clients’ needs – in particular the needs that they will pay an acceptable rate for. When marketeers feel compelled to watch their backs the whole time they are stymied; unable to push for necessary changes that clients want they confuse popularity with effectiveness. Over time the situation affects not only clients but the firm itself. House-trained business development staff will increasingly fail to alert the captain and crew of the impending icebergs that litter the legal world of 2010. Three things that can be done to avert this situation:
1. Expose partners to outside expertise. Get lunchtime speakers, circulate articles, offer links to online webinars where the real-world is discussed.
2. Make sure that partners read the right journals – not the legal ones. Things like Marketing Week, Accountancy Age & Probate Weekly (I made that last one up). Then get them to write for these publications.
3. Get clients in to talk about what they like from professional service firms – not lawyers, but all professionals. Then, when the guest has gone, get the partners to reflect on what they have heard and what they will do as a result.
In these ways the marketing director is not the pioneer with arrows in his or her back – s/he’s the leader of a wagon train that will work together to get to the planned destination.