My name is Barney O'Kelly. I recently became the head of Solutions and Products Marketing at AlixPartners after having run their digital team for a few years. This is a new role where we're trying to work harder to market the firm's deep technical expertise, particularly in performance improvement, technology, AI, and data areas. While we're good at explaining situations where people might use us, we're less effective at articulating what we do within those situations. Being clearer about this would help as we grow.
I agree with Brian Macreadie on this. I don't think that's my job at all. I think it's a byproduct of me doing my job well. And if people see what we're doing and want to emulate that, that's both flattering and interesting. I see my job as doing the best work I can do to help AlixPartners create the environment and opportunities to win work and attract great people. That's my job. To do that, you've got to find things to say that stand out and are uniquely yours, though I'm not sure about using the word 'distinctive'. I also think you need to find ways to say them that engage people and capture their interests.
There's a lot of sameness out there so you need to innovate. And if that leads to what looks like good practice and other people think it's interesting, then I'm all for that.
I wouldn't necessarily say provocative, but the one I've been most passionate about and advocated most strongly for is around the power of personal brand in professional services. It's been a theme of conversations since my latter days at Freshfields, particularly when I was out on my own and especially now at AlixPartners. Chiefly because the people at AlixPartners are really cool, decent human beings who do incredible work. So building a personal brand for them and a strong market presence feels like it should be straightforward. Psychologically it's not, and I don't see many professional services firms doing it very well. I genuinely think for the right firm, it could be one of the most powerful strands of your marketing strategy.
I genuinely think for the right firm, it could be one of the most powerful strands of your marketing strategy.
I frame it in terms as ‘be seen and make friends’. It’s open to individual interpretation: Who do you need to be seen by? Where do you need to be? Who do you want to make friends with? It's both a simple articulation of what we're trying to do and gives you a structure in which to do it.
I went through various iterations to try and land on something that resonated with people. I found that "personal brand" made people uncomfortable - it feels showy and superficial. Then we got into "building market presence," but that sounded mechanical and process-y. So then we ended up with "be seen and make friends."
Einstein used to say "make it simple, not simpler”, and I think it works on that level. It's open to interpretation at an individual level or a practice level, business level. Anybody should be able to do it.
The truth is there is not a tremendous amount of gap between what professional services firm A thinks about an issue compared to professional services firm B. But what is interesting is what the people who are doing that are thinking and that's what we need to capture and bring to life.
Nowadays standing out from the crowd requires you to give much more of yourself than people have typically been comfortable doing. I'm particularly passionate about it in the context of AlixPartners because I think the people we have here are truly deserving of this acclaim and recognition. LinkedIn is great for this, and the more transparent you're prepared to be, the more vulnerable you're prepared to be – which is a big thing for smart, high achieving people – the more people will connect with you.
We've touched on two terms which I love and hate in equal measure: authenticity and storytelling. I think they’ve lost some of their meaning and impact but they’re both so important.
Storytelling is incredibly powerful. It's been the number one way of transmitting knowledge in our species since we've been able to communicate with one another. It's much easier for people to understand who you are, what you do, and why that matters in the context of a story –and there's a story in everything.
"I'm a really good consultant, and I can do X, Y and Z" is far less interesting than "Let me tell you about the time I did X, Y and Z for this organisation that you've heard of. Here's what happened, here's who was involved, here's how they felt, and here's how I made them feel, and here's what we achieved." You're going to listen to that. Without the story it can be rather dull.
Every interaction you have with a human being is a story, and all you need to do is understand how to get that out of people.
And, everybody has stories, thousands and thousands of stories. Every interaction you have with a human being is a story, and all you need to do is understand how to get that out of people. This is where emotion comes in, which is another thing I believe strongly in professional services marketing. Personal brand, relationships, storytelling, emotion - they all fit together.
I’ll talk specifically about professional services marketing because B2B marketing lumps us in with tech, and they have a very different approach. Professional services is more nuanced. The buying community and process is more complicated and often less accessible to us as marketers.
I think we just really need to remind ourselves what we're here to do - it's to create the environment and opportunities for the business to win work and capture great talent. The environmental piece is around the long-term market presence, brand-building piece - you know, the "long" in Binet and Field's "The Long and the Short of It." And then the "short" is creating the opportunities that help the organisation sell stuff. You can't over-index one or the other, and professional services firms in particular do this all the time.
I think marketing generally and B2B marketing have both lost their way a little bit. People are getting lost in data that's not telling them what they want to know, or they don't know how to look at it properly– it's just massively misleading. And then when they take it to the business, which turns around and goes "So what?" You know, "Oh, we've got X number of impressions on a LinkedIn post. What does that mean?" It all means something if you know how to explain it.
But there's this sort of weird bit of magic in the middle, which is quite mysterious. I think fundamentally it's a relationship game and the profession needs to remember how to market itself as well. And if you're really adamant on personal brand, I think it's really hard to convince people they need to do something that you're not visibly doing yourself.
I've been in professional services marketing now for over a decade and it was very different then to how it is now. That's encouraging, but I still think we need to do more to build relationships and to be really clear about how much we can actually help with things, because we're not miracle workers.
Marketing is one of the few functions that has the absolute permission to be looking outside of the organisation more than we're looking inside it. It's our job. If you do that then you will find inspiration.
I generally say to my team, “just bring ideas!" What I mean is "bring ideas and a way to make that idea happen". The biggest thing is just creating that psychological safety that experimentation is okay. Good marketing needs experimentation. We’re asked: “how do we know this will work?”. My response is always “well, let's find out”. There are very few consequences other than it doesn't work, and then at least you've learned it doesn't work. We spend a lot of time convincing ourselves that something's not going to work before we've even done it. And I'd much rather have the know for sure and ideally why something worked or didn’t work.
And then the final point I say to my team is, look, your successes are yours and your failures are mine. Which sounds noble and wanky, but I believe that's my job, right, to basically be accountable for the things that the team does. But if the team does it well, that's a reflection on the abilities of the person who's done it. The team does it badly, that's a reflection on the person who leads the team for giving somebody an outsized level of responsibility before they were ready. So I think it tracks.
Relationships.
If you get the relationships right, everything else follows. They are the source of your permission to do new and different things. They are the source of your protection when those things don't work. They are the source of the people who will support your ideas and want to do new things. They are your way of mitigating the impact of people's reticence and concern and fear of trying something they've never done before. You get the relationships right, everything becomes an order of magnitude easier. If you don't, and very few people do, you've just made your life more difficult.
And I don't see people doing this enough. They build relationships in the context of a predefined dynamic or a project. That frames the relationship in a completely different context. It's not building relationships because the relationship itself matters.
Be curious. That sounds really naff, but I was talking to a new team member this morning and they were saying, "How much do I need to prepare for these meetings?". I said, “you don’t need all the answers, you need good questions”. To build relationships, you've got to show that you are interested in people and that you're invested in understanding what they do, because that will inform how you can help them. If you only understand what they want, you will only ever give them what they want, and that might not be what they need. If you partner with them, invent and innovate with them, you will be much more successful, and that starts with you understanding them. And curiosity invites curiosity - it may kill cats, but it builds careers!
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