How Can Professional Services Firms Build More Consistency into Business Development Follow-Up?

Learn how professional services firms can improve business development follow-up through stronger leadership, clear processes, key commitments, and accountability.

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Consistently good or occasionally great?

I take indoor cycling classes, and I had a tough (but awesome) instructor who would always say (usually at the toughest part of class when we’re ready to coast), “I’d rather see you be consistently good than occasionally great.”

In other words, show up to class on a regular basis, 2-3 times per week, and your positive results will compound over time. Or show up sporadically, take 14 classes in two weeks, exhaust yourself, quit for a month, and then start over.

If that sounds familiar in business development, I see it all the time – and specifically in follow-up. When I help clients solve this problem, they see more consistent growth over time in the process. This small act of consistency, interestingly enough, helps professionals and partners make it routine but also more rewarding.

Why Is Consistent Business Development Follow-Up So Difficult?

Professional services leaders and practitioners balance solution delivery, client experience and the continual responsibility to cultivate new business. Competing priorities can make consistent business development activity challenging, especially when immediate client needs take precedence.

This next comment might be unpopular but needs to be said. The lack of consistency and accountability in business development starts with firm executives and partners. The CEO, CGO, CMO, CFO, CHRO, CIO and anyone else with a C in front of their title has leadership responsibilities that touch business development. Any leader running a service line or industry group has direct impact on business development. You set the tone and the culture for business development success, together. The rest of the firm sees and models your example.

When business development is only done when forecasts aren’t being met, when a lack of business development has no negative consequences, and firm leaders aren’t active champions for business development, firm culture and results will suffer.  Greater consistency comes from strong leadership and is modeled in the behaviors, processes and skills embedded throughout the firm.

Tactically speaking, follow-up is one of the places where business development opportunities lose momentum. Research compiled by HubSpot indicates that 80% of successful sales require five or more follow-up calls. But 44% of professionals give up after a single follow-up. (Refer to points 13 and 14 in the research.)

How Can Firms Better Connect the Value of Follow-Up to Clients and Prospects?

In working with my clients, we often talk about the “north star” of why we do what we do. In most professional services environments, the goal is to be a trusted advisor and to help clients prosper. Sometimes that “why” gets lost among all the activities (business development and otherwise) that professionals are asked to do.

Connecting the activity of consistent follow-up to the value it brings to clients and prospects can lower the barriers to doing it. What are some practical ways to accomplish that?

• In my Strategic Selling for Professional Services curriculum, I teach a concept called Advisory Intelligence (I call it the other AI). Advisory Intelligence is your depth of understanding about a client or an industry that allows you to offer more substantial ideas, building credibility that creates additional business development opportunities. Recently I built an agent that provides me with a daily briefing of industry publications in professional services, which I then use to share insights with my clients and prospects.
• Pay attention to internal and external trigger events that can signal a need for change and provide a timely reason to reconnect. This is built-in urgency that senior executives respond well to on follow-up.
• Leaders, reinforce the idea that follow-up is directly helping clients and prospects to make decisions that improve their outcomes. Specific urgency or timelines surrounding a decision will require more targeted and systematic follow-up. Broader keep-in-touch situations may require fewer touchpoints but more strategy because they aren’t tied to a specific opportunity.

Episode 225 of The Unique CPA features Amy Franko. She explores how accounting firms can build a stronger sales and growth culture, why treating sales as an afterthought can limit growth, and how firms can navigate the long-term impact of private equity and mergers in the profession.

What Structures Help Professional Services Firms Create Consistent Follow-Up?

Building a culture of follow-up and reinforcing its value is only part of the equation. Structures play a critical role in helping to operationalize follow-up, plus make it more visible and accountable across the firm. Practices that CGOs can implement include:

• Creating a clear business development process and methodology that provides structure for moving opportunities through the pipeline. I like to think of process as a staircase – it’s the set of steps that most opportunities follow from identification through closure. For example, a process may include certain gates that an opportunity must pass through for personnel capacity to be forecast or a client engagement letter to be created. Methodology is more like a chess match, where a team is selecting from the tools, skills, and behaviors necessary to move an opportunity through the business development process. Those selections are tailored to the team and to the opportunity. Firms require both a business development process and a methodology. For example, your process may include a follow-up gate, and your methodology indicates how you will perform that follow-up, based on the client’s or prospect’s needs.
• When your business development process and methodology are integrated with CRM, CGOs will improve adoption, opportunity tracking, and forecasting. Accountability, ownership, and follow-up are more naturally built in so that the structure supports the culture you’re building. CRM has a much better chance to become a true growth tool, rather than a compliance exercise where opportunities are entered into a pipeline only as they are won.

How Can the Concept of Key Commitments Improve Business Development Follow-Up?

In the Strategic Selling for Professional Services methodology designed by Amy Franko, one element is Key Commitments. Key Commitments are actions throughout the business development process, on both the firm’s part and on the client/prospect side, that advance a relationship or opportunity forward.

If CGOs were to review the last 90 days of wins and losses in the CRM, a likely pattern will emerge. In key wins, there were commitments fulfilled that directly led to the win. In key losses, commitments were either missed or not fulfilled and that led to a no-decision or loss to a competitive firm.

Practices that CGOs can implement to improve key commitments include:

• Identifying the commitments by name and ensuring they are captured in the opportunity flow. Commitments can include access to decision-makers, discovery calls, document reviews, requests for information, presentation dates, and other agreed-upon next steps.
• In every opportunity, require teams to establish the next commitment as part of the current interaction. Without a next step, that can delay forecasting, client assignment, or data flow into practice platforms.
• Treat commitments as data. Review where commitments are being made and where they are absent. This can reveal where an opportunity is gaining momentum or beginning to stall. Patterns in commitments can also help professionals more effectively qualify or disqualify opportunities. A disqualified opportunity that exits the pipeline early is as important as confirming a qualified opportunity.

How Can CGOs Build Follow-Up into the Firm’s Business Development Culture?

Healthy business development culture is no longer something that is nice to have; it is a requirement in modern firms, whether that firm remains independent from outside investors or has private equity backing. Some practices for CGOs to consider include:

• Continual focus on strengthening the behaviors, processes and skills that keep relationships and opportunities moving forward. This is done by reinforcing the right messages from the executive and managing partner level to new associates. It is accomplished by investing in the structures and the skill development capabilities that reflect the culture you’re building.
• Develop business development capabilities across a broader group of professionals to create more opportunities and strengthen the firm’s next generation of growth leaders. Reinforce business development skills through continued application, coaching and practice using real client and prospect situations.

Who can help your firm build more consistency into business development follow-up?

Amy Franko works with professional services firms to strengthen their growth strategies and sales capabilities. If you’re a Chief Growth Officer ready to help your firm sell to senior executives, contact Amy to schedule a call.