When you are looking at your growth goals for the coming year, how are you deciding what to spend on marketing? Are you looking at this year’s budget and saying, "well, same, I guess, for 2027?"
Are you totally sure what you should be spending on? What worked? Where you should be doubling down? What you should be cutting?
If you’re not, then you’re kind of beholden to your marketing in the same way you are to all those subscription services you’re not sure you’re getting anything out of.
And I get why it happens. Year-end client work is piling up, and rethinking the whole marketing function feels like a project for someday. And if you’re honest, you don’t have great visibility into what actually worked. So it’s really hard to make informed decisions about spend.
Why November matters more than March
The decisions you make over the next six weeks lock in how next year goes. Who sets the strategy. Who implements the tactics. Which tools stay. Who actually owns growth.
It's the worst feeling when in March you realize it's still not working. By then the contracts are renewed and the year is already moving. Now is when you can still do something about it.
So before the spreadsheet gets finalized, look honestly at whether your firm is showing any of these signs.
5 signs your firm has outgrown its current approach to marketing
1. The growth goal and the marketing plan live in different rooms
You've got growth goals. But do you have the plan to get there? In many firms, leadership sets the revenue target and marketing builds a list of tactics, and nobody connects the two. The plans I build with clients start with the goal, then back into every condition that has to be true to actually hit it. Will marketing get qualified leads in front of your business developers? Once a deal closes, does operations bring that new client on seamlessly? If these teams aren't pushing the boulder up the hill in the same direction, the goal is a hope, not a plan.
2. The same few people are still the pipeline
Your firm grew. More people, more service lines, maybe a real marketing team. And yet the best new business still comes from the same few people working their connections. When growth depends on a few senior relationships, the pipeline can only get as big as their calendars. Asking them to network harder isn't a strategy. It's a burnout plan with a nice name.
3. Nobody can say where your last 20 clients came from
Not a guess. Not "mostly referrals." Where they actually came from, and roughly what it took to win them. I ask this early with almost every firm I work with, and the answer is usually some version of... "yeah...we could be doing better with that." (Not a knock on anyone. Most firms were never set up to answer it.) But it you're going to invest in the kind of marketing is working, you want concrete answers as to what is working!
4. Marketing is busy, but the systems don't connect
Articles, newsletters, LinkedIn posts, case studies, event recaps. Your team is producing a lot, and much of it is genuinely good. So why is it so hard to say what it brought in? Usually it's not the team. It's the systems around them. Marketing isn't capturing lead source. Sales isn't logging it. And the website, CRM, and email platform were never set up to pass that information along. A prospect reads three articles, joins the newsletter, attends an event, then calls a partner directly... and on paper it's a direct inquiry. But, what about all the touch-points before that which aren't visible?
5. Everyone owns a tactic. Nobody owns the outcome.
A website agency, an SEO person, a freelance writer, someone on LinkedIn, maybe a PR firm. Plus one very tired internal person keeping it all moving. It's like building a house by hiring every trade separately and managing it yourself. What you need is a general contractor. Someone who makes sure the right people are on the job, in the right order, and nobody's there just because.
It's not a marketing problem. It's a journey problem.
If a few of these sound familiar, here's the good news: it isn't personal, it's structural. You're not stalled because your team lacks talent. You're stalled because marketing was never set up to run as a real function.
Professional services firms rarely have a marketing problem. They have a journey problem. Opportunities leak in the handoffs between marketing and business development, between BD and intake, between intake and delivery. Adding another tactic won't fix that. Someone has to look at the whole path. That's why when I look at everything a firm is doing for "marketing," I'm also looking at the hand-off to sales, the client journey, service delivery, and even off-boarding (hello, past client evangelism!). Every BIT of it shapes how your brand is perceived.
That's where I start with the firms I work with. We get clear on what's already working, find where good opportunities are slipping through, and build around three pillars: Brand Positioning, Proactive Visibility, and Tech-Enabled Execution. Strategy first, then the tools and tactics that support it. The result is a marketing function that keeps running when client work gets heavy, and a leadership team that can actually see what's driving growth.
Before you finalize the 2027 budget
Don't just ask "what did we spend?" Ask "what did it get us?" And if that answer isn't clear, or you don't love it, ask "what do we need marketing to do next year?"
And that's when you call me. Before the budget gets locked, let's have a 45-minute complimentary conversation. We'll map where you are now, get clear on where you want to be, and identify at least one step you can take right away.
So here's the real question: could your marketing plan for 2027 actually deliver your growth target?
Amanda Berlin is a Fractional CMO who partners with financial advisory and professional services firms to transform their marketing capabilities into measurable drivers of growth. Through her strategic marketing planning process, she helps firms establish systems that create consistent, qualified leads while minimizing the operational burden on the leadership team.
