When a firm has a true market orientation, it is focused on its clients and how to deliver top quality services to those clients. Robert C. Sawhney of Hong Kong based consulting firm SRC Associates Ltd, explains how marketing, when done properly, can maximize a professional service firm’s financial performance.

Some professional service firms think of marketing as an add-on that involves promotional materials, such as websites and sales brochures. When marketing is viewed this way, its ability to lift a firm’s performance is, at best, hit and miss.

Professional service firms are different from consumer product companies. As a knowledge-based firm, an accounting firm’s ability to leverage professionals’ experience and know-how depends on whether it can engage its people and link the core activities of strategy, marketing, human resources and knowledge management. This will fail if you don’t have the full support of your staff.

When a firm has a true market orien-tation, it is focused on its clients and how to deliver top quality services to those clients. It seeks to understand clients and the marketplace, and share that information within the firm. This allows the firm to provide an upward spiral of better services, and new and innovative products.

Value creation

Professional service firms are in the enviable position of being able to create value for their clients once they embrace marketing as a way to serve them.

Marketing tactics such as advertising or promotion are not the whole picture. In addition, many firms hire marketing staff in the belief that marketing belongs solely within the marketing department, but a marketing culture needs the commitment of every employee from the top down.

A marketing mind-set adds value because it helps the firm decide what it wants to be known for, what clients it wishes to serve with which services and how the firm can structure itself to ensure it stands out.

Some practices within professional service firms tend to hold back performance and erode client value:

• Reliance on hourly billing
• Lack of direction and values on the part of management
• Consensus decision-making
• Lack of business training for professionals and knowledge sharing among partners, practice groups and offices
• Culture focused on partnership promotion track

Some professional service firms have changed their business models to valuing knowledge and results more than time; that is, they have switched from a focus on billing to a focus on sharing knowledge and great results.

Most clients care more about results and the value you can deliver than they do about your time – they care about what you can do for them. In many firms, the existing working structures and systems work against delivering value.

Training and education

To become more market-oriented, a firm needs to change its mind-set. One of the best ways to achieve this is through training and education, with a strong focus on successful case studies.

Once a firm realizes that client value is the cornerstone of success and requires the integration of various company functions, it will be ready to change. A market orientation will give you the mind-set, culture and tools to ensure change is headed in the right direction.

For more information any of the topics included in this article please contact Robert C. Sawhney who is the managing director of SRC Associates Ltd., a Hong Kong marketing consultancy.

This article was previously published in the January 2010 APlus Magazine which is the journal of the HKICPA

Article Date: 8th July 2010