Most firms want to grow and know they need someone to help. They may call this person “Marketing Director,” when they really want someone to get out there and close deals. They may call this person “Business Development Assistant,” when they really just need someone to order pens with the firm logo. It is extremely unusual for one person to have skills in all four areas: Marketing, Business Development, Sales, and Training. It is unreasonable to expect your hire to do all of these things well. Here is a chart that lists the responsibilities and skills sets for the four types of people most commonly needed in professional service firms:

Marketing Communications
“Image Makers”

Responsibilities

• Brand development
• Advertising
• Website & Newsletters
• Sponsorships & Public Relations
• Firm marketing plan and budget
• Niche marketing plans
• Write and design proposals
• Market research
• Plan events / seminars
• Manage CRM database
• Communicate internally

Skill Set

• Write, design, photograph
• PR: pitch stories to media
• Manage projects
• Hire vendors
• Market research
• Strategize from experience
• Gain partner buy-in
• Have and implement creative ideas
• Database skills
• Must have terrific communication skills

Business Development
“Openers”

Responsibilities

• Meet new people
• Conference attendance
• Networking
• Make appropriate introductions
• Tee professionals up to speak or write
• Transition contacts to business
• Know all about a certain niche
• Get professionals on the right opportunities
• Work with partners on marketing plans
• Must have real credibility to build relationships

Skill Set

• Meet new people
• Discern valuable relationships
• Develop new relationships
• Understand and develop new opportunities
• Basic technical understanding
• Great relationship skills
• Follow up

Sales
“Closers”

Responsibilities

• Take leads and turn them into clients
• Work with attorney teams to sell
• Write or organize proposals
• Make presentations
• Follow up on opportunities
• Discern good opportunities
• Close deals

Skill Set

• Structure and sell deals
• Work in sales teams
• Cold calling follow up
• Relationship transitions / hand-offs
• Sell
• Network
• Lead / relationship development
• Must have real focus to get deals done

Training & Coaching
“Developers”

Responsibilities

• Sales, networking, cross selling, leadership and
• other training experience
• Curriculum writing
• Deliver dynamic, fun training programs
• Understand needs of firm and individuals
• Learning / culture assessments
• Coach individuals and teams
• Cultural change and intervention

Skill Set

• Platform training / speaking
• Adult education methods
• Curriculum creation
• Learning system creation “Firm U”
• Coaching
• Cultural awareness / intervention
• Writing
• Follow up
• Must have a passion for developing others

Go viral. Start a blog. Join the flat world.

Remember when websites and Internet commerce were only deemed useful for companies that sold products to the general public? You should. It was only about seven or eight years ago.

The virtual storefront promised to do away with bricks and mortar stores. Soon everyone would shop online. While retailers and taxing authorities were figuring out how to handle this new medium, service providers shrugged and returned to their Rolodexes. Their business demanded personal contact. It couldn’t be automated.

Now those same companies are rethinking the opportunities to sell and market their services to an audience that is increasingly accustomed to shopping online before they buy.

Websites are becoming the HUB of marketing strategy. The next generation of websites is Hands-On, Unifying for a variety of sales and marketing programs, and Branded to the company mission and culture. Find out if your website meets the HUB test.

Hands-On
Rather than a billboard or advertisement for your company, websites now have many options to engage the user. The more informational and resource-oriented you go with a site, the more opportunities you have to differentiate your firm from the competition.

Users can join a mailing list to receive a monthly e-newsletter. They can read articles and use tools like calculators and calendars. They can download brochures for specific services. Some service providers are also incorporating audio, video, and blogs to engage users. They include podcasts of seminars and workshops, blogs by various authors on important industry topics, and video testimonials by clients and new employees for marketing and recruitment. These are all ways to get the visitor to know and like you better.

A few websites we like include Carr, Riggs & Ingram (www.cricpa.com), a CPA firm that includes great articles, tax guides and tools right on the home page. Another good CPA firm site is Henry & Horne (www.hhcpa.com), which has attractive photos of its staff right on the home page and easy links to publications and news. Law firm Paul Hastings gives you a sense of its global reach with a news series on doing business in China, a prominent link to its About Us page, and options to view the site in French or Japanese (www.paulhastings.com).

At the Ingenuity Marketing website, we have created a blog for our Power Up! young professionals group, offering tips on networking, navigating the workplace, and building a power base for career advancement. Because young professionals are native to text messaging and chat rooms, the Power Up! Blog (the PUB for short) is designed as an online networking tool.
Check it out at www.powerupblog.com.

We will also soon have podcasts of marketing tips and training
issues in the Free Tools section of our website.

Unifying
Your website can be central to all marketing and sales efforts due to its interactivity, limitless publishing capabilities, and global reach. It can advertise, collect prospect data and résumés, promote practice areas and service niches, and give users a sense of your culture without ever visiting your offices.

Your website can be leveraged as a marketing tool simply by how many other websites link to it. The more links you have, the more likely that people will learn about your company. Once people arrive at your site, there should be tools for collecting data on them. Search engines like Google offer a number of ways to track visitor traffic and how they respond to your site. You can find out which pages are the most popular and what links or promotions visitors used to arrive there. A number of companies also offer website analytic software. A popular one for email tracking is called Constant Contact.

Short surveys, contests, and blog RSS feeds are other ways of collecting data on visitors. Just make sure that these features don’t take a lot of time for visitors and don’t prevent them from viewing the rest of the site. That’s just annoying.

Branded
When you look at your website, it should resemble your firm. The colors and fonts, certainly, but also the general tone of copy should reflect what sets your firm apart from your competition. If you are an upbeat and energetic firm with a young crew of professionals, your website should feel energetic. If you are promoting a culture of trust and stewardship, your
website should feel uptown and classic.

Websites can say a lot beyond their content. If they are difficult to navigate or disorganized, it makes your firm look the same. If the most recent release on the press page is from 2006, communications don’t look like a priority.
If you desperately need new employees but don’t have a Careers page for posting positions and accepting résumés, candidates won’t feel as motivated to contact you.

Professional services are still a people business. If you only have stock photography on your site and no pages with the real people who work directly with clients, you are missing one of the newest opportunities to connect on a personal level. Believe it or not, website bios are one of the most frequently viewed pages on websites, not because competitors are trying to steal your employees, but because prospects and candidates
gauge their next move on whether or not your people look like their kind of people.

In other words, your website may determine whether or not people call you.