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SALES PERFORMANCE AND LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT INSIGHTS FROM AMY FRANKO
The Missing Piece in Your Growth Strategy: Trusted Advisors
For professional services firms, expertise alone is no longer enough to drive sustainable growth. If your growth strategy doesn't intentionally develop trusted advisors across your firm, you're likely missing opportunities to win new business, deepen client relationships, and expand existing accounts. While your team may have exceptional technical knowledge, clients increasingly value professionals who anticipate challenges, provide strategic guidance, and proactively connect them with solutions. When those relationships aren't built, someone else often steps in to fill the trusted advisor role. The firms that consistently grow understand that becoming a trusted advisor isn't just a client service philosophy—it's one of the most effective business development strategies available. Professionals who earn trust create stronger client loyalty, uncover new opportunities, and become indispensable partners...
Video: Trade Show ROI: How to Win More Business From Events
Trade shows and events remain one of the largest investments organizations make to drive growth—yet they're often one of the most difficult to measure. Whether you're attending an executive roundtable, hosting a client event, or exhibiting at a major industry conference, success depends on far more than showing up. It requires a strategy that connects every interaction to long-term business growth. In this video, Amy Franko shares how sales leaders and professional services firms can maximize the value of both curated events and large-scale trade shows. She walks through a practical three-phase framework—from planning and execution to post-event follow-up—to help transform events into stronger relationships, greater visibility, and sustainable revenue growth. Key Takeaways Blend both event types: Curated events build depth; large trade shows build reach. Think in phases: Pre-plan with a clear business...
Growth Strategy: How do growth leaders make better growth decisions using data?
Chief Growth Officers and Sales leaders: how can you make better growth decisions using data? This article introduces a strategy using a Balanced Data Framework to help cut through the noise. Learn how to balance data with context, avoid overload, and make confident, impact-driven decisions. ******** Business leaders are surrounded by data. Revenue dashboards, customer insights, market trends, pipeline metrics, profitability reports, AI-generated analytics, and economic indicators all compete for attention. Yet more data doesn't automatically lead to better decisions. The challenge for CEOs, Chief Growth Officers, and sales leaders is knowing which signals matter, how to apply context, and when to act. The Balanced Data Framework helps leaders cut through the noise, evaluate opportunities, and make confident growth decisions. As it relates to data, I have a colleague who is a customer experience expert....
Does Your Sales Commission Incent the Right Behaviors?
Your sales commission philosophy and sales commission structure are key tools to create both a healthy sales culture and a profitable organization. Sales leaders should read this article for a checklist to help you determine your strengths and weaknesses in your current plan. ***** The era of "set it and forget it" sales commissions is over. I recently had the opportunity to facilitate a leadership exchange on business development compensation at the 2026 AAM Summit in Palm Springs. Many of the session participants approached me afterwards to share how helpful it was to learn from their peers… and just how different things are from firm to firm based on culture and goals. The data reflects this shift. In 2026, companies are placing a greater premium on measurable sales performance than at any point in recent years. In fact, the earnings gap between top-performing and average sellers reached $200,000—the...
Guest Article: The Client Relationship Is Your Greatest Growth Asset — Or Your Greatest Risk
If You Don’t Expand the Client Relationship, Your Competitor Will ****** Many CPA and advisory firms believe growth will come primarily from new clients. But the greater growth risk may already exist inside your current client base. In Amy Franko's latest article for Inside Public Accounting "Perspectives from the Profession," she explores the hidden vulnerabilities in firm operating models that lead to client atrophy, competitive encroachment, and stalled organic growth — and what firms can do to change course. Read the full article. Are your firm's client relationships growing? Here are several of the client relationship risks, growth challenges, and operational shifts shaping the future of CPA and advisory firms that were included in the article: Existing clients are the biggest organic growth opportunity and the greatest hidden risk. Relational atrophy happens slowly when firms fail to expand...
Sales Strategy: Trusted Introductions Can Maximize Sales Growth
Trusted introductions in sales don’t just make accessing decision-makers easier—they boost your credibility as a seller and improve your odds of converting leads into clients. Discover how to strategically request introductions and integrate them into your sales process. ******** The Value of Trusted Introductions When I consider what has helped me to create success in my career, within my sales consulting practice and within the various leadership roles I’ve had, the value of trusted introductions is near the top of the list. This has taken the form of introductions from current clients to decision-making peers in their network, sponsoring high-level events that will put me in the presence of my key decision makers, meeting with community leaders through my non-profit work, and key partnerships. I'm not alone. According to Forrester (2025), 84% of B2B conversions start from a referral. My anecdotal...
Guest Article: The Hidden Cost of “Wait and See” Decisions
How can today’s leaders think and act differently to avoid the curse of “wait and see?” ****** As former board chair of Girl Scouts of Ohio’s Heartland, I helped lead a critical decision during the uncertainty of COVID: whether to continue moving forward with a $16 million capital campaign for our STEM leadership center — or pause and “wait and see.” (Spoiler alert: We did not wait and see. You can peek below to see how our vision became reality.) That experience reinforced an important leadership lesson: indecision often carries greater long-term costs than thoughtful action. In my latest article for Smart Business, I explore the hidden cost of “wait and see” decisions and how leaders can create momentum through clarity, ownership and decisiveness. Read the full article. What happens when “wait and see” becomes your leadership strategy? What leaders often don’t realize is that delaying a decision can...
Stale Playbooks Aren’t Driving Growth in Professional Services Firms
How Chief Growth Officers Can Think Differently and Win More Opportunities. The sales playbook is as old as time. On paper, playbooks make sense: they help to define ideal clients, guide conversations, and create a more consistent approach to winning complex work. Why Don’t Professional Services Playbooks Help Firms Win Complex Opportunities? But most playbooks don’t get firms to their ideal growth outcomes. Why? 1) They’re a static PDF. 2) Because they’re static, they are quickly dated and difficult to maintain. 3) They aren’t quickly adapted to current issues a client or prospect may be facing. 4) They fail because they never change the behaviors required to best position the firm to win the complex opportunity. Execution is the one word that sums this up. For Chief Growth Officers and firm leaders, there’s a shift that’s needed, from a playbook to a system that shapes the behavior required to win...
Client Experience Quietly Makes or Breaks Growth for Professional Services Firms
I have a keynote speech this summer and I’m providing copies of The Modern Seller for the event. Because it’s a few months out, I ordered the books for shipment to me. Then I’ll ship them to the hotel. This is what arrived at my door: Over a dozen separate packages for a single order of 125 books. What if I allowed that shipment to go directly to its destination? While nothing was technically wrong and everything arrived, optics and ease matter. It doesn’t matter about the logo on the outside of the box. That experience would’ve tarnished my brand with the client and the experience they have with me. The lesson here is that client experience isn’t just the work (in my case the content of my books or the keynote). It’s how the work arrives and how the client feels about the work being done that matters equally. This is where it’s easy to go wrong in professional services. You’ve never heard a firm say, “we...
Find Your Underestimated Growth Advantage
What Growth Strategies and Business Development Skills Do Professional Services Firms Need in 2026? Remember 2020? COVID sent everyone home and firms weren’t struggling to land clients. In fact, the opposite was true: client work was plentiful. Business development in professional services firms was paused and along with that was a pause on building the required business development skills across firms. In the past two years, that pendulum swung back. The Chief Growth Officers Amy Franko works with are refocused on organic growth, along with the added layer of inorganic growth through mergers and acquisitions and private equity investment. With that comes the realization that there are bottlenecks in creating growth, along with a significant lag in the strategies and skills required to achieve goals for organic growth. If you’re a Chief Growth Officer, Partner, or firm leader, how do you determine what...
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