Robert Buday, Bernie Thiel, Susan Buddenbaum, and Tim Parker from The Bloom Group have got it all right in their recent paper on “Getting Marketing and Business Development on the Same Page” that I found through Michael McLaughlin’s blog Guerrilla Marketing.

The article/white paper is based on a survey that The Bloom Group completed in late 2007. In the opening they note several similarities of successful firms as it relates to Marketing and Business Development. Namely they found that… “most successful firms:

• View marketing and selling not as independent activities but rather as an integrated process in which marketing and business development have defined, complementary but different, roles.
• Organize their demand–creation process in a way their clients prefer to buy complex, high–cost, high–stakes offerings, which are hallmarks of all professional services.
• Concentrate marketing and sales activities on fewer service offerings rather than more to avoid fragmenting resources and reducing market exposure for each service.
• Base their activities on strong points of view—well–researched and rigorous insights on business issues and how to solve them—that redefine the way their target clients think about these issues and enables the professional firms to shape leads to their advantage and stop responding to standard requests for proposals.”

This is just the beginning of some great information on how to get your marketing and business development activities on track, including extensive results and graphs from the survey. It is well worth a visit to their website to read “Getting Marketing and Business Development on the Same Page“.