Find Your Underestimated Growth Advantage

What Growth Strategies and Business Development Skills Do Professional Services Firm 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 should get your focus right now to improve growth? It begins with work from the talent base and the client base you have, and making decisions on: what to develop, what to delete, and where to find underestimated advantage.

What Business Development Strategies and Skills Should Professional Services Firms Develop?

Most firms are too focused on diffuse opportunities instead of concentrated leverage.

1. Business Acumen. Knowledge of firm services still matters, but that knowledge is considered table stakes for growth. Instead, when skill development focuses on business-level acumen and industry specialization, a firm can better differentiate itself. This leads to better opportunities and higher value for both the firm and the client.
2. Ideal Client Profile Discipline. The adage “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” is usually cited when firms decide on which opportunities to pursue. It’s faulty thinking and creates a significant amount of wasted time, resources, and money. Instead, build ICP Discipline. Instead, use industry research, combined with an understanding of your ideal client base, to build 3-5 profiles for each industry you serve. This approach reduces opportunity cost and improves revenue, profit, and perceived client value.
3. Cross-Selling into Existing Clients. Your firm is leaving opportunity on the table that can significantly improve organic growth. While cross-selling (or cross-serving in some firms) isn’t new, it’s often overlooked. Firms on average retain roughly 75-85% of their client based each year. In addition, research from the Association for Accounting Marketing and Hinge Marketing shows that most professional services revenue comes from existing client relationships, driven by cross-selling new services and existing service expansion (High Growth Study).

What Business Development Strategies Should Professional Services Limit or Avoid?

Most firms have a subtraction problem, taking on too many strategies and skills that don’t serve the bigger picture.

1. Proposals for the Sake of Proposals. This is an overused tool. Firms that rely heavily on proposals typically don’t realize the organic growth results they’re looking for. When used strategically and structured correctly, proposals are a highly valuable tool for opportunity collaboration with a client, and differentiation against your competition.
2. Partner Level Selling as a Solo Strategy. Unlike traditional sales teams, one of the unique benefits of professional services firms is the ability to build selling capabilities across the firm and not just at the top. The professional services firms and Chief Growth Officers that Amy Franko works with are building organic bench strength by developing future firm leaders. This approach triples the number of opportunity entry points into a firm, versus a smaller funnel with partners only. As more firms merge or take on private investment, increased opportunity entry points are attractive as part of valuation.
3. CRM as a Compliance Tool. The investment in CRM is high, and to use CRM as a compliance or historical tool is a financial leak point in many professional services firms. This viewpoint also reinforces unproductive behaviors and culture that inhibits organic growth. Instead, Chief Growth Officers who are using CRM as a forward-looking pipeline development tool that includes Ideal Client Profile discipline and cross-selling are seeing documented improvement in organic growth.

What Business Development Strategies and Skills are Underestimated in Professional Services Firms?

Most firms do what other firms are doing, and they can’t differentiate themselves.  

1. Assuming your clients understand all the problems you can help them to solve. This speaks to two key skillsets a Chief Growth Officer can sponsor in the firm: business acumen and cross-selling. Professional services firms have grown in complexity and offerings, which means that traditional core services provide an excellent entry point for other business conversations with the client.
2. Your client is a client of the firm. Firms assume that a client will never leave. Earlier research from Hinge Marketing found that more than one in four professional services clients may be open to switching firms at any given time. Even if the exact number shifts over time, the message is clear: client retention does not equal client loyalty. Creating excellence with client experience isn’t a function solely for Growth and Marketing; it’s a function of the entire firm. Firms with formal Client Experience programs and the viewpoint that the client is a client of the firm will excel in keeping and growing their ideal clients.
3. Improving decision speed, both internally and with clients. According to this article in Harvard Business Review, 40-60% of opportunities are lost to indecision (and not to a competitor). Lack of decision speed places significant drag on firm growth. Indecision stalls pipelines, and more significantly, the firm is placing too much hope that the opportunities will be won. Chief Growth Officers that emphasize decision speed with both growth strategy and business development skill development will win at organic growth. Pipeline velocity increases, and the firm will improve new client growth plus cross-selling growth.

Where Can Chief Growth Officers in Professional Services Firms begin in Implementing the Right Mix of Business Development Strategies and Skills?

For Chief Growth Officers searching for the right mix of business development strategies and skills for 2026, an ideal starting point is a review on the firm’s overall growth strategy. From there, selecting one strategy or skill from each of the three categories: one to develop, one to avoid or limit, and one that can become your underestimated advantage.

Additionally, if you would like to schedule a growth strategy conversation with Amy Franko, please Contact Us.