Building a marketing function that can withstand change
In professional services, the product talks back
Most marketing careers start with a product that stays where you put it. You learn to understand an audience, brief an agency, evaluate creative or manage a campaign. The product is passive.
In professional services, the product talks back. And it will tell you exactly what it thinks.
The fee earner is not a passive recipient of marketing. They are a commercially trained professional who has spent years learning how to make arguments, hold positions, and win rooms. When a marketer walks in to brief them, challenge their thinking, or defend a recommendation, there is an asymmetry of knowledge. The fee earner generally holds the cards.
I've spent about 25 years in B2B marketing in various sectors. I've learned how to deal with tricky situations, negotiate a position or persuade a partner to try something new. But I still come up against a difficult conversation that throws me off, or find the idea we originally believed in being watered down with multiple reviews. When you look back the thinking and the work was good but something happens in a moment and it starts to go off track.
The gap we need to train for
Mark Ritson has made a compelling argument recently that marketing suffers from a competence gap. Too many people in the profession are not technically trained to do the job. He's right. But for professional services, technical competence is only half of what the job requires.
The other half is situational competence: the ability to read what's happening in a specific moment, name it, and respond effectively.
We send our marketing teams into some difficult situations. A junior marketer, two or three years in, is routinely sent to work with a partner who has been negotiating in client meetings for twenty years. That partner has been trained, formally and informally, in negotiation, influence, and how to hold a position under pressure.
In these situations, the marketer has to earn the right to be a strategic advisor. They need to have the tools to respond without either caving or escalating. Otherwise, the project or campaign often ends up being a compromise.
The design process
I wondered if this was something we could solve. I started writing things down. Specific situations I'd been in and how I wish I'd navigated them differently. The partner who arrives late and reopens a decision you thought was made. The feedback that sounds like a preference but is actually a veto. The meeting that ends with everyone nodding and nothing agreed. For each one, I tried to capture what should have happened. What would I do differently now?
The list got longer than I expected. Over a period of a few weeks, I captured 28 moments which I put into six categories. The Brief, where the foundation gets set. The Room, where decisions get made. The Work, where the idea gets reviewed. The Relationship, where your standing is built. The Reckoning, where outcomes are evaluated and the Internal Moments, where the marketer's standards are set.
The four tools
I settled on four tools to navigate these moments. Something simple that you can remember and apply in the heat of the moment.
The pressure to leave the room with a plan is one of the first moments I wanted to crack. A partner says something that changes the direction of a piece of work, or a meeting starts moving towards a conclusion you don’t think is right. The Hold is language that gets you out of the situation without having committed. It requires you to recognise the moment as it occurs and to have language ready that buys you the time to think properly.
The second thing was the level of the conversation. I had a vivid memory of a partner who was obsessed with appearing on the home page of our website. When someone more senior starts moving a discussion towards the executional the temptation is to follow them there. The Reframe is the move that brings the conversation back up. The language you use is important. You are normally in a room with someone more senior, more experienced, and who knows their area better than you. Anything that makes them sound tactical and you strategic will rub them up the wrong way.
Can you spot when a project might not go according to plan? I think you can. Perhaps a junior person is briefing you who is unsure of the detail. Perhaps you can tell a project will need wider approvals than those in the room. Maybe the team hasn't considered the timeline and what's involved. The third tool I called The Ask. Its about recognising these flags early and planning accordingly.
The Mirror works differently from the other three. It is less about a specific moment and more about habits. Professional services marketing involves compromise. You will not always get the brief you wanted, the approval you needed, or the campaign you believed in. The Mirror is the practice of knowing what good looks like regardless, and holding yourself to your standards.
The other half of the equation
Mark Ritson is right that technical competence matters. But in professional services, the training budget does tend to be invested in technical skills. Campaign planning, data analytics, digital skills. The situational half rarely makes it onto the L&D agenda with the specificity required for the job.
The good news, is that I think these moments are learnable as a set of specific situations with specific responses. Once you can name them, you can prepare for them.
Pivot Brand and Marketing works with leaders in professional services firms who are building or rebuilding their marketing function. If the thinking in this blog resonates, take a look at how we work or get in touch at hello@pivot-marketing.co.uk.