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 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 larger and more complex opportunities. Amy Franko works with professional services firms to help them improve their growth by thinking more systemically about their markets and prospect opportunities.

For firms focused on substantial opportunities, it’s no longer simply managing a sales process. It’s helping prospects and clients make high-stakes decisions with confidence while navigating internal dynamics, competing priorities, and risk.

That’s where a consultative system becomes valuable; it goes beyond process and playbook to guide how your firm:

• focuses business development efforts across industries
• qualifies and disqualifies opportunities
• leads client conversations with trusted perspective
• compels confident decision making

How Do Professional Services Firms Use AI to Improve Growth?

It’s Good News, Bad News.

The good news: Many professional services firms are leveraging some level of AI to accelerate data gathering and organization for better consultative playbooks. Where these components used to take significant manual research, now firms can access internal and external data sets to design these elements.  That bad news: every firm now risks looking exactly like every other firm taking the same approach.

Why is a consultative playbook system valuable?

The real value of creating comes from three areas:

1. Unique advisory. Using the data to offer unique advisory that sets the firm apart from others (reducing “sameness” in AI)
2. Integration into your current data ecosystems for real-time updates AND personalization of the playbook even though it’s derived from the system
3. Behavioral Change. Focuses the pursuit team or individual on what behaviors will best position them to win, and not simply a checklist of activities.

If your thinking can change in one way:

It’s not a static PDF; it’s a point of view. Because it’s focused on unique advisory and behavioral change, and it’s derived from your ever-changing data lakes, it can’t be a PDF. It’s a framework from the Chief Growth Officer that sets the parameters and then allows for continual dynamic use in a variety of formats.

What are the Components of a Modern Consultative Playbook System?

1. Ideal Market Profile

Problem: Professional services firms claim focus but continue to pursue a wide range of opportunities. I’ve heard this referred to by many a firm as their “Other” category.

Result: The result is diluted effort, inconsistent positioning, burnout, and losses.

An ideal market profile is not a background exercise but a strategic filter that can help a firm identify the right markets to pursue before the clients within those markets.

For Chief Growth Officers, this defines the markets (or industries) where the firm will and will not invest time, money, and people resources to win. It should reduce where pursuit and client teams spend time.

These ideal market profiles can be combined from a variety of sources and then organized by AI where appropriate. This might include third party data enrichment, CRM and other technology tools, and client billing systems. The goal is to determine:

• Which markets align with the firm’s overall strategy and capabilities
• Where growth is truly scalable and profitable
• Markets where the firm should consider not pursuing opportunities

2. Ideal Client Profile

Problem: Most firms define their ICPs, but they don’t use it to say no. In a capacity-constrained environment, this matters. Additionally, industry teams are actually pursuing opportunities not in their aligned ICPs (whether knowingly or unknowingly).

The Result: Winning the wrong work is just as costly as losing the right work. The work assigned to the wrong industry dilutes the value of the industry and creates significant frustration.

A modern Ideal Client Profile helps firms to:

• Operate with neutrality on where clients and prospects are assigned
• Determine outliers where the firm will definitively say no (regardless of how important the opportunity might be to a single partner or leader)
• Understand the mindset of their decision making individuals and committees (way more important than understanding all of a firm’s services)
• Create a cleaner and more aligned marketing plan

3. The Consultative Question Bank

The problem: Complex selling has long emphasized asking better questions. That still matters, but in Amy Franko’s experience with professional services firms, the ability to ask questions is table stakes.

The result: Much like using AI to develop research, many firms use AI to develop their questions. And your firm will look like every other firm. AI will pull you down into sameness.

Today’s clients expect more than simple question asking and discovery; they also expect expert perspective as part of their decision process. They expect more provocative questions and thinking from the firm to stand out. The goal isn’t just to understand the client’s situation, but to help shape their thoughts around it.

A question bank is a useful tool to equip partners, business developers, and upskilled staff in developing:

• Unique points of view for a client or prospect
• Patterns that can inform how to guide a client or prospect
• Opportunities for the pipeline, and very importantly, accelerating those opportunities

 

 4. Structured Sales Conversations and Coaching

The problem: In many firms, the “sales conversation” is avoided because of its negative connotation.  The conversation is left to chance without preparation.

The result: There is too much ineffective, low value conversation that never leads to anything other than a “nice lunch.”  That leaves the client or prospect thinking that your firm is bland, doesn’t understand their problems, or can’t help.

A strong consultative playbook system establishes:

• Sales conversation framework that provides both structure and flexibility
• Opportunities for coaching, whether with a human performance coach, or an AI-based sales coach
• Clarity on what “good” looks like at each stage of the conversation and opportunity

5. Orchestrating the Firm’s Approach

The problem: Many playbook approaches focus primarily on a specific engagement without addressing how the broader team engages, especially for cross-selling opportunities.

The result: A one-time win that isn’t leveraged for future opportunities for the firm to engage. For Chief Growth Officers, this is a missed opportunity. Additionally, this keeps the firm from operating as one unit, versus silos of service lines.

A better approach:

• Partners, subject matter experts, and delivery leaders engage from other parts of the firm, whether at the initial opportunity or after the client is onboarded.
• All opportunities and client contacts are maintained the CRM and not simply entered at the point in time where an engagement is an imminent win.
• AI technology analyzes opportunity data for other ways to nurture future opportunities and the overall prospect or client relationship. This is across the firm, so the firm is finding opportunities across as many services as possible.

What Can Chief Growth Officers and Firm Leaders Do to Improve Their Playbook Approach?

• Focus on the four areas offered in their article to improve from where you are today.
• Improve rigor for opportunity entry and maintenance in your CRM
• Conduct regular and frequent pipeline reviews, using CRM data and win/loss insights to refine how deals are pursued

What Can Partners, Business Developers, and Staff Do to Improve their Business Development Results?

The biggest opportunities are how you engage in client conversations. You can begin with:

• Building a strong question bank tied to your firm’s industry and service focus areas
• Developing a clear point of view on the issues facing your prospects and clients
• Master the sales conversation to demonstrate your value and earn trust with your client or prospect. The goal is not to follow a process. It’s to lead a conversation that helps clients make better decisions.

A consultative playbook system isn’t a single solution, and it won’t transform your firm’s growth on its own. But it’s part of a broader growth ecosystem that can offer clarity on which opportunities and markets to pursue. For firms committed to focused, disciplined growth, that clarity is exactly what’s needed.

Where Can Chief Growth Officers in Professional Services Firms turn for help?

If you’d like to explore how Amy Franko could accelerate your firm’s growth, schedule a growth strategy conversation now.