Insight
Professional services and advisory firms operate in a model where the quality of client relationships, the level of trust, and expert positioning are critical to business development. At the same time, many such organisations grow their sales primarily through referrals, personal relationships of partners, or reputation built on past projects.
At a certain stage of growth, this model begins to limit the organisation's scalability. Experts and partners possess strong substantive competencies, but do not always have a consistent model for conducting developmental conversations with clients, building a pipeline, and actively developing new business relationships.
In many professional services firms, commercial conversations move too quickly to a presentation of competencies, references, and scope of services, rather than focusing on diagnosing the client's situation, their priorities, and the business consequences of their problem.
An additional challenge is that business development is often heavily concentrated in the hands of a few partners or practice leaders, which limits the ability to build a predictable and scalable sales model.
Business Consequence
The client portfolio grows irregularly, and organizational growth remains heavily dependent on personal relationships and the activity of a few of the most experienced individuals.
The absence of a repeatable model for conducting sales and developmental conversations makes it difficult to build a predictable pipeline, increase cross-selling between practices, and develop client relationships in a systematic way.
As a result, the organization may possess very strong expert competencies while still not fully exploiting its commercial potential.
Our Approach
We help advisory firms, law firms, agencies, and professional services organisations build a sales model that strengthens business development without compromising the expert character of the organisation.
The Sandler Selling System is in this context an exceptionally well-suited methodology -- because it is grounded in building an equal-footing relationship with the client, rather than in typical sales techniques that in an expert environment may be perceived as inauthentic. Sandler teaches partners and experts to conduct conversations that focus on diagnosing the client's situation and the business value of the partnership, rather than on presenting services. This approach fits naturally into the culture of advisory firms and law firms.
Our projects include:
- developing advisory and expert sales competencies based on the Sandler Selling System
- building a pipeline in professional services firms
- developing partners and practice leaders in the area of business development
- increasing cross-selling and developing relationships with strategic clients
Team
Head: Michal Biernacki
Consultants: Dariusz Milczarek, Lukasz Grabowski
