Not every long-standing marketing practice deserves to survive.
Marketing in professional services is rarely short of activity. Campaigns are planned, events are delivered, content is produced, and pipelines appear to move. Yet beneath that surface, there’s often a quiet tension between effort and actual impact.
Many of the practices still in place were built for a slower, more predictable environment. A time when buyers followed clearer paths, decisions were made by fewer people, and visibility alone could influence outcomes. That context has shifted, but not every approach has shifted with it.
What’s becoming increasingly clear is that the challenge isn’t a lack of marketing, but a misalignment with how decisions are now made. Buyers operate in groups, information is tested instantly, and progress rarely follows a neat, linear journey. In that environment, volume, rigidity, and surface-level metrics can start to work against meaningful progress.
In this collaborative article, contributors reflect on the outdated marketing practices they believe professional services should leave behind, along with the modern approaches that should take their place. What emerges is not a single solution, but a shared direction — towards marketing that is more adaptive, more relevant, and more closely tied to real commercial outcomes.
Steven Moss
BD Consultant Pitchflix (previously Pinsent Masons Head of BD Sectors)
Evaluating the ROI of an event through quantity rather than quality. Are there genuine leads, cross sells, introductions etc versus the hysteria around we had 200 people attend. Was it the right 200!!
Graham Smith
Marketing Graham
I advise getting rid of the 3 year marketing plan. It’s pointless.
The world is now moving so fast (and getting faster) that most plans are out of date within 6 months – especially SaaS, cybersecurity and tech.
I now work on a 6 month strategy framework. Keeping it flexible so we can be agile. A 3 year strategy doc can be too rigid.
Lior Zaidner
Head of Marketing Transformation at Apex Group
Single buyer, funnel led, volume marketing
Most professional services firms still design marketing around individual personas and linear funnels — pushing generic thought leadership at scale and measuring success through MQL volume. This model no longer reflects how decisions are actually made.
Why this no longer works
These days, buying decisions aren’t made by just one person; instead, they’re taken collectively by large, AI-powered teams. These groups cover a range of roles—economic, risk, legal, operational and technical. Using AI tools, they educate themselves, compare suppliers, test the validity of claims and spot possible risks. Information is shared instantly, allowing the group to progress in unpredictable, non-linear ways as they decide what to do.
This change means that introductory material rarely makes much of a difference, and generic messaging is quickly pulled apart by the team. What’s more, focusing on sheer volume hides the fact that relevance is often lacking, and the later stages of the buying process remain fraught with difficulties.
Marketing isn’t failing to generate activity — it’s failing to support group decision making.
The modern strategy that should replace it is Buying group centred, value based decision enablement
Marketing is changing. Instead of trying to convince individual buyers, it’s now about guiding groups to make decisions together. The focus isn’t on chasing lots of leads, but on nurturing a handful of valuable accounts. It’s important to look beyond job titles and really understand the part each person plays in the decision, as well as what worries them (pain points). Marketing needs to offer information that addresses concerns, builds trust and helps the group reach agreement. Content should be easy for group members to share and discuss. Success isn’t just about having a busy pipeline—it’s about having good opportunities, moving deals forward quickly and re-energising those that have stalled. With this shift, Account-Based Marketing becomes a genuine strategy for growth, not just another campaign.
A practical change I have implemented and would recommend to others
In practical terms, I’ve encouraged teams to move away from campaign-based quarterly marketing plans and instead embrace ongoing buying-group programmes. This meant swapping out generic, gated thought leadership for decision-making resources tailored to specific roles, creating a single commercial point of view that could be adapted for each stakeholder, and focusing marketing on the points where deals typically stall, rather than simply chasing website traffic. As a result, these changes led to fewer leads, but they were of higher quality, with stronger engagement across multiple stakeholders, faster sales cycles, and marketing becoming a true partner in deal support instead of just a lead generator.
The hidden cost of sticking with the old approach
The real danger of sticking with outdated marketing methods isn’t just that they’re inefficient, it’s that you risk becoming irrelevant. When marketing fails to tackle the objections that come up late in the buying process, sales teams are left to handle tricky internal discussions among buyers on their own. This can mean losing credibility, especially when compared to competitors who appear more reliable and prepared to support decision-making. And if marketing activity is geared towards being seen rather than actually making a difference, it does little to move deals forward or help groups reach a decision, making its impact far less meaningful where it really counts.
Taken together, these responses point to one clear idea: outdated marketing loses value not because firms are doing too little, but because much of it no longer fits the reality of how today’s market works.
Whether the issue is measuring volume over value, relying on rigid long-term plans, or continuing to market through overly simplified buyer journeys, the underlying problem is the same. Too many approaches still reflect assumptions that no longer hold true.
What stands out across these contributions is a stronger focus on quality rather than quantity. Not more activity for the sake of it, but more relevance, better timing, and a clearer role in helping decisions move forward.
None of the contributors suggest that modern marketing is about doing everything differently at once. Instead, they point to the need for marketing to become more adaptive, more commercially aware, and more closely aligned with how buyers actually think and act.
Professional services marketing becomes far more effective when it reflects the complexity of modern decision-making. When that happens, it stops being judged only by output and starts being valued for the progress it helps create.
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