1. THE JOURNAL OFTHE SOCIETY FOR MARKETING PROFESSIONAL SERVICES VOLUME 34, ISSUE 6, DECEMBER 2015
CAREERS ISSUE
18 STORYTELLER-IN-CHIEF
22 GETTING TO KNOW SMPS CEO MICHAEL V. GEARY, CAE
28 WHAT MAKES YOU WANT TO COME TO WORK?
30 LET YOUR CAREER FLOURISH SIDEWAYS, NOT JUST UP
2. CONTRIBUTORS
9 Effective Event Networking
LINDSAY L. YOUNG, MBA, CPSM, is a marketing
consultant with nu marketing in Haysville, KS. Reach her
at 316.680.3097 or lindsay@numarketingllc.com.
10 Writing for the Win: Don’t Just Write the Story,
Celebrate the Outcomes
Past president and president-elect of SMPS Virginia,
TRACEY A. GOULD, M.S. IMC, is the director of
marketing for Noelker and Hull Associates and a 1st Place
Zweig White Marketing Excellence Award recipient.
Reach her at 520.907.1977 or tgould@noelkerhull.com.
14 Brand Marketing to Boost Your Firm’s
Marketing ROI and Visibility
SYLVIA S. MONTGOMERY, MBA, CPSM, is a senior
partner at Hinge, a marketing and branding firm for
professional services. Montgomery is a co-author of The
Visible Expert, Inside the Buyer’s Brain, and Online
Marketing for Professional Services. Reach her at
571.238.5378 or smontgomery@hingemarketing.com. or
follow her on Twitter @BrandStrong.
16 How to Build a Webinar Following
BILL READER is corporate marketing director at NTH
Consultants Ltd. in Northville, MI. NTH is a geotechnical,
environmental, and facilities engineering consulting firm.
Reader can be reached at 248.324.5252 or breader@
nthconsultants.com.
18 Storyteller-in-Chief
Marketer contributing editor NANCY EGAN, FSMPS,
focuses on image and content development for firms in
the design community. She writes on workplace issues,
urban design and architecture, and professional services
marketing. A past president of SMPS, she can be
contacted at 310.943.7294 or egan@newvoodou.com.
21 Sidebar: Think Résumé
NANCY EGAN, FSMPS, and MARJANNE PEARSON
Marketer contributing editor MARJANNE PEARSON is
recognized as an industry pioneer in talent, leadership,
and business strategies for architecture and design
practices. She can be reached at 510.452.1460 or mp@
talentstar.com.
28 What Makes You Want to Come to Work?
MICHAEL T. BUELL, FSMPS, CPSM, is the client
development director with CCI Mechanical, Inc., in Salt
Lake City, UT. He is also a national speaker, adjunct
professor at the University of Utah, and co-creator/faculty
of SMPS’ Business Development Institute. Buell can be
reached at 801.541.3440 or mbuell@ccimechanical.com.
30 Let Your Career Flourish Sideways, Not Just Up
KARIN DOUCETTE is regional inside sales manager of a
10-person team with Jacobs in Asia. She works primarily
in Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, and Malaysia. She
can be reached at karin.doucette@jacobs.com.
34 Off to a Good Start! Preparing New
Coordinators for Success
JENNIFER K. MCGOVERN, CPSM, is mid-Atlantic
regional marketing manager at VHB in Vienna, VA. She
can be reached at 571.389.8171 or jmcgovern@vhb.com.
37 Bookshelf: Successful Project Management for
A/E/P and Environmental Consulting Firms, Second
Edition by Ernest Burden
SCOTT D. BUTCHER, FSMPS, CPSM, is vice president
of JDB Engineering, Inc., in York, PA. Butcher is a trustee
of the SMPS Foundation and was the 2014–2015
Foundation president. He can be reached at
717.434.1543 or sbutcher@jdbe.com.
39 SMPS Member Spotlight
KAREN B. CARR, CPSM, LEED AP, is director of
marketing & business development with Stafford King
Wiese Architects in Sacramento, CA. Reach her at
916.930.5953 or karen_carr@skwaia.com.
40 My Turn: Sometimes It Takes Courage to Help
Clients Envision the Future
DAVID ZATOPEK, AIA, is a practicing architect and a vice
president of Corgan in Dallas, TX. Zatopek’s areas of
practice include master planning and design for higher
education, technology, civic and cultural clients. Reach
him at 214.757.1677 or david.zatopek@corgan.com.
6 SOCIETY FOR MARKETING PROFESSIONAL SERVICES
4. Planning your career used to be linear.You’d start at
the junior level, impress your boss with top results
and smarts, and earn the attention of an influential
manager to gain visibility and move up the ladder.
That vertical path was flattened and elongated by the matrix
organization; now we work as peers across functions.
This affords us limitless opportunity for lateral or sideways
career growth. You can exploit, resize, upscale, reframe, and
redefine your role and transfer across functions that fit your core
competencies.
As you consider your career path, be clear about what you want
and why it’s attractive, yet keep your options open. You never
know your creative breadth.
I recently had lunch with a former colleague, a young engineer
who just joined a client organization. He had been interviewing
with various firms to explore market needs and see how his
skills were perceived. His new employer seized on a skill that my
colleague had undervalued—his ability to think abstractly in solving
hard technical issues and to look for business solutions this way.
In his prior role, the engineer had worked within set technical
parameters; in his new job, he sets them.
My colleague was unaware of his abstract thinking acumen; it
was something he did automatically. But his career is broadening
because he was open to the possibilities.
There are myriad ways you can grow sideways. Here are some
practical examples.
Know and repackage your core competencies. These often
aren’t reflected by your academic degree(s) or certifications.
They are your core behaviors, knowledge, skills, abilities, and
motivations. In my role, they are measured in hard areas such
as managing vision and purpose, or decisionmaking, and in soft
areas such as innovation management, organizational agility,
and interpersonal savvy.
Depending on where you are in your career, you might rely
on some of these more than others. Repackaging your core
competencies can allow you to move upward as well as across
functions and industries—say, from transit planning to sales, or
from engineering management to business management.
Rescale your current role. Although she was a successful
marketing manager for a San Francisco architectural firm, a
junior colleague felt stifled. Once she shifted to sales with a
commercial developer, she thrived. The role gave her larger
prospects and more space for her self-directed, assertive style.
She kept the same skills base, but rescaled and reframed it to
fit a large-client portfolio in a more mature market.
Extending your capabilities can often be simple. At a conference
in Pasadena, I met a woman whose job had been inputting data
to a complicated project management database. She started
suggesting simple improvements to its functionality so updates
would be less time-consuming. The database was modified and
she was asked to train users. Soon she was travelling across
states and interacting extensively with project delivery teams
and IT experts. All she did was suggest a business improvement
to streamline her current work, but it brought an exciting career
expansion.
Let Your Career Flourish
Sideways, Not Just Up
By Karin Doucette
30 SOCIETY FOR MARKETING PROFESSIONAL SERVICES
5. Sidestep gaps you can’t fill. I am
intuitive and often know the right solution
or the way to it, so I was attracted to doing
consultative selling. I learned there is an art
to building the right level of rapport with a
buyer and knowing when to ask them to
pay for your solution. I don’t do that well;
I also lack the ability to fill the gap, so I
continually gave my solutions away. Making
a living as a consultant isn’t right for me!
My mentor at the time had sage advice: “If
the suit of clothes doesn’t fit you, just find
another suit.” I shifted from direct selling
back to indirect selling and it suits me well.
Be adaptable. A company I worked
with for many years shrewdly rode global
market shifts by flexibly reorganizing itself
and redirecting internal priorities with
little advance warning. Employees were
expected to adapt quickly and succeed in
foggy, sometimes uncomfortable business
cycles. The company expected everyone to
be comfortable with ambiguity. Those who
couldn’t adapt, left.
A smaller former employer prized people
who could take on multiple hats by
seeing a need and raising their hand
to fill it. The geotechnical department
manager recognized there was no formal
leadership for the growing administration
staff. He drew them together and shaped
a multidisciplinary group that added
meaningful value to our business. Do you
see an unfilled need in your company?
Take time. You might be at a career
crossroads due to layoff, transfer,
discontent, or because you’re following
your spouse’s transfers. A young
professional with a degree in science
moved from defense sector R&D in
England to pharma project execution and
then professional services sales in China.
After returning to the United Kingdom, he
joined a specialist employment agency
and was flexible about where his career
could take him. While he explored the
possibilities, he took time to find the
right culture and position in a high-end
organization and, at the same time,
developed a broad personal network.
Frame your role. The best professional
services sales people I’ve met aren’t sales
people. They’re relationship managers.
Winning revenue is almost a byproduct of
the client’s satisfaction with the business
value received. The salesperson needs
to be transparent, ethical, and skillful in
forming a meaningful business relationship
versus promoting services and solutions.
Similarly, understand how your client
frames the project you’re pursuing. On a
transit tunnel project I once helped to bid in
San Francisco, we asked the client if theirs
was a transit project or a tunnel project.
After they said tunnel, we fine-tuned our
win strategy and changed our project
manager—and we won.
Express your ideas. Career growth can
be this simple. A now-successful inside
sales manager was noticed, and quickly
mentored, in part because she was the
only person to speak up and make smart
observations at a business meeting.
As a very junior staffer at a petrochemical
industry publication, I proofread the
publisher’s speeches and articles. When
I thought his concepts were unclear or
his phrasing might be misinterpreted,
I’d suggest changes. The publisher was
responsive. Within a year, I was offered the
role of assistant editor.
Follow your heart. Two years ago, I
brought a young structural designer into
my team. He had graduated only a couple
of years earlier and was already an award-
winning bridge designer. But he saw a fit
with sales, saying that creative writing was
deeply satisfying to him and important in
his career.
Develop champions. Many of us want a
mentor. If you agree with the six degrees
Downtown corporate office interiors, Seattle, WA; for Twist Architecture & Design and Edifice Construction. Andrew Buchanan, www.subtlelightphoto.com.
MARKETER DECEMBER 2015 31
6. of separation theory—namely, that each of us is only
six people away from any other person in the world,
then you have many options for finding one! My first
mentor gave me provocative advice that I remember
every day: “First, look for the right work environment,
then find or create the position you want in it.”
When I talked informally about mentoring with MBA
students at a local university last fall, I advised them
to demystify the title of mentor. It implies top-down
guidance and interaction, but it’s really two-way. You
want guidance and support and a mentor wants to
help you to bring more value to the organization.
Your obligation to a mentor is to be clear about what
you need right now from that interaction. Areas you
should explore together include hurdles to moving
forward; what you do/don’t enjoy doing; your gaps and
ways to fill them; and how your skills and strengths
could add different value.
The inside sales colleague who spoke up in the
business meeting told me her mentor advised her to
sit with supervisors and managers she has worked
with and have them candidly describe her strengths
and weaknesses. It was intimidating, but eye-opening.
Learn how to succeed. Filmmaker and comic
Woody Allen once quipped that failure is just delayed
success. To me, there is no failure when it comes
to your career: There are just different pathways to
fulfillment. A transit sector sales guy who’d joined my
former firm via acquisition was insecure during his
first few months. He explained, “I know what to do,
and I was successful in my old job because I knew
how we made decisions, how much latitude I had for
independent action, and how success was measured.
Now, those signposts are gone, and I’m unsure how to
succeed.” One of my responses was to connect him
to peers around the organization. Through this affinity
group, he learned how to succeed in that culture.
Are you taking sufficient initiative to let your career
flourish? Explore your company’s intranet. Be
active in SMPS. Join affinity groups on LinkedIn.
Talk informally to different managers to learn their
issues and business approaches. Quiz colleagues in
different functions.
I’ve had the good fortune to work in marketing and
sales capacities on five continents. I see that growth-
oriented people want the same things—to learn new
ways to express their creativity and be rewarded for
their efforts. You can stay where you are and still do
that—sideways. n
Downtown corporate office interiors, Seattle, WA; for Twist Architecture &
Design and Edifice Construction. Andrew Buchanan, www.subtlelightphoto.com.
32 SOCIETY FOR MARKETING PROFESSIONAL SERVICES
