Step-by-step guide: How professional services firms can build a business development strategy that actually works

For many professional services firms, business development is ad hoc and is primarily done by only a few people. This doesn’t make the most of resources to maximise growth opportunities and is risky if those people move on.

Firms benefit from key foundations being in place if business development is going to be effective and grow your firm.

In this article, you will gain a clear idea on what is important for the first foundation, which is developing a business development strategy.

What you need to think about before a business development strategy

Firstly, you need to have an overall strategy for your firm. This is creating a vision of what you want to achieve and setting some objectives around growth and focus.

Ideally, the growth would have numbers attached to it, and the senior leadership would think about which departments or teams will drive this growth. Is the growth coming evenly from each department? Is it a growth percentage based on current revenue? Or some other number?

If you want business development to be more effective and establish a business development culture, your firm needs to commit to a changed approach, as well as be willing to commit time and budget to making it happen.

How to approach building a business development strategy

Once these pre-cursors are in place, then you can focus on a business development strategy. This needs to be worked on at a departmental/team level. This is because each one is likely to have very different focus services and potentially different types of clients.

For instance, if you are a law firm, the services and client types are going to be very different in a corporate/commercial department than in a private client department.

What are the foundations of a business development strategy?

Firstly, think about which services you offer. Most departments can probably list a fair few. For a business development strategy to be effective, it should outline a core set of services that the client-facing teams want to focus on. Exactly which services are the focus of the business development strategy depends upon several factors:

1. Profitability – selected services need to be profitable, and if they’re not directly profitable, then they need to be services that lead clients into other highly profitable services that your firm offers.
2. Market demand – there needs to be a clear demand in the market.
3. Expertise – utilising the expertise of your team, and in particular, whether there is any specialist expertise that might be chargeable at a higher rate. An example of this is at one of my client law firms, a particular individual is a specialist in returning children to the UK who have been taken to another country by a parent, without the consent of the other parent.
4. Enjoyment – consider which services your team enjoy delivering.

This approach doesn’t mean you can’t ever do work in other areas, but it means you’re not actively going out to the market looking for it. If you have an enquiry, you have the time, and it’s a profitable piece of work that uses your expertise, then that’s still something you can deliver for a client.

The second consideration for the core services that you have defined is the ideal client profile for each. You should be able to imagine in your mind some key characteristics of the type of client who derives value from each of the services you have listed. Being able to help ‘anyone’ will be very unhelpful later on. This clarity will help your team to be far more focused and make business development seem more ‘doable.’ 

Remember that value in most service businesses is in the form of you solving an immediate problem or challenge for them, providing a long-term benefit or mitigating a risk. When you are clear on these client profiles, it’s a lot easier to define which business development activities you should be doing.

Thirdly, it’s important to look at whether the services you have defined can deliver the growth figures that have been set out (derived from the business strategy). This means that it’s important to consider the average fee you can charge for each of those services, how many you would hope to bring in in a year and see what that adds up to.

An important sense check is then to look at the time involved to deliver all of that work and check that it aligns with the capacity you have in the department/team. Naturally, you can’t count on every hour of every working day for your team, as other tasks have to be done, including business development itself and administration.

These core aspects define your business development strategy. When you have this carefully thought through, clearly articulated and importantly communicated to the team, then it’s a lot easier to develop your business development activity plan, which is the next important stage.

What next for you?

• Have you got an overall business strategy in place?
• Have you got commitment to change, as well as time and budget allocation?
• Have you got a business development strategy in place by department/team?

Think about where you need to start for your firm.

It might seem like a lot of time investment upfront, but it will lay the groundwork for many months, if not years to come, when you put time into thinking and planning and have a strategy that everyone understands and aligns with.

Book your discovery call to discuss where you are at with your business development strategy here.