The Soft Skills That Are Delivering Hard Returns
When trying to identify a professional services firm that will outperform its competitors, hard metrics like revenue growth and investment in technology might be where you focus. But beware of overlooking other criteria. Clients value firms with superior soft skills too—and they’re willing to pay for them.
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.