New Book Review: "The Integration Imperative"
New 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:
Copy provided by publicist Andrea Harris.
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.