Reposition marketing as a growth driver

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In many professional services firms, marketing is still considered a cost center.

If this is true in your firm, here are a couple of things you can do to get marketing the recognition it deserves as a growth driver.

1. Move from support to insights

Support teams are often told what to do – sometimes even when and how to do things.

If you’re serious about marketing your firm’s solutions, you should be in the lead.

A position you can claim by providing your colleagues with insights, i.e. valuable things they don’t know yet. Like…

• High-value client challenges and their willingness to pay.
• What the competitive landscape and market alternatives look like.
• How your ideal clients’ industries evolve and what sustaining needs they have.

Back in the days, uncovering these insights would take a lot of time. Now, you can fire up a free AI chatbot like Google’s Gemini and get a pretty decent snapshot in minutes.

Maybe, you’ll find the LLM Powered Market Research tool I’ve built useful.

2. Map the buyer journey in your CRM tool

In many professional services firms, the most senior subject matter experts are in charge of selling solutions. 

As a results ‘leads’ are only logged in the CRM system when proposals are sent out.

That’s way too late.

If you only log proposals sent, you’re ignoring the fact that a prospective client first moved through an entire buyer journey.

During which they first became aware of a challenge, then recognized how painful, urgent, and expensive this challenge was to their business, then realized they needed a solution and only then discovered yours as a trustworthy option.

Ideally you log everything that happens in the awareness, consideration, and decision phase of the buyer journey. Allowing you to track prospective clients, get an idea of what your sales pipeline looks like and attribute generated revenue to marketing and sales efforts.

3. Bridge the gap between marketing and sales

Marketing and sales are not the same. Each is a different discipline. However, they’re both required if a business wants to generate revenue.

Acknowledging these facts is a great way to start bridging the gap between marketing and sales.

Next, you can…

• Set shared revenue goals.
  
• Decide on a structured process and supporting tools. Agree on what the buyer journey for your clients looks like, what efforts needs to be taken and by whom, what labels you’ll use for prospective clients in the different phases of the buyer journey, and what system will be your single source of truth.
  
• Work together in cross-functional team on a new solution or a number of key accounts.

4. Measure & report the right things

With the advent of online marketing, it’s easier than ever to track all kinds of marketing metrics.

However, marketers need to be mindful of two things:

1. The insights most online media offer are metrics that are important to them – not necessarily to you or to your business.
   
2. Most of the time, these metrics are not actionable. You can’t really take a business decision on number of page views or Likes.

If you’re serious about growing a business you need to measure and report on metrics that matter to a business. Like…

• Inbound-Outbound Leads Ratio – Self-initiated vs. pro-actively generated leads. Which tells you something about brand awareness, reputation, and authority.
• Sales velocity – How quickly deals move through the pipeline and generate revenue. 
  
• Client Lifetime Value – How much revenue your business generates from an average client. 
  
• Client Acquisition Costs (CAC) and Payback Period – How much it costs to acquire a new client and how long it takes before you earn back these costs.

If you like more tips on how to track growth performance and decide on the right metrics, read this article.

Hope this helps you change the perspective on marketing from cost center to growth driver.

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Thank you for reading MBD Spark #102, sent on February 24, 2026.