ENABLING AND ENHANCING THE BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT EFFORTS AT PROFESSIONAL SERVICES FIRMS
Muscle Memory and Business Development
By Dorothy Potash
Why is Business Development such a challenge for professional Services Firms? Well, honestly, if you look at the numbers at most firms, typically 85% of revenue tends to come from key accounts, and from less than 15% of Practitioners.
Many organizations spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on resources, and tools to enhance the BD function. What is going wrong? Many of these firms often preach to their own clients that it is “people, process and technology”, yet fail to purposefully integrate in their own strategic objectives, nor everyday practice, these three integral parts. People spend a great deal of money on tools, yet, these tools are not used purposefully, nor are they used practically. Hundreds of thousands may be invested developing a process that is not practical, strategic, nor takes into account the strengths and weaknesses of the practitioners that must deploy the process to make it successful. Firms also spend hundreds of thousands of dollars hiring professional BDs, yet do not create nor employ a compensation plan that incents any type of real growth. Some firms actually get angry when their BDs make a lot of money, instead of realizing that if their BDs are making money, the firms are making even more. Lastly, these firms often do not integrate their BDs within the practice nor encourage the practitioners themselves to team with them outside of utilizing them for administrative tasks; thus making their impact marginal at best.
At the end of the day, the smart organizations understand their expertise, their markets, industries and most of all, the strengths and weaknesses of their client servers. They understand how to harness the power of technology to forward their brand, to measure and track the success of campaigns to further the reputation of their expertise as well as harness the power of technology to further and share knowledge across their firm to best serve their clients. Most of all, they respect the Business Developer for being a professional, no less than they would a Litigation Partner, or an International Tax Partner. They realize they have a specific skill set that cannot be easily replicated, and value these practitioners as integral members of a pursuit team and strategic account team.
A process, a road map, a CRM; they still require human interaction developing relationships, or there is just no point to having any of these things, and surely there will be NO ROI. Professional Services are services provided by A Professional, translation: A human being who has specific expertise. Thus, any and all professionals working within a professional services firm, need to understand how to develop and or deepen relationships so that they may properly serve their current clients, and certainly if they have any intention of ever developing a new one. All need to be their own best business developers, as ultimately, it is they who will be interacting day to day with their clients, and it is their responsiveness, their reputation, their expertise, and the trust and credibility that has been developed that a client hires.
The presentations, the monthly workshops, the practice meetings, the one day team building events at the partners retreat, or even the professional Sales Training you invested in are just not enough. Perhaps 40 % of your practitioners need a mentor, or a coach to sit with them consistently (until they know how to do this on their own). They should be coached in how to develop their own practical and achievable development plan so that they are not blindly hoping for a prospect to convert into something, but instead, learning how to purposefully identify a strategic target, following a process to convert that target to profitable revenue, and understanding how to grow that account and service that account into meaningful, predictable and repeatable revenue across multiple disciplines. All while being entirely focused on the client and the client needs.
So many firms have brought in professional sales training organizations, who have left their participants with binders of information, page after page of roadmaps that no one ever reopens, or refers to ever again, and then, worse, after a few months, no one follows that same process that got them so pumped up about only a few months before.
Business Development requires PRACTICE. Lots and lots of practice. It requires a “Pro” to coach a novice and provide feedback and encouragement, as well as additional support when needed. If it takes over a 1,000 serves for a tennis player to finally achieve the muscle memory necessary to repeat that move properly, why does anyone assume that any human being would not require practice to get business development right?
It takes multiple times to enter a networking event and feel comfortable moving away from the usual suspects to introduce yourself to someone you have never met before. It takes practice to develop the confidence to allow yourself to be vulnerable, to ask the right questions at the right time, and to listen and to learn. It takes lots of practice just to consistently remember to follow up, co-develop a solution and ultimately ask to be hired. Anything that takes you out of your comfort zone, your autopilot default, requires practice, and lots of it.
Most of all, before one even picks up the phone, it requires a step back, to think about a game plan, and how to best position yourself to achieve success at each of these things, to be the best client server you can be. And if you are able to do that, chances are, that you will, in the process, automatically position yourself to be the best business developer you can be.