Clients and Building Business

Towards a business building culture

Over past decades the professions have transitioned from a prohibition against marketing and advertising to basic advertising, then more sophisticated marketing, and more recently, better organised, more robust business development. Given the increasingly competitive nature of the markets in which the professions conduct practice, there is a new imperative; organisations need to evolve a 'business building' culture. This goes a lot further than traditional marketing or business development. 

There are two main thrusts for professional service firms to achieve a successful outcome in respect to nurturing and growing their client-base; it is having a structured, firm-wide or institutional approach to managing and growing client relationships, coupled with behaviours and commitment from all owners and staff which support this. While some firms have established a form of client relationship management (CRM) system they don't always consistently provide the results firms hope for. Most firms have a small group of partners and professionals who are naturals in this area, but the majority usually are not.

The issues that clients address in this area include:

• How to introduce a business building culture within a professional services organisation.
• How to ensure a structured, systematic management of key client relationships.
• How to ensure a cross-fertilisation of clients and work between practice divisions within a firm.
• How to engage the support of all firm staff in business building activities.

It is therefore essential that appropriate management systems are established which provide leadership with a way of achieving firm-wide compliance to critical behaviours in the client relationship sphere. One of these is the Client Relationship Partner™ (CRP™) system evolved by Authentikos which focuses on embedding a business building culture in an organisation and establishing accountabilities for members of an organisation.

"Having good marketing systems in place, and an acceptance by firm owners that clients are important and relationships must be nurtured, is unfortunately not enough. It is also not enough to simply turn up at functions or do a presentation or two. It goes a lot further. Everyone has to be attuned to building the business of the firm through each and every existing or key client target of the firm, and to collaborate with others in doing so. This must be led by the owners, but often requires a massive shift of approach, attitude and commitment from many partners/directors, many of whom still display silo behaviours and attitudes. There thus needs to be clarity and agreement as to their roles and accountability for undertaking them."  Sean Larkan, Chairman, Authentikos

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