Inspired Reality Blog

Marketing is fundamental to business success. Peter Drucker, the father of modern management is quoted as saying “the purpose of a company is to create and keep a customer”.  It is that simple.

As many of you know my work experience is varied but the foundation of where I have come from is the professional services environment working as an insurance lawyer both inhouse and in private practice.

I was a good lawyer, yet the one thing I was never really exposed to in a formal sense was marketing.  When I was a young lawyer I was advised that it was the job of the partners and senior practitioners to procure work.  So in the early part of my career I was not required to bring in work but was to market for the firm by producing quality work at the operations level.

I then moved inhouse, so the way I marketed there was by being civilised and helpful to the people sitting around me.

Back into private practice and by this time I had a much better understanding about what this whole ‘marketing’ thing was about.  I needed to do so much more than just being a good lawyer if the work was to keep coming in.

Which of course begs the question, why is it that professional services firms introduce the concept of marketing so late in a practitioner’s career? (That is a whole other blogpost).

When I started my current business, I had to market, otherwise there was no work.  Given my limited exposure to marketing in the law I effectively started from scratch and have been on a massive learning curve ever since.

So where are you at in your understanding of marketing?  How good are you at doing it?  How knowledgeable are you about it?  A quick and easy way I found to test this was to complete a free marketing autopsy.  Marc Dussault has been a mentor for me in the marketing arena almost from the start and his marketing autopsy is a fantastic way of determining where you are really at in terms of your marketing.

Try the marketing autopsy for yourself and determine  where the opportunities to better market in your industry lie.  In the current economic climate differentiation is going to be the key so if you haven’t got your marketing plan sorted then there is no better time than now to do it.