With 2024 likely to be a challenging year for many in professional services, firms will need to work hard to retain existing clients and convince them to spend. This is where soft skills, such as those deployed within successful relationship management, can play a considerable part.

Source’s latest quarterly research analysed what clients really value in the firms they’ve used most over the past two years. The top answer (selected by 26% of clients) was that the firm looked after them well. This (seemingly soft) reason even pushed return on investment down into second place, demonstrating the concrete commercial value of building great relationships.

This finding is borne out by our recent Emerging Trends report on account management. Here, the soft skills* that come with great account management were shown to be pivotal to revenue generation, with more than half of clients (54%) saying their organisation had commissioned extra work, that they otherwise wouldn’t have, as a direct result of their relationship with an account manager. And, in addition, 45% of clients told us that they had spent more on individual projects due to the influence of an account manager.

The value of great account management

However, the picture varies across the professional services market. While buyers of consulting and accountancy/audit services have frequently been convinced to spend more on a project by good account management (49% and 39%, respectively), legal services clients are less persuadable, with only 14% being won over.

Why do firms lose work?

While strong relationship management during a project can lead to additional work, the connection must be actively maintained to remain fruitful in the longer term. Firms frequently ask us why they don’t win repeat business and often the answer is that they don’t keep talking between engagements.

Perhaps consultants (and other professional services executives) shy away from seeming overly pushy with their selling. But clients welcome meaningful catch-up sessions—ones where experts share insight on the market and prove their worth as thought leaders.

Another reason that firms don’t win repeat work is the corollary of what we discussed earlier: because they have demonstrated poor soft skills during a prior engagement. Nowhere is this more visible than in legal services. Here, a cautionary 71% of clients say that poor account management has caused them to end an association with a firm.

And when we asked clients why they had reduced their use of a particular firm, the top two reasons cited were consultants that were difficult to work with and those that weren’t proactive. Substandard service destroys revenue, just as great service creates it.

Where relationships are destroyed

Ultimately, clients want to buy from firms that know them well, treat them as individuals, and are easy to work with. For firms to do this—at a time when they are prioritising investment in technology and thinking carefully about all other costs—they mustn’t neglect their soft skills.

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*It is worth a small aside to explore what attributes clients want in account managers, and in doing so tighten up our definition of revenue-generating soft skills. Clients value someone with knowledge of their organisation and its problems, who demonstrates creativity & problem solving, and anecdotally they use words like trust, empathy, and responsiveness. It’s not simply about friendliness or communications skills (those rank low on their list—buying work remains a commercial decision).