and marketing drives client-centric practice, it’s ‘professional services marketing 3.0.’
by bruce w. marcus
professional services marketing 3.0
today, we are entering a new phase of accounting marketing, in which marketing is not only integrated into the tax and accounting practice, but actually helps shape the nature of the firm itself. this is professional services marketing 3.0. it’s new. it’s different. it’s better. and it’s already winning in the marketplace.
professional services marketing 3.0 is characterized by marketers – professional marketers, accountants, firm managers – who fully understand the nature of practice, as well as the techniques and skills of marketing professional services.
there is a new generation of accountants who, unlike their predecessors, fully understand that marketing is as much part of the practice as billing and other financial controls. even the process of the growing field of knowledge management, long considered primarily technical for acquiring and managing internal data as a management function, is now beginning to include marketing data as integral to managing a firm. and why not? no professional firm exists without its clients.
where once project management was taken for granted, there is now a more sophisticated approach to it, as part of a growing firm management professionalism needed to improve productivity.
competition has sharpened the practice, and helped introduce new services that better serve both the firms and the clients. the changes are phenomenal. it has led to more streamlined firm management and service structures, benefiting both the firm and its clients.
it’s a new partnership between the professionals, who are imbued with a true understanding of the meaning of marketing to a contemporary practice and their inevitable role in it, and marketers who fully understand the markets and services, and the personalities of accountants.
if the last generation marketers better understood the craft and tools of marketing professional services, the marketers of 3.0 better understand the practice of accounting, the profession’s disciplines, fundamental characteristics and tasks in the actual practice of accounting, as well as the distinctive personality traits of accountants. at the same time, both marketing and accounting professionals now better understand the principles and practices of marketing.