January 12, 2024

Working With Marketing Without Making Them Typists

Marketing teams in professional firms are too often asked to format documents at the last minute. The result is that the firm pays for design and brand judgement and gets neither.

Bring marketing in at the start

Invite the marketing lead to the kickoff call, not the final review. They can shape the story, spot repeated material and warn about what has already been said to this client in other channels.

Invite them to the client research too. Marketing often has access to public information, past campaigns and audience knowledge that partners have not seen. Combining these with the partner's relationship knowledge gives a fuller picture of the buyer.

Agree who owns what

Marketing usually owns brand, layout, the content library and the firm's public voice. BD and partners own the client relationship, the price and the substance. Write this down. Most friction comes from unspoken assumptions about who decides.

Where roles overlap, name a tie-breaker. If marketing and a partner disagree on a headline, who decides? Having a settled answer before the conflict avoids a last-minute stand-off, and usually the answer is that the partner decides on substance and marketing on presentation.

Give them the inputs in usable form

Late, messy content produces late, messy documents. Set a content deadline well ahead of the release date, and agree what a finished section looks like. A short template for biographies and case descriptions saves hours.

Provide examples of good and poor inputs. A marketing coordinator who has seen a well-written biography knows what to ask for. It also reduces the number of revision rounds, which are where most of the hidden time goes in proposal production.

Share the pipeline, not just the requests

If marketing sees the pipeline, it can prepare material before a request arrives and can point out where the firm lacks proof for a target sector. That is a better use of their time than reacting to a deadline.

Regular visibility also helps marketing plan its own work. A team that knows five proposals are due in a fortnight can schedule design time, while a team that learns on the day will work evenings and produce weaker results. The firm pays either way.

Use tools to reduce the typing, not the thinking

Drafting assistants and library lookup can remove a good deal of copying and pasting. The point is to free marketing for editing, structure and visual clarity. Decide together which tasks are automated and which stay with a person.

Do not automate the parts of marketing's job that need taste. A tool can propose a structure or trim a paragraph, but a person decides whether the result sounds like the firm. Make it clear that the tools serve the team, not the other way around.

Review the working agreement quarterly

Meet briefly each quarter to look at what slowed the last few proposals. Adjust the agreement based on that, and keep it short enough that people remember it.

In that meeting, ask marketing what they would change about how BD works with them. The answers are often small: a better request form, a clearer naming scheme for files, earlier notice of deadlines. Small fixes add up to a noticeably smoother process.

Respect each other's constraints

Partners face client deadlines that cannot move. Marketing faces production limits that cannot be stretched without a cost to quality. Both are real, and a good working agreement acknowledges them instead of pretending that effort alone will close the gap.

When a request is truly urgent, marketing should be told why. When a request is routine, it should be scheduled. Separating the two categories honestly is one of the most effective ways to lower the temperature between the teams. Over a year, a steady and fair working relationship will do more for proposal quality than any single tool, template or restructuring of the team.

VIPMarketing Editorial