Cross-selling (Part 1): How can firms make the most of their conversations with clients?

Here’s a story: In the middle of an economic downturn, we were working with a consulting firm that wanted to know why it wasn’t winning more business. Then, as now, the key question we were being asked by professional services firms was: “Our pipeline is weaker—is that us or the market?” The truthful answer to that question, then as now, is that it’s both. A better question is: Which is having the greater impact?

With this particular firm, the answer was them. Client after client told us that these smart, lovely, and respected people didn’t come with suggestions about how they could help their clients in other areas. Why not? Because the consultants were worried that they’d be viewed as aggressive salespeople, and that they’d lose the trust of their clients. “There’s a line,” agreed one of the clients we interviewed. “We absolutely don’t want to be sold stuff we don’t need. But these people are nowhere near that line: There’s so much more they could be doing in this organisation.” Nearly twenty years on, those comments perfectly encapsulate today’s issue.

Account management is the primary mechanism through which professional services firms cross-sell. By having conversations with their existing contacts, account managers can explore areas of concern on the client side and suggest ways in which the firm can help.

The problem is that account management has inevitably become less visible—and less important—because of hybrid working. Data that we’ve been gathering since 2017, which tracks the relative importance of factors clients consider when broadly deciding which firm to hire show that account management, which was ranked fourth at the very beginning of 2021, had dropped to 13th 12 months later.