For many professional service marketers, especially in the architect/engineer/construction (A/E/C) industry, their firms are totally driven by “billable hours.” Project hours -- hours that are reimbursed by the client -- inform and/or govern virtually every decision in an A/E firm. And all technical staff have goals for how billable they should be (project hours as a percentage of total time).
However, because marketing staff generally bill their time to an overhead number rather than a project whose labor costs are reimbursed by the client, many of these firms don’t recognize that marketers make a contribution to the firm's bottom line. Somehow, they don't see the initial winning of the work as contributing to the bottom line.
In many firms, this creates an adversarial relationship between marketing and technical staff.
Many technical staff are led by firm managers and principals to believe that the marketing staff -- like the accounting and word processing staff -- are simply "leeches on the corporate profits" their work produces. They don't seem to get three things:
- Without marketing staff, there would be no new projects to which they could bill their time.
- Without accounting staff, invoices would not go out. There would be no revenue and, thus, no paychecks.
- Without word processsing staff, many of the final deliverables would not exist unless very senior people did their own typing, graphic design and page layout (not the best use of their very expensive time).
Some years ago, I worked for a major national A/E firm. The principal constantly reminded me that the technical leader's client was the owner, but my client was the technical leader. Since we were apparently not working for the same client, the technical leader had a hard time understanding that he/she and I were on the same team. This made it easy for the technical person to see me as something other than a contributor to the "win work" effort. I could be utilized but ignored just like the proposal's word processor or graphic designer.
So what's the fix? How do we promote an understanding of our contribution to the bottom line and overcome the bias against marketing (overhead) staff?
First, we marketers must confront the bias gently but head-on, and find ways to become billable. Consider the following two examples:
Marketers generally have great communication skills, especially writing and/or graphic design skills which can benefit a (billable) project. Few universities think it is important to teach engineers and architects to write, but marketers can write, prepare graphics for, and/or edit project reports. They can also design and/or write text for project websites, newsletters, and supporting documents and hand-outs for public meetings and/or hearings.
Marketers can provide direct public relations assistance to clients. They can help a client get publicity for a project or help prepare an award submittal. They can help coach a client in presentation skills for press conferences, public meetings or for jurisdictional agency hearings/workshops.
Unfortunately many firms are uncomfortable with the idea of marketers becoming billable because project commitments may prevent them from being available for an "emergency."
In this context, an "emergency" is defined by an RFP that was released with a due date 30 days away, which a principal or technical leader buried on his/her desk for three weeks, thereby creating that emergency.
Many years ago, when I suggested to my principal that I could obtain billable hours, he actually gave this as the reason he didn't want me to look for billable hours.
Having billable hours helps put marketing staff on more of an equal footing with technical staff in how they are seen to contribute to the firm’s success. Changing this perception can help make the relationship between the two groups less adversarial and more collaborative.
Once this shift in perception is accomplished, perhaps we can convince the technical staff and our principals that winning the work in the first place DOES contribute to the bottom line.