Calibrate consultant Gordon Braun-Woodbury‘s article, “The Essential Partnership: How IT and Marketing/BD Can Drive Results Together,” was published in Legal Business World’s eMagazine.
The article addresses the critical role of healthy collaboration between CMOs and CIOs, the inherent challenges to this partnership, and how sustainable success in the tech-heavy future of our industry demands it.
So how can these two critical business functions work together more effectively in a law firm? To find out, Gordon interviewed a group of Marketing and IT leaders from professional services firms. Here’s what we heard:
- Seek role clarity: IT and Marketing/BD leaders need to agree on their respective roles in moving the firm forward.
- Broaden and deepen relationships: While the IT/Marketing partnership starts with the CIO and CMO, it needs to extend much more deeply into both organizations.
- Bridge the language gap: within any marketing/BD organization there are people who are fluent in tech and data – just as you’ll find people interested in marketing in any IT organization.
- Create an investment roadmap: Most IT leaders are quite accustomed to the long term reality of tech investment, and are very good at creating multi-year business cases for funding large technology purchases.
- Reinforce annual planning: The goal should be to achieve a reasonable balance between planned initiatives and on-demand support.
- Learn about each other’s differences: Marketing and IT face different types of challenges which can undermine their partnership, but rather than quickly judging the other’s behaviour, both groups need to consider each other’s realities in their interactions.
- Become “Thought Partners”: Advances in technology and proliferation of data are creating huge opportunities for IT and Marketing to become “thought partners” who collaborate on projects and goals for the greater good.
