Is Your Firm’s Marketing Culture Limiting Its Growth?

Part 1: Arrested Development

Bruce Ditman — November 3, 2021

This Corner Talk is the first part in a series in which we will explore various marketing cultures common in professional services and how they may be limiting your growth.

Before we begin, let’s start by giving ourselves a pass. There is no blame to assign here—not to leadership and not to marketing. As we’ll discuss later, it is very likely that if marketing culture shortfalls exist that they are actually a function of your success and growth.

The two models I see the most often (and the ones I want to talk about first) are what Chief Seconds calls the Administrative Marketing Culture (AMC) and the Completist Marketing Culture (CMC). For this week’s Corner Talk, let’s explore what an Administrative Marketing Culture looks like and how it stacks up (where it falls down). Give a read below and consider if any of these traits could apply to your firm’s marketing culture:

The Administrative Marketing Culture Firm:

• Has grown its marketing functions out of administrative functions. 

• Leadership closely directs the marketing function (Click here to read all about the damage this can cause in our Corner Talk about the Accidental CMO)

• Feels its marketing is reactive and under-resourced

• Makes unsuccessful investments in technology (CRM anyone?)

• Has a marketing organizational structure that has very large gaps in function and vision.

• Suffers from poor brand coordination 

• Marketing is top-heavy from a salary perspective (a leader with 15 years of raises at the top but no bench strength)

• Sees all marketing as overhead

• Leadership and professionals often feel dissatisfaction with their marketing department for a perceived lack of inspiration or strategic thought

• Struggles to keep good marketing talent because that talent discovers that they’re at an AMC firm.

Here’s the matter at hand: Firm strategy should drive both marketing and practice. In an AMC firm, practice drives marketing and strategy is replaced with immediate need.

Ringing any bells?

That’s okay if it does. Here’s why: High-growth firms often find that their operational functions lag behind practice areas. It may just be an unfortunate side effect of your success and a totally fixable one at that.

“Hey, Bruce, that’s not us!”

That’s cool. I’m sure you’re correct. Tell you what: tune into Part 2 as we dive even deeper into firm marketing cultures with a look at the AMC’s “photo negative” cousin, the Completist Marketing Culture.

Chief Seconds knows that it takes all kinds to make a business successful and there’s no one right way to do things. We hope to inspire positive change at your firm with our insights, coaching, and organizational services. If you’d like to start working on this today, click below to start the conversation