Your Growth Problem May Not Be a Marketing Problem

By: Becca Johns

Key takeaways

• Marketing is often where growth problems surface, not where they start. Diagnosing first keeps you from paying for the wrong fix.

• Inconsistent positioning weakens every channel. If partners can’t agree on what makes the firm different, marketing can’t communicate it.

• An undefined ideal client profile scatters effort. Knowing who you serve best makes marketing, BD and partner time more productive.

• Pipeline gaps get mistaken for lead-quality problems. Someone needs to own opportunities from first contact to signed engagement.

• Strong demand can mask fragile systems. Growth that depends on a few partners’ relationships and habits is harder to sustain than it looks.

When growth stalls, or starts to feel harder than it should, the conversation often lands on marketing: The website is outdated. The newsletter goes out without much response. Social media is inconsistent. Someone suggests a rebrand, a new campaign, or another marketing hire.

Sometimes that’s the right call. But in our growth assessment work with mid-sized accounting firms, we often see the same pattern: marketing execution is where the problem shows up, not where it starts. More activity rarely fixes it. Better content, a sharper website, and more frequent posts can’t solve underlying issues in a firm that hasn’t decided who it serves, what it stands for, or who is responsible for turning interest into revenue.

A growth assessment is designed to separate symptoms from causes. When we do one, the real constraint usually turns out to be one of three things.

The firm can’t describe itself the same way twice

Ask five partners at the same firm what makes it different, and you’ll often get five answers. One names responsiveness. Another names industry depth. A third says “we’re big enough to handle complex work but small enough to care.” While these answers are sincere, and they could also describe dozens of competitors.

This is a positioning problem, and it’s really tough to build a growth strategy on a weak foundation. For marketing to amplify a message, the firm first has to agree on what that message is. Without that agreement, you’re left with generic website copy that’s trying to work for everyone, and every proposal starts from a blank page because there’s no shared story to borrow from.

Eventually, someone asks why the marketing feels so bland. It’s a fair question, but the answer usually has less to do with the marketing team than with what it was given to work with.

What the assessment looks for: Whether leadership can state, consistently and specifically, why the right client should choose this firm over a credible alternative, and whether clients describe the firm the same way.

“Ideal client” means “anyone who will pay us”

Most firms can name their best clients. Fewer can explain what those clients have in common, or say which new opportunities they should decline.

What could happen if you don’t have a defined ideal client profile? Partners follow whatever opportunities come through their own networks, while marketing tries to speak to every industry and service line at once and ends up reaching none of them clearly.

Over time, the firm takes on work that strains capacity, pulls down realization or pulls away from where leadership wants to go. The frustrating part is that none of this shows up right away. On paper, the pipeline can look perfectly healthy, even as the book of business slowly drifts away from the firm’s strategy.

An ideal client profile isn’t a restriction on who you’ll work with. It’s a filter for where you put limited time, attention and marketing budget.

What the assessment looks for: Where the firm’s most profitable, best-fit relationships come from; whether current pursuit activity matches that profile; and whether marketing, BD and partners are aiming at the same targets.

Nobody owns the pipeline end to end

In many firms, marketing owns awareness and lead generation. Partners own relationships and closing. Someone in operations might track proposals. But the stretch in between, where a contact becomes a conversation, a conversation becomes an opportunity, and an opportunity becomes an engagement, belongs to no one. Follow-up depends on individual habits.

The CRM is half-populated. Leadership can’t say with confidence how many real opportunities are open, how fast they move, or why they’re lost.

When that happens, marketing gets judged on outcomes it doesn’t control. Leads come in and go quiet, and the conclusion is that “marketing isn’t generating quality leads,” when the issue may be that no one was accountable for what happened next.

What the assessment looks for: How opportunities move from first contact to signed engagement, where they stall, who is accountable at each stage, and whether the firm has the data to see any of it.

Why these problems hide behind marketing

All three problems have something in common. From the outside, they look like execution issues, but they’re really about leadership and structure. How the firm positions itself, which clients it wants most, and who is accountable for the pipeline are calls only firm leadership can make. Marketing just happens to be where the absence of those calls is easiest to see.

That’s why adding marketing resources before anyone has diagnosed the problem so often is rarely the path to growth. The firm spends more and produces more, and the growth still doesn’t come.

Growth can certainly hide these problems, too. Many of the firms we assess aren’t stalled at all. Referrals are steady, partners are busy, and some service lines have more work than they can take on. When things are going that well, it’s natural to assume the growth engine is in good shape.

Often, though, we find that the growth rests on a handful of partners’ relationships and personal habits, with very little shared process behind it. (I often find myself reminding our clients, “Hope is not a strategy.”) That can work for years, right up until a key partner retires, capacity runs out, or the firm tries to grow in a new direction. Then the gaps that strong demand was covering get much harder to ignore.

What a growth assessment involves

A growth assessment is a structured, outside look at how your firm grows today, which isn’t always how leadership assumes it grows. At its core, it answers three questions: Are you doing the right things? Are those efforts producing results? And what aren’t you doing that you should be?

At Inovautus, our Growth Assessment & Plans work is built on Growth Compass®, our model for evaluating a firm’s marketing and business development maturity across seven dynamics:

• Vision and Strategy

• Leadership and Strategic Alignment

• Branding and Marketing Execution

• Product and Service Development

• Sales

• Client Experience

• Data Utilization and Measurement

Notice anything surprising? Only one of those seven is about marketing execution, and that’s intentional. Growth depends on the whole firm, so the assessment looks at the whole firm.

To get an accurate read, we draw on several sources. Growth Compass surveys show how people across the firm see things, not just the leadership team. Conversations with partners and key stakeholders add the context behind the survey results.

A review of the firm’s own materials, such as its org chart, revenue by service line, recent proposals, and marketing plan, shows what happens day to day. Each dynamic then gets a maturity rating from Level 0 (Getting Started) to Level 3 (Advanced), along with specific actions to move it up one level.

The ratings are useful, but most of the value comes from the conversation afterward. No firm should try to act on every recommendation at once, so the process ends with a priority-setting session where leadership decides what to tackle first. For firms that are ready for a detailed roadmap tied to revenue goals, a Growth Plan can build from that foundation.

None of this is about grading the firm or looking for someone to blame. The point is to make sure the next dollar and the next hour you invest in growth go toward whatever is holding you back, even if that turns out to be marketing after all.

FAQs

How do we know if our growth problem is really a marketing problem

Here’s a useful test. If your marketing were executed perfectly tomorrow, would every partner describe the firm the same way, pursue the same kinds of clients and follow up on opportunities the same way? If the honest answer is no, the constraint probably sits upstream of marketing.

Is a growth assessment only for firms that are struggling?

Not at all. Many of the firms we assess are growing steadily. They come to us because growth isn’t happening where leadership wants it, because capacity has become the ceiling, or because they’re about to make a significant investment, such as a rebrand, a new service line or a key marketing hire, and want to get it right.

What's the difference between a growth assessment and a growth plan?

A growth assessment answers “Where are we today?” It evaluates maturity, identifies roadblocks and recommends where to focus. A growth plan answers “How do we grow from here?” It lays out a tactical roadmap tied to revenue goals, target markets and specific initiatives. Many firms start with an assessment so the plan rests on an accurate picture of where they stand.

Who should be involved in a growth assessment?

Firm leadership needs to be closely involved, since the most important findings usually come down to leadership decisions. The surveys and stakeholder conversations reach further, though. Hearing from partners, managers, marketing and BD staff shows how growth works in practice, not just how it looks from the top.