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Upcoming
Speeches:
Convert
Your Marketing Role into a Strategic Firm Leadership
Position, SMPS-PSMA Build Business 2007
National Conference, Washington DC, August 23,
2007 (details)
Articles
and Publications:
What
Would a Female Superhero Do for Gender Diversity?,”
American Bar Association’s Tort, Trial
and Insurance Practice Section newsletter,
July 2007
Suzanne
Lowe contributed to: Marketing
Metrics De-Mystified: Methods for Measuring ROI
and Evaluating Your Marketing Effort, by Sally
Handley FSMPS, President of Sally
Handley, Inc.. Sally is an adjunct faculty
member at Pratt Institute in Manhattan, where
she teaches Marketing /Communications for design
firms.
Practice
Management: Re-evaluate how you evaluate your
marketer (PDF), by Suzanne Lowe and Sally
Glick for Accounting Today, September
2006 (also published with permission on The
Marcus Letter)
Why
You May Not be Truly Differentiated, Consulting
News, September 2006 (available to CN subscribers
only)
Hallmarks
of an Effective CMO (PDF), The Marketer,
August 2006
New
from the Expertise Marketplace Blog
Ford
Harding’s advice on growing books of business
with clients
How
to overcome cross-selling hurdles – inside,
and those that clients erect
How
Professional Service Firms Can Think Strategically
about Selling
"Cross
selling: more than selling from Point A to Point
B"
Just
Say No to limited CMO jobs
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all the posts at the Expertise Marketplace blog
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The
Marketplace Master™ is a monthly email publication
on professional service marketing from Expertise Marketing,
LLC.
A
Fresh Approach to Service Portfolio Management
After
writing this monthly newsletter column for more
than three years, you would think I'd have
run out of luck finding newly relevant material for
my professional service marketing readers. My decision
to focus the 2007 newsletter series on individuals "doing
things differently" was in fact a leap of faith
that I could find a professional service marketing leader
who has demonstrated a notable level of audacity, or
that s/he would want to speak candidly about it.
I
admit, I had my doubts about this as I announced my
intended theme in
January.
Now,
seven months along, two things are clear: one, gutsy
people do indeed have a measurably positive effect on
professional service firms' marketplace achievements,
and two, professional service marketers are indeed finding
fresh ways to deepen the strategic importance of their
firm-wide roles.
These
two epiphanies are brought to light with this month's
issue on "service portfolio management."
You'll hear about Jim Lanzalotto, who joined Yoh,
a Philadelphia-based talent and outsourcing service
provider, in 2000 and soon afterwards became its first
ever Vice President of Strategy & Marketing.
This
is one of the few times I've heard of these responsibilities
being explicitly combined in a professional services
enterprise. This functional integration is noteworthy,
because it underscores the competitive benefits of rigorously
deploying the marketing function instead of the more
limited marketing communications conception of the role.
Suzanne Lowe
Author, Marketplace Masters: How Professional Service
Firms Compete to Win
President, Expertise Marketing, LLC
Standing in Front of the Bus
One
of the key issues for any professional service firm
is to continually improve the profit performance of
its services. Often it's a challenge to know where to
begin. Soon after he joined Yoh, a $380 million unit
of privately-held Day
& Zimmermann, Jim Lanzalotto determined that
he needed to stand in front of the bus so that his colleagues
could see the strategic advantages of adopting a portfolio-management
approach to Yoh's services. Lanzalotto wasn't afraid
that he would get run over, but he knew he needed a
compelling way to get directly into the headlights of
his firm's management.
He
employed three focused techniques to make a difference.
First, he advocated a "marketing is science, not
art" approach to help the firm develop higher-end
services. Second, he looked at Yoh's services
portfolio from a brand management standpoint. Third,
he established and tracked measurable benchmarks that
were acceptable to Yoh's management.
The
result was that Yoh took a dispassionate look at its
businesses, and made critical improvements to its service
portfolio.
Jim Lanzalotto
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We
focus on technology, healthcare and professional
markets. The overall market for talent services
is roughly $130 billion overall domestically,
and our particular amenable markets range from
$30-40 billion a year in sales. It is a big
market without a lot of differentiation. Last
year we reviewed research about the brand recognition
of companies in our industry. Our potential
customers had 50% aided recall about two of
the big three brand-name players in our industry,
and 17% aided recall about the third biggest
player. That says to me, as a marketer, that
we have a great opportunity; no one company
has significant mind share in the industry.
That means that Yoh has a chance to do something
compelling that makes a difference in the marketplace.
We also saw research in the spring, about respondents'
awareness levels of different companies in the
talent and outsourcing services space. Our awareness
scores were zero. But when respondents were
asked, "Would you consider using Yoh in
the next 3-6 months," we scored 9%. So
that indicates to me that our message is getting
through.
From
research we did in 2001 on the key buying indicators
for decision-makers who buy talent and outsourcing
services, we launched Yoh's first-ever
brand campaign, focusing on delivering the highest
quality talent. Yoh was a 60-year old undifferentiated
company with multiple undifferentiated sub-brands
in the IT, scientific, civil and structural
engineering markets. So we needed to brand our
entire firm and have a consistent message out
to the marketplace. We needed to stand for something.
We developed a tagline, "Know greater
talent," which is a good solid message
based on what we knew the market is concerned
about – high-demand talent.
We
did more research and developed more messaging
off that, to back up our claim. We learned that
the quality of talent delivered by Yoh was considered
to be 24.7% greater than the talent delivered
by our competition. We scream that as loud as
we possibly can, and everywhere we can. When
someone asks, "What makes you different than
ABC," we can factually say, "Well the people
we deliver are 24.7% better than anyone else's."
In
terms of benchmark data points, we decided to
use Fred
Reichheld's Net Promoter Score. We wanted
industry data against which to compare ourselves.
For our industry as a whole, the average Net
Promoter Score in 2005 was -2; in 2006, it was
3, which means that buyers were more than a
little dissatisfied with the companies in the
industry. (The scale is from 1 to 10 and aggregates
to 100.) World class companies are, per Reichheld,
at about 80. Yoh was rated at about 50. So,
while the talent and outsourcing services industry
is in the bottom, we are up towards the upper
end. From a loyalty perspective, then, the trend
line shows that we are currently ahead of the
market.
Our
work to manage our brand through research and
benchmarking gave us the context we needed to
make some strategic decisions regarding our
core markets and services. Specifically, we
made some decisions to exit certain businesses
and other decisions to deliver some of our services
through the web. Our goal was to leverage content,
community and commerce.
Less
than a year after I joined Yoh, I stood in front
of the bus and said, "Let's put
together a venture with a just-established internet
company, featuring a revenue-share to help us
convert our customers over to a click-and-mortar
business model."
Our
leadership team's big push-back was: "You mean
we are going to dedicate how much business
to an alliance with a company that has been
in business for only nine months?" I said,
"We need to partner with an eBusiness firm to
provide the commerce part of the equation as
part of an overall customer-focused portal strategy."
Essentially this portal handles many of the
requests our on-site people would usually get
from talent that we've placed at a customer's
site. For example, what it is like to do business
at that location, what it is like to be a consultant
or contractor at XYZ company, vacation schedules,
holiday schedules, dress codes, and all that
stuff that used to take us away from adding
value to our customers. We realized that, using
this partnering model, we could meet our goals
to leverage content, community and commerce.
In this case, the commerce was going to be provided
by our partner, the community would be fostered
by all of the interactions online between our
people, consultants, customers and suppliers,
and the content would be delivered by us.
About
a year later, we changed eCommerce partners
and went with SAP, which has provided an incredible,
market-leading engine and portal component.
We
went from $0 in online revenue in 2001 to $197
million in online revenue in 2006. Along the
way, in 2004, we received an Impact Award for
innovation for this service from ASUG, SAP's
users group. Today, this online revenue represents
roughly half of our business. It is a very strong
offering and growing. The nice thing is that
this service is not a pure web-based model;
it completely integrates offline services into
our broader managed services portfolio. It's
a great way to add value to our customers.
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Kicking up a fuss: part of a marketers' job
Lanzalotto's
work to drive Yoh's marketplace growth has gone far
beyond most professional service firms' current conception
of branding. It's clear that his charisma and professional
passion have played no small part in Yoh's success to
create and deliver more value-added services. But so
did his willingness to stretch traditional norms. He
cannily leveraged his managers' desire to "brand"
into truly substantive – and measurable –
services improvements. And he did it by employing factual
data, defining a clear "starting point," and benchmarking
to track the progress of the firm's entire service portfolio.
"Kicking
up a fuss is mostly my job," concluded Lanzalotto.
"I say that jokingly, but when it comes to developing
a marketing strategy to best drive the company to where
it needs to be, that is what my team is here to do."
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©
2007 Expertise
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