The Professional Services CEO’s Expectations of Marketing: An Interview with Ed Boswell, CEO, The Forum Corporation
The Forum Corporation is a world leader in helping organizations train their people to execute their growth strategies more quickly and effectively. From nearly 40 years of experience in helping hundreds of global companies, Forum helps executives transfer critical skills, attitudes and capabilities throughout their organizations. The Boston–based firm helps clients make the change in employee attitudes, beliefs and behaviors that are critical to executing a growth strategy.
Ed Boswell is CEO of Forum and a sales executive by professional upbringing. For six months, he has also been the firm’s interim CMO in addition to his CEO responsibilities. This experience has given Ed unique insights on the CEO’s expectations of marketing – and the difficulties that CMOs face in proving the value of marketing in professional firms.
In late June, Bloom Group Partner Susan Buddenbaum interviewed Ed on his view of marketing from the chief executive’s chair.
Bloom Group: What should a professional services CEO expect from his or her chief marketing officer?
Ed Boswell: I expect the CMO to be a thinking partner on the strategic level. I need someone to help me think about our business strategy and our marketing strategy. What are the most important elements of marketing and, given our unique situation, where should we allocate our scarce resources (people and money)? First and foremost, speaking for myself, a CEO needs a thinking partner engaging me around our strategy and how to execute it.
I see marketing strategy as an outgrowth of business strategy. At Forum, our marketing strategy this year is simple: We want to have different conversations with different people. This means we want the people who run large and complex organizations—a new audience for us—to understand how Forum helps execute the people side of their strategies. That’s a different conversation for us. The marketing activities we choose, the lists of people we target, the editorial tone we set, everything needs to be geared to a different level and different individual in the organization. So I think the intersection between business strategy and marketing strategy has to be very clear.
I’d expect someone to have a marketing plan that backs up the business strategy and a way of capturing feedback on how the marketing plan is working. I want marketing to have the strategy, the plan, the budget, the activities, the implementation and a way to assess our target audience’s experience and impression of our marketing activities.
I want a CMO who is in my face every day pushing my thinking and challenging me with new ideas. My rule of thumb is if I’m not saying "No" half the time, you’re not pushing enough or being creative enough. It’s important to be in the CEO’s face rather than just being responsive to the CEO’s ideas. I’d rather have a CMO who brings ideas to me, who says things like: "We have a new idea. We think our target audience will respond. With your OK we’d like to experiment." That’s the model I prefer.
BG: How can marketing best demonstrate its value to your business?
EB: Clearly, there are quantitative and qualitative measures of marketing’s value. I’m not concerned about whether marketing generated $1.25 of revenue for every dollar spent. But I am concerned about whether we have an adequate process for knowing what marketing activities work, what messages work and what activities and messages don’t work.
When other Forum functional heads come to me and talk about what a great job the marketing team is doing or when we hear about the great client feedback we got on a marketing event or other marketing activity, that makes a difference. When we get direct testimonials from clients, that’s almost better than any quantitative data on value.
BG: Can you elaborate on what you mean by the qualitative side of demonstrating value?
EB: There is an analogy here to how a professional services business works with its clients. In our business, it’s often hard to draw a straight line between the work we’re doing with an executive group (such as leadership development) and their company’s bottom–line results. There’s a line of sight but not always a direct correlation.
That’s where stories and anecdotes provide immense value. We do use quantitative and qualitative measures in our work. Sometimes we have the luxury of conducting before–and–after testing on leadership skills or we have the organization rate a leader before and after an intervention and we are able to measure improvement. When working with a sales organization, you can see if sales went up as a result of your work. So, sometimes we can assess. But more often than not the more powerful data are the stories.
For example, here’s a story one of our longstanding clients tells his organization. The CEO of a regional energy processing, transporting, and marketing company did not think his people understood the company’s strategy and vision. At one point he was quite discouraged and didn’t even have confidence that his direct reports understood the firm’s direction. He was out in the field organization one cold winter night in Bangor, Maine riding in a truck with a driver delivering home heating oil. He and the driver took a break for coffee. The CEO asked him how things were going, what he thought about the direction of the company and working for the company. It brought tears to his eyes because the driver could describe the strategy on the napkin at a restaurant counter. The driver said how proud he was to work for the company with this vision and direction.
The CEO told us he was incredibly gratified that his strategy was successfully communicated from top to front line. He will tell this story over and over because it’s the best evidence he has that the investment he made in working to align and equip the organization around the strategy was paying off. If everyone understands, it affects how they make decisions, how they work and their motivation—all of which adds up to better performance.
So, quantitative data on marketing impact, while important and necessary, is not always sufficient in professional services. There is often more powerful impact captured in a good story. Marketers have to value the power of a story as much as analytics.
BG: Many of our clients tell us their marketing, sales functions and practice or service development groups do not work effectively together. How should marketing work with sales and the "R&D" part of a professional firm?
EB: One of the things I’m thrilled with this year—one thing I now really value—is tightly integrating marketing, sales and R&D within Forum. I had a meeting last week with representatives from marketing and R&D. It was one of those moments where we all realized the value of being tightly integrated. As you well know, for the past six months we’ve really tried to meet and coordinate on a regular basis across the teams. It is now so much easier to see points where we can piggyback on each other’s activities and we can do so far more efficiently and effectively.
The marketing team was designing how to follow up with attendees at a client conference. The event had been highly successful and we wanted ways to remain maintain relationships with our attendees after the event. Independently, R&D wanted to do research with that same audience. When marketing and R&D talked, they realized they could integrate efforts and have multiple ways to stay connected, conduct research and provide value to the client.
In the past, this wouldn’t have happened. The two organizations wouldn’t have known what the other was doing. Marketing wouldn’t have talked to R&D and wouldn’t have seen the opportunity. If by some chance they had seen the opportunity, it would have been a multi-hour meeting to get on the same page. This turned out to be a 15–minute meeting where R&D is thrilled that marketing asked for follow–up ideas. Conversely, marketing is thrilled because it has two to three activities it can take forward to keep our clients engaged.
My expectation now is that the field [sales] and R&D and marketing are all going to work much closer together. We are not "all the way to bright" yet but we can feel the traction and momentum. At one time in our firm, the sales group was a big obstacle for the marketing group. Now marketing and sales are very responsive to each other and well–coordinated. In terms of marketing expectations, marketing being connected and having good relationships is really important.
BG: How does marketing establish credibility with other parts of the organization if it hasn’t had that credibility?
EB: I don’t think there’s any one way. Early this year our marketing team didn’t have sufficient credibility, and the sales regions were largely doing their own thing. We [marketing] got really very clear on what we could deliver. We went to the field and said, "Over this time period we have this much budget and bandwidth to do this amount of work on behalf of sales. If you want to think about conferences, webinars, briefings or other marketing and lead-generation activities, this is what we can do month by month. If you want to do something, here’s the role we [marketing] will play and here’s what you [field sales] will have to do."
To gain credibility, we had to be very clear with ourselves and others about what marketing could deliver. That was a big change. Second thing was marketing then pulled it off. We did all of it that we had said we could do. Part of gaining credibility was being clear, and part was delivering as promised.
Marketing was also clear on establishing a different working relationship with the field. We set expectations for what we could deliver but also for what we needed back from them and in what time frame. The field appreciated that we were prescriptive.
And lastly marketing gained credibility based on the quality of the marketing activity. Having clients telling people how much they valued the activity made a huge difference. It’s not us internally — it’s the client that matters.
BG: Having run marketing on an interim basis, you’ve stepped into the shoes of the CMO. What do you now realize about marketing of professional services that you didn’t fully appreciate before?
EB: I will really miss being the head of marketing [laughter]. I appreciate how challenging the task is. I now understand that sales people think completely differently than marketing people!
One thing I’ve come to realize is there’s a distinction between activities that are sales activities and those that are marketing activities. There are certain things sales needs to own and other things marketing needs to own. I now realize how important it is to be clear about marketing’s role vis–a–vis sales. I have much more clarity. Other organizations might cut the pie differently [the roles and the boundaries]. But I’ve found a way that makes sense for me and for Forum and generates alignment between the two organizations.
As an example, I recently heard that one of our sales regions was launching a campaign on the same topic that marketing had planned a significant global campaign around. Once my marketing team heard that we said, "Wait a minute. You can’t do that. It’s part of our campaign." Then I found out that what the region had really done was contract with a telemarketer to attempt to set appointments with a single target executive in each of a specific list of accounts. Once I heard that, I realized it was a very targeted prospecting campaign—a cold-calling effort into one buying center with one specific message with the intent of getting appointments.
Why wouldn’t every region do that? That’s the sales role, and it was far different than the activities marketing was about to undertake on a much broader level. In fact, the two campaigns could work together. While the sales executive is at the appointment, he could say, "Are you on our mailing list? We’re in the midst of a launching an event on driving organic growth. Would you come to our webinar or our breakfast briefing?"
In that moment, I began to realize we blur sales and marketing, make it far too difficult and get into struggles about who owns what. I now have a much clearer idea of where marketing starts and ends and where sales starts and ends and how the two work together effectively.
Another thing I’ve learned is that in the past, like a lot of other non–marketing people, I was drawn to cool and innovative tactics. I’ve learned that you really need to start with your marketing objective, your target audience, and your message and all of a sudden those things that seem cool may be totally irrelevant to what you’re trying to achieve. They would not get to the people I’m trying to talk to. Marketing starts with what you want to achieve and the message and then talks about activities. Prior to this role, I’d start with activities.
BG: What in your opinion is the importance of the professional services brand?
EB: The importance of brand in professional services has two dimensions. Brand helps position you in a market space. Brand can be very important in terms of saying who you are vis a vis the alternatives out there. It obviously gives you visibility but should also put you in the right place on the map so nine of 10 times when people call they are calling for the right reasons.
The second dimension is that brand helps you establish your position with targets. Whether you are the value–add provider (and can therefore be charging a premium over the competition), or, alternatively, you are the low–cost provider, that image is set through your brand.
When a professional services firm has a strong brand, its employees can make better decisions about such things as the presentation approach with a prospect, what they choose to wear on a sales call, everything. It’s easier to make decisions if you have a strong brand to align to internally.
Everything a company says and projects is aligned. The pedigree of the team, the clients they serve, the way the employees look and speak and present materials all sets the brand image for the client. So, for instance, if a professional services firm makes some bold assertions and puts forth a bold price in a sales meeting, the client believes it makes sense because of the brand image.
I’ll share an experience I had recently with a company that we are considering hiring for some visual communications. I discovered the firm through a presentation they had done on YouTube and I did some research to find them. They do very high–quality work, some really cool stuff. I was talking to them about how they could help us with some specific types of projects. Their product is fantastic and the people were very polished. What was so interesting was when I asked about price. I didn’t want to express my surprise but the salesperson could have said significantly higher and I would have expected it.
I had a brand perception based on the people I interacted with and the quality of their clients. But their pricing was not consistent with my image of the product and perceived value.
BG: One last question…Forum is a global business. What is the most difficult aspect of marketing a global business?
EB: This has really come out through the strategic global marketing work we’ve done with The Bloom Group. Can we have a global marketing strategy and plan? It’s challenging to have one message that applies to all markets equally. If you want to be super relevant in one region, it makes you less relevant in others. What it means is that if you want a global message, it has to be a high–level message. And then there has to be a blend and a balance between global and local efforts.