Some time ago, I was conducting a weekend-long workshop with a major professional service firm on the topics of marketing and selling their services. Many subjects were covered, including strategic positioning, targeting of key prospects, selling skills, client service, and the relative merits of seminars, brochures, and newsletters.

Toward the end of this two-day workshop, one of the participants stood up and said, “This has all been very interesting, but you have just confirmed what we all already knew about this subject. Why don’t you ask us why we haven’t been doing it?”

This challenge sparked a spirited discussion that led to a litany of managerial, operational, and personal reasons that had impeded these professionals from executing past marketing initiatives. Indeed, they did already know what they should and could be doing, but had not implemented what they knew.

This same pattern has been repeated time and again within professional firms. Past attempts at organizing marketing efforts simply have not delivered results, in spite of a good understanding of “what works.” From these experiences, I have learned that, for many professional firms, the “marketing problem” is frequently not really about marketing. Rather, it is a managerial problem: how to ensure that “things happen.”

Excerpted from ‘Managing the Professional Service Firm’ by David Maister, page 133