“You’re going to have to grow your portfolio…”

Now, whether this is an unexpected challenge in your appraisal, or as a senior associate or senior manager on your journey up to partnership or even as we heard recently, the challenge laid down to partners who were “too comfortable“ with a portfolio of just £1 million, it can send a chill down many a spine!

It’s often cause for concern when business development is not at the top of your to-do list. Sometimes that’s because you are busy enough with managing a team, firefighting client calls, billing clients and all the other tasks that seem to fall under your remit. Sometimes it’s because you’ve already achieved a certain level of success and have relied on new clients coming to you.

After all, we all love the phone to ring when someone says “I was speaking to my friend and he recommended you…“. That’s a wonderful call to take –  But it’s not enough.

So here are six top tips to keep your “funnel“ full and ensure that you can meet your business development targets

 

1 Find the Time

The biggest problem for 70% of the professionals we meet, is not a lack of knowledge about what they need to do (networking, blogs, coffee, lunch, more networking) but a lack of time to achieve these activities. Everybody has the same seven days and we all want to fill that with the right balance of Work and Life.

So the real question is; how do we make the right choices about priorities?

Great business developers are consistent. They apply themselves to specific BD activities every week for perhaps only half an hour or an hour. But they do it Every. Single. Week. And this gets results.

 

2 You’re going to need Targets

One of the most useful things we get our clients to do is define their “ideal client“. Yes it’s someone we’d love to work with, but we don’t know that until we meet them, yes somebody that pays promptly, but we don’t know that until we meet them and work with them. So it really comes down to what size of client, geographically what area, what sector, what typically defines that business that means you are best place to service their problems?

Once you know that, you can create a very specific target list to go after them.

How many do I need?

A lot of people have 50 or 100 names on a spreadsheet.

Pointless

Just put down half a dozen names and spend your time on them. An hour a week means you can barely spend an hour on each one every month so you are hardly going to be bombarding them with useful thought provoking material on a regular basis!

 

3  Create a Process

When you find yourself looking at your diary and thinking “great, it’s my hour to do business development“, the last thing you want to do is sit back in your chair and wonder what exactly are going to do with your time!

You need a clear plan that is going to appeal to your prospects so…

Firstly, do your research so you understand the business, what they’re inventing or doing, all the challenges they have got in the marketplace, who the directors are and which ones you want to target

Second, Decide how to best approach them, can anyone give you an introduction on LinkedIn, does your lawyer or other associates know anyone in that business?

Third, Make the approach, in person at networking events, on LinkedIn, or just drop them a line with something useful that you think that business might benefit from.

And now… Keep it up!

A good business developer and rainmaker has tenacity. This means they go back every couple of months with something else that’s useful and after a while those individuals in that prospect firm are thinking… “Why the hell doesn’t my accountant or business give me this kind of advice… and I’m not even paying for it!“

 

4 Keep Score

There’s an enormous difference between playing tennis with a friend and having a “knock up“ and playing tennis with a friend and actually playing a league match. Suddenly the pressures on, every serve counts, you stretch for every ball and you really play to win.

Same thing with business development. You keep score: what are you doing, when are you doing it, how many emails have you sent out, meetings attended, blogs written, networking events attended, useful conversations over lunch held et cetera.

The best example I’ve ever come across for this is the firm that dispensed with timesheets for their partners in terms of client work but… Every partner had a target of 300 hours of strategic conversations with prospects and clients every year. Wo betide if anyone failed to hit their targets…

What this ensures is that every month partners need to be having, on average, 25 hours of deep and meaningful conversations with either prospects or clients.

 

5 Lead and Lag Measures

If someone says “How’s business development going?”

Usually in most firms the response is to look at your billings and say… Well of my billings this year… XYZ was from new clients and (usually) this is going to be a small percentage and is met with your appraisor being a bit sniffy and saying that’s not very good then is it?

Much better if we actually bother to measure the activities that lead to work in the future. No salesman in the world measures what the company has billed. Half of them barely care. Because they work on a pipeline of future contracts. When a salesman walks in the door and says “I’ve done the biggest deal in the year and I’m going to the top of the leaderboard… “The company actually bills nothing. It’s just that they’ve met the prospect who has agreed to sign a deal and at some future time (they don’t care when) The company will actually bill that money.

In professional services we are far too much in the other direction, all we care about is billings.

So we need to change the metrics.

The best thing to do is to define your lead measures. These give you lag results. As I’m trying to lose weight at the moment, jumping on the scales tells me nothing apart from the fact that I’ve still eaten too many doughnuts! Useful lead measures that I can use would be:

• Have I been for a 20 mile bike ride.
• Have I gone for a run this week?
• Did I do my HiT training?
• How many times I walk the dog
• Been swimming?

So when it comes to business development, the kind of lead activities that will generate future income boil down to a wide range of different things. They are not all about being an extrovert and racing around networking events grabbing business cards from anyone who still carries them!

Firstly, having deep strategic conversations with your clients!
Secondly, having the same conversations with a prospect!
Writing a blog
Connecting with someone on LinkedIn.
Posting something valuable on LinkedIn (not just a selfie about what you were doing over the weekend)
Providing a prospect with some useful value. Some insight into their industry or business. Not sending a crappy tax newsletter that nobody wants to read.
Simply having coffee or lunch with a prospect or indeed a client can count if you make it valuable for them.
Meeting with intermediaries

The list of lead measures is almost endless, but it’s very important that you define exactly what you want to be doing that you believe will give rise to the best chance of success with your lag measures which will be, writing proposals, attending a pitch and ultimately winning the work and billing the work

 

6 What kind of Support do you need to do this?

Well, if you find yourself in an appraisal one of the first things I would be asking is: How does the firm want to monitor the lead activities I intend to undertake?

All of these are going to be “non-chargeable time“. So for anyone to really drive business development, unless it is expected to be on top of a 40 hour week, they would need to be a change in expectations about the volume of chargeable work you might do and the non-chargeable work you might do.

A committed firm will create non-chargeable codes for many of the above lead measures so that when you do your timesheet, it’s possible to accurately assess exactly what someone is doing. You may have a scoreboard which is informal in your office or on a Trello board but it may be the firm wants to monitor activity – I know I would and have all the statistics inside your time recording system.

 

So, growing a portfolio is straightforward but not easy – it requires Tenacity it requires Self Discipline and the recognition that this will take a little time.

 

So make the most of it

 

And if you want to know how to make it happen in your firm – get in touch hello@thegrogroup.com