Targeting and winning business:
Where to start

Business development can be a difficult concept for professionals who have long relied on their reputation and expertise to win clients. However, in a changing marketplace where professional firms need to sell their services if they are to maintain profits, strategies for effective business development must be understood and practised throughout the firm. Peter Matthews, partner in charge of business development at Ernst & Young, examined this area at the recent Professional Services Marketing Group (PSMG) conference. In this article, he gives a synopsis of the workshop that he ran.

There are so many different angles from which one could consider the whole arena of targeting and winning business – from the processes involved, through to the development of the people who are actually going to try to win the business, through to the infrastructure that will support your rainmakers. In a short article, it is clearly impossible to cover each of these areas, so I thought I would start by looking at how you get started – perhaps the question I get asked more than any other.

For many in professional services, ‘sales’ or, as it is more acceptably called ‘business development’, is seen as a very alien activity. This is linked into our own personal identity – many fee earners see themselves as ‘professionals’ first – as lawyers, accountants and surveyors, and when this identity is expanded to include some sort of business-development role they are likely to find this challenges the whole concept of who they are.

Identity is a good place to start any discussion on business development. Any firm can have all of the processes in place; these processes can be ‘best in class’ but, if the people who are responsible for following them have no sense of motivation and do not see it as their role, then business-development activities fail. Ultimately, organisations and firms only change if the people within them change and this is a fundamental lesson that I have learnt from my time working in professional services, not just at Ernst & Young but also in other professional service firms.

So, how can people review their sense of identity, such that the role of a professional is seen as more than somebody who displays technical knowledge and manages client relationships to a high standard of ethics and competence? This is unquestionably one of the major challenges facing professional services firms today. Ultimately, as somebody who believes passionately in coaching, I believe that the work around an individual’s identity can best be done through coaching. Sometimes team coaching will work effectively – the benefits of peer learning and the feeling that one is in the same boat as one’s peers cannot be underestimated. Indeed, some of the most successful changes in individuals’ attitudes have come through the medium of some kind of peer group or action learning group, often externally facilitated.

However, at the level of senior people within the professions, working on an individual’s identity and beliefs is often most effectively done on a one-to-one basis – we are all made differently, we all see the world differently and have all had different experiences. Individual coaching is time-consuming, but in terms of the return on investment, it may be the most effective way to build and develop rainmakers within an organisation/firm.

So recognising that much of this is about the development of people, let me return to what I was supposed to write about. I see business development as following the tried and trusted format of plan-do-review.

It is an eminently logical statement; one that few people reading this article would debate. However, it is remarkable how regularly the process is not followed. Typical problems include:

A tendency to fire then aim. In their enthusiasm to ‘get things done’ firms target work without thinking through what the objectives are and whether the objectives are best met by the methods they have chosen. The result is a classic scattergun approach – a few random hits, but many misses and occasional damage to innocent bystanders;
Getting stuck in the ‘plan’ mode. The analytical nature of many professionals means that they are very skilled at making sure that everything is absolutely correct; the result is the reverse of the previous point. The result is the classic analysis by paralysis, which leads to no action, and hence, no business development;
A reluctance to review. The planning is thorough and the actions are then followed, but there are no checks and balances to ensure that the actions are having the desired effect. Worse still, there is no opportunity to review the learning from the activities that have taken place to make sure that the next time similar activities are undertaken, it can be done more effectively.

At the PSMG session, it was evident that this was one of the biggest challenges for a number of delegates: how to ensure that their firm’s business-development activities were properly planned, moved smoothly into action and then given a degree of review. Around 40 per cent of the delegates felt that the biggest issue was that there was the lack of planning, 40 per cent felt that the biggest block was moving into action, and 20 per cent felt review to be a problem. Interestingly only three people out of an audience of 50 people felt that there were effective review systems in their organisation for tracking what has happened on business development activities.

So, how to get started. Again, it may sound very obvious, but there needs to be a degree of clarity about whom you’re targeting and why. The ‘who’ is an interesting one – many firms appear to make this judgement based on gut reaction and intuition rather than any sort of systematic evaluation. While ‘soft’ factors (for example, do I want to work with this person or organisation? Do they share my values? Do I like them?), are important, I believe that these can be built into a more systematic evaluation of an opportunity for a potential target. This ensures that some rigour and discipline is put into the target-identification process. No matter how effective your business development team and partners are, it is a truism that you will win more business if you attempt to sell to the right people. The business-development function in any professional services firm should be responsible for both the design and the implementation of such an assessment form – as an example some of the factors that could be considered are shown below.

Factors to consider for the business development of existing relationships:

How much do they spend on our type of services?
What feedback do we get about the current providers?
Do we want to do business with them?
What is the PR value to us of having them as a client?
Can we clearly offer them a unique proposition?
Size (by turnover)
Size (by market cap)

Today, with such intense competition, firms need to have something a little different to win work. Often that differentiator is relationship driven, a factor that is critical to developing business. However, in my experience target companies are always amenable to a slightly different idea. The challenge for the marketeers and the business- development professionals is to articulate what differentiates their product or service.

Of course, products by themselves are not enough – the world moved away from product-based selling a while ago; arguably it has never been that way in professional services. The principle of solving problems for your client, that is, being very clear about what your client’s issues are before blindly trying to sell what may be an inappropriate product is clearly the most effective way to develop business. No matter how good the product there must be a compelling business reason behind it, which could be in a variety of arenas, whether it be cost-saving, impact on staff, risk issues or a host of other factors.

So getting started for me is about two areas. Be clear about why you have chosen a particular organisation to target (the external factors) and be clear about what makes you different, not in your eyes, but in the eyes of the organisation you are trying to get close to. If it sounds straightforward, that’s because it is. Despite the mystique around selling and business development; much of it is common sense – the key is in applying and executing those ideas.

Peter Matthews is partner in charge of business development at Ernst & Young. He can be contacted at: pmatthews@uk.ey.com.

Targeting and winning business:Where to start

Targeting and winning business:
Where to start