New Book Review: "The Integration Imperative"

Recently posted book review for The Integration Imperative: Erasing Marketing and Business Development Silos – Once and for All – in Professional Service Firms, by Suzanne C. Lowe, Professional Services Books, 2009, reposted here:

Author Suzanne C. Lowe writes that many professional service firms exist in a state of confusion due to a less than optimal structure for deploying marketing and business development. "Business development (selling) is a one-to-one activity. Practitioners' brains (well, their brain power) are the 'products' clients are considering for eventual engagement. But marketing is a one-to-many activity, and is best deployed from a firm-wide, centralized purview." And "without an optimal structure for marketing and business development, the potential for confusion creeps in when one-to-one fee-earning practitioners want to get involved in the one-to-many aspects of marketing". She continues to write that "any misunderstanding of the optimal scope of the marketing and business development function causes 'disconnectivity' and waste". After a discussion of the structural and cultural challenges to marketing and business development integration, Lowe discusses how individual "doing things differently" efforts within a professional service firm can impede effectiveness if such initiatives do not have integration as a springboard.

Lowe's Integration Imperative concept, which consists of the Process Imperative, the Skills Imperative, and the Support Imperative, three interdependent structural frameworks, embeds marketing and business development into the function of every individual within a professional service firm. Through these three frameworks, respectively, the author suggests that professional service firms "broaden the scope of their marketing and business development functions, better balance them strategically, make them more discernible to everyone in the firm, and make them more obviously iterative", "reframe their advancement pathways – for practitioners and nonrevenue-generating staff – to more clearly outline the steps every professional can take toward competency growth in marketing and business development", and "create more formal avenues for function-to-function collaboration, shared accountability, and co-leadership for marketing and business development".

The third part of this book presents 11 case studies (from Korn/Ferry International, Holland & Hart, Perkins+Will, Moss Adams, IBM Global Technology Services, Haley & Aldrich, Baker Donelson, Ross & Baruzzini, Jones Lang LaSalle, R.W. Beck, and Randstad) to demonstrate the effectiveness of the Integration Imperative when applied to professional service firms, and the frank business leader quotes liberally provided throughout are one of the best features of this book. A quote by Scott Jensen, the first Moss Adams director of sales, illustrates the practicality of these case studies: "I knew our people got the message that there is a difference and dependence between marketing and selling. They understood that we cannot effectively sell unless we market, and that we cannot market unless we sell, and finally that without superior service, both are wasted. Marketing is too expensive without selling. Selling is too hard without marketing…When we market effectively and sell correctly, we establish the basis for serving passionately." Similarly, a quote by Ranstad's chief marketing officer Frans Cornelius: "The key lesson is that it is all a matter of organizing and communicating internally. To win outside, one must start on the inside. One would think that the marketers would be excellent communicators, but sadly this is not a skill that is learned a lot in marketing education. Typically, marketers tend to communicate within their own circles – with agencies, other marketers, seminar participants and the like. Yet marketers must become expert at communicating to general managers and CFOs!"

This reviewer also appreciates diagrams such as Figure 9.1 which shows the connection between passive and active aspects of marketing, sales and service along the path from messaging to revenues. The appendixes are also well done, especially the second that includes several templates, including the Skills Imperative template which outlines how associates, consultants, and senior consultants can be involved along with principals/senior managers and owners/management executives in the Integration Imperative. Regardless of whether you read this work in an as-needed "à la carte" fashion like Lowe suggests, or start-to-finish, as a consultant this reviewer expects that all individuals working in professional service and business to business firms stand to benefit. Well recommended.