"It's not that I don't want to market, it's just that I don't have the time," is the cry of the harried professional. In other words, he's saying "other things were more important to me". What could be more important than marketing? Dealing with clients and practicing my profession is the answer I receive. Yet, professionals who say this are sincere and genuine. What can be done about this problem? The first Issue to deal with is perspective.

What happens if you don't market?
Will the client flow continue interminably?

If the answer is yes, then you don't need to market. Take this newsletter and give it to a professional who doesn't have an infinite client base. If the answer is no, then you need to worry about marketing even though you are busy!. For most professionals, their client base is very much like an orchard. Trees die all the time, no matter how well you tend them. Clients go away all the time, too. Clients die, they sell their businesses, they merge, they become dissatisfied because the moon is in the seventh house, or the professional commits a big boo-boo and the client grabs his file and leaves in a huff. This means you always have to replace clients just to stay even, never mind getting ahead. So, if you aren't marketing, you're losing ground every day. You're getting weaker and weaker.

But, what to do about being busy?

First, are you really that busy? Are you really working that many hours? Remember, a professional is an entrepreneur and a business owner and long hours come with that territory. If it was really easy, 95% of the population would be entrepreneurs, rather than the other way around.

Second, how much of the work that you're doing should be delegated to someone else?

Another one of my sayings is, "A professional firm is nothing more than a collection of brains." We should be choosing the correct brain to do the appropriate job: the science and art of delegation. I remember once waiting quite a while to interview a Nobel laureate-level scientist who was being paid in excess of $200,000 a year. When I finally got in to see him, he apologized, explaining that he was busy doing his own filing, as his employer had failed to provide him with a clerk. My computation told me that each piece of paper cost $25.00 to file. Not a good utilization of an expensive resource. The same phenomenon occurs everywhere. Over and over again, we find professionals performing functions that should be handled by a lower-level staff person. This has several negative effects: the partner is left with no time to market, the client is billed at an excessively high rate, the firm loses opportunities to utilize subordinates, and profitability suffers.

Why don't professionals delegate?

Sometimes they are perfectionists; sometimes, they haven't focused; sometimes, they have no one qualified to delegate the work to. Why don't they have someone qualified to delegate their work to? Because firms are neither skilled nor careful enough in their hiring; the weak sisters are not winnowed out soon enough and not enough senior professionals take an interest in training junior staff: As a result, there are often few really promising juniors and even fewer who know anything. This results in there being too few staff to delegate to and the seniors saying, "They'll screw this up royally, and it will take me three times as long to fix it. I might as well sit down and do this myself." Consequentially, those marketing phone calls get delayed another week and then another week...

What are the solutions to this problem?

A. Make sure you hire the best and the brightest juniors. Don't settle for mediocrity. Look more, look longer.

B. Assign each junior to a senior whose task it is to monitor and mentor that junior. Remember, the single greatest expense for a professional firm is labor and to have a $40,000, $60,000, $80,000 inexperienced junior wandering around the halls without supervision is fiscally irresponsible. Make sure that the new recruits who are winners are stimulated, trained and given opportunity. Make sure that the new recruits who are losers are identified and excised and replaced with stronger candidates. Remember, the life of the partner will be difficult or easy depending heavily upon the skill of the people beneath him/her.

C. Offer mini-courses in delegation and supervision to your seniors so they'll know a little about management and motivation. These skills are not found in the D.N.A.. They must be taught.

D. Periodically, review the types of tasks that seniors are doing to help them identify which tasks are appropriate for them and which should be delegated to others. (When you're on the treadmill, it's difficult to be objective about one's own work.)

E. Offer in-house training courses for juniors taught by the seniors. Create a curriculum of study. Require each junior to take each important unit. Keep track of attendance. Assign a senior or two to develop, coordinate and monitor the process. Once you get it going, brag about this program to your clients and prospects. They will be impressed with your high-quality orientation. Again, if you recruit, supervise and train more effectively; You will give your partners more staff to delegate to and, hence, give them more time to market.

How much time should you be devoting to marketing?

Some of my colleagues say 40% of your time, others say 30%. I say as much time as you can, but at least 10%. This 10% can be spent on making phone calls, writing letters, attending hockey games with centers of influence, etc. The problem for most professionals, however, does not center around a debate of 40% or 30% or 10%. The truth is, that most professionals are spending 2% or less of their time marketing. With such a slim investment, the yield will be correspondingly slim. There is no way around the following truism:

Marketing takes time, and you have to be willing, and able to invest the time.

Finally there is real merit to quietly sitting down one day under a Weeping Willow tree and asking yourself what should the business life of a partner or senior professional be like, ideally? Would we want them to work very long hours, putting in as many billable hours as possible? Is this what a partner should be doing? Or, should that partner be billing a moderate number of hours and devoting some time to firm issues and some time to marketing? It would seem to me that the latter is a much more rational, humane and profitable way to run a firm.

So the next time you hear somebody saying, "I don't have any time to market" - ask yourself, "What is wrong with this picture?"

If you would like to learn more about sales coaching, contact SIC today!