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You hear a lot about "Best Practices" these days. In fact, my company researches and publishes studies about the best practices of marketing and selling services every year. We also teach seminars using these best practices. I have published articles in this magazine about them. It seems like I hear this term all the time.

But what about "Worst Practices?" We can’t all be best, can we? Doesn’t anyone have a bad practice? You bet! I see them all the time. I don’t know why it took me this long to realize it, but it would be just as valuable to know what doesn’t work, wouldn’t it? So, in the interest of helping you avoid the mistakes of others, here are some practices that don’t work very well.

1. Depending upon corporate or product marketing to also provide services marketing. This is a common mistake. My experience has been 100 percent consistent that this doesn’t work. It sounds good. Corporate or product marketing has all the resources. It will help us to be more consistent. We wouldn’t want services marketing to be different from our product marketing, would we? The problem is that no organization ever has enough resources, and product marketing will always dominate in this group. In one case, a service organization was convinced to transfer their lone service marketer to product marketing. By the beginning of the next fiscal year, more than 60 percent of this marketer’s goals were for non-service objectives. Service lost a big part of their meager resource. This is typical for this worst practice.

2. Service product managers with no marketing experience. Here’s another dog that won’t hunt. Product management has some serious marketing overtones that operations people just don’t get. It could work as long as you understand this and organize around it, but if you believe that these people are performing marketing tasks without any training or experience, you’re just kidding yourself.

3. Not paying commissions to salespeople for selling services. Excuse me for being politically incorrect, but this is just dumb. Salespeople, as a good friend of mind who sells likes to say, are coin-operated. Services don’t sell themselves and salespeople just give away things they are not compensated for selling. Don’t try to skimp here. Better to pay an extra commission than none at all.

4. Pricing committees. Pricing is one of the four Ps of marketing. It must be aligned with the other Ps to work effectively. Committees that include finance and service operations types will just muck things up. They don’t understand marketing or pricing strategies. Besides, too many cooks spoil the broth. You know the old saying, a camel is a horse designed by a committee.

5. Business prevention committees. This is another committee, operating under various cover names, dominated by service operations people. They are particularly good at finding the 100 things that could possibly go wrong with any new idea. That’s the problem with those of us who come from a strong service background. We have good diagnostic skills, and we have seen almost everything go wrong at one time or another. Put in the wrong place, we will kill any attempt at innovation and all new business opportunities.

6. Depending on corporate for public relations activities. If your company produces a product (other than services), your PR staff probably doesn’t "get" service. They also don’t know the media and editors that follow services. If you’re lucky, they might help out to write a press release, but then they won’t know where to send it. Take responsibility for this important function into your own hands, even if you have to hire your own agency.

7. Selling professional services through your product sales force. Enough companies have tried this to prove it doesn’t work. Selling custom professional services requires a consultative selling process, higher level calling, and a longer sales cycle. These are all pretty incompatible with most product sales forces. They usually wind up giving these services away to move more product. O.K., I do know of one software company that used product salespeople closely teamed with professional services representatives and made it work. Another exception is in selling packaged professional services, sometimes called managed services. Otherwise, it doesn’t work. Most companies have to set up an entirely separate sales team to sell high-end custom professional services. You also will need a bid desk to help assemble complex proposals.

Well, that ought to get a few letters of protest. Sorry, if you disagree with me, but I am just reporting some things I have observed more than once. Actually, I have seen these practices fail many times. If you have a genuine exception, feel free to let me know. Better yet, if you have a worst practice that you have tried or observed, pass it along. I’ll save any new ones I receive for a future column. You’ll be saving your peers from serious trouble.