Make your experts fans again

I hate to break it to you, but… your subject matter experts aren’t always the biggest fans of your marketing department.

Whether this is justified or not, they sometimes feel misunderstood. Neglected even.

In order to prevent further damage, provide clarity, and restore trust, I highly recommend you have a conversation with them.

For that conversation there are 3 magic words: Make it explicit!

And also, here’s a visual to help you structure your conversation:

This visual shows you the 5 steps that make up any business*. Value creation, marketing, selling, value delivery, and finance. Take out 1 steps and you don’t have a business anymore.

Just showing your subject matter experts these 5 steps, helps them understand that marketing and selling are essential parts of any business. Also, their business.

When talking to subject matter experts, I usually start with value delivery. This is what your colleagues spend 80 – 90% of their time on. They’re constantly resolving clients’ challenges by providing services.

However, you can only provide services, if you understand your clients’ challenges. And, develop something to help them overcome these challenges: value creation.

Before you can provide your services and resolve your clients’ challenges, you’ll need some degree of marketing and selling. You’ll need to create awareness in the market and generate demand for your services. You’ll also need to remove barriers to buy from you.

After you’ve delivered your services, you’ll need to get paid: finance.

Now, there are marketing and business development tasks in most of these 5 steps.

It helps to recognize that a lot of these tasks are performed largely by your colleagues:

• Enabling client success, when working with clients on resolving their challenges.
• Spotting business opportunities in the market, by following industry trends and combining these with their expertise and experience.
• Creating awareness and generating demand, through speaking engagements, market studies, and one on one conversations with existing clients.
• Selling services, by helping their contacts convince the DMU to buy from your organization.
• Cultivating relationships and trust, by composing capability statements, staying up to speed on current events at a specific client, and having dinner or drinks with them.

When speaking with your subject matter experts…

• Agree on the process, i.e. the 5 essential steps of any business.
• Agree on the marketing and business development tasks required in each step.
• Agree on who will do what. Combine your marketing and business development expertise with their industry and client know how for the best results.

And finally, make sure to align it all with your other marketing and branding efforts.

Hope this helps!

* According to Josh Kaufman in his book The Personal MBA.

Thank you for reading MBD Boost #019, sent to marketers and business developers on September 24, 2024.