CPA Firms and Their Marketing Directors; Marketing Professionals Have a Lot to Offer - If CPAs Make the Most of Their Expertise
NINA HAMBERG is President of Hamberg Taylor Associates, San Francisco, a marketing consulting firm specializing in the accounting and legal professions. Before founding the firm, she held in-house marketing positions for eight years and was director of marketing for KMG Main Hurdman, San Francisco. Marketing professionals have a lot to offerCPAs make the most of their expertise. tin directors have la ed a role in CPA firms for more than a decade. Unfortunately, the relationship between firms and marketing professionals can be a rocky one. In-house marketing directors leave their positions after an average of only two years, frequently because of misunderstandings about what marketers can or should accomplish. Often neither the marketing professionals nor firm managers are quite aware of what caused the problem and what can be done to build a more productive and harmonious collaboration. If CPAs are to enjoy the benefits of in-house, professional marketing expertise, they must have a blueprint for integrating nonequity professionals into their firms. They also must have a clear idea of what they want before they interview the first candidate. Hiring and retaining a marketing director is only one piece of the puzzle. For a program to succeed, a firmwide commitment to marketing is necessary. This article describes how firms can achieve their own business objectives and retain talented marketing professionals. It details six steps that can help ensure a marketing director's productivity. START WITH STRATEGIC PLANNING Strategic planning is a systematic process that defines the firm's identity, what it does best and what specific goals it expects to accomplish in the next year or so. Planning may be done for each practice area, for each industry served or for the whole firm. It is vital that firms engage in strategic planning before they commit any resources to a marketing effort. Planning should be done before the director is hired, a step that often constitutes a firm's largest allocation of marketing resources. Strategic planning helps educate partners about what marketing accounting services really means, namely, a combination of research, planning, goal-setting and action steps (or tactics) necessary to accomplish goals. Strategic planning demands a new way of thinking. Many CPA firms focus their marketing efforts on tactics. They hold seminars, develop brochures and mail newsletters, all to increase new business, but they must support their tactics with an underlying strategy. They must set goals for what the tactics should accomplish numbers of inquiries from prospective clients, for example, or new services performed for existing clients-and plan to monitor their success. Planning helps demonstrate the difference between strategy and tactics. Strategic planning should involve at least the firm's senior partners and maybe all partners. Marketing consultants can be called in and assigned to gather intelligence, synthesize information, make recommendations and facilitate discussion. Alternatively, a partner with good communication skills, the respect of peers and a willingness to devote approximately 100 hours (for a small to midsized firm) to the process can facilitate planning. In doing strategic planning, partners learn to ask-and answer-marketing questions such as * How are we perceived in the marketplace? * What advantages do we hold over our competition? * How should we best communicate these distinctive selling points? The process helps firms develop a game plan. Partners can then identify opportunities and decide which are best for them. For example, without the benefit of planning, partners might believe that if a competitor offers a tax seminar, they must do so, too, when in reality another marketing tactic might be a better investment of their time and money. Partners also will be less inclined to place nonproductive demands on a marketing director's time once a game plan is formed. …