Ed Russ and Using Budgets Proactively to Evolve a Professional Firm's Marketing Program (from The Marketplace Master™)

Professional service firm guru Suzanne Lowe has a nice piece on Grant Thornton CMO Ed Russ in her newsletter, The Marketplace Master™. In the piece, Ed (aka November's Marketing MVP), who has helped the firm recently get to $1 billion in revenues, gives some sage advice on "spending money differently on marketing."

The highlights:

• Talk to decision-makers in their own language.
• Start small, on a test basis.
• Make a point of promising to measure results, and reporting on them.
• Become informed about the marketing practices of competitors, but don't go too far to copy them.
• Make friends with Finance.
• Leverage your investments.

You can read the whole article here. Subscribe to The Marketplace Master™ here and view Suzanne Lowe's blog, Expertise Marketplace, here.

For more on Ed and the Grant Thornton marketing machine, see Larry Bodine's piece from 2005, Ed Russ of Grant Thornton named Marketer of the Year.