Gatehouse Blog
Creating a cross-selling culture within the professional services firm – thoughts from the PM Forum Global Conference
Last week I had the honour of co-facilitating two 90 minute workshops on cross-selling as part of the PM Forum Global Conference in London.
PM Forum is a 5,000 strong regionally-based members’ association, formed in 1996, dedicated to raising the standards of professional services marketing and to enhancing the credibility of marketers working within the sector.
Now this isn’t a subject I’ve spoken about at length before, but having spent a long time operating as a senior communicator at one of the Big 4 accountancy firms, it’s something I’d had a fair bit of exposure to over the years. So I thought it would be a fun exercise.
Working with the excellent Halina Kochanowicz, Head of UK Marketing at ‘magic circle’ law firm Linklaters, we developed a session to explore the softer side of cross-selling. For us this meant exploring four broad areas that echo our own passions and interests:
- Conversation – creating the right internal dialogue
- Collaboration – connecting people, match-making, internal networking
- Culture – tapping into diversity, creating a positive ‘can do’ culture, building a ‘one firm’ identity
- Confidence – building brand, reputation and trust from the inside-out
- Cross-selling remains one of the key challenges facing the professional services sector.
It’s an area that most firms acknowledge as critically important, but very few ever manage to get right. Indeed, according to one survey (BTI Consulting Group’s ‘Benchmarking Law Firm Marketing & Business Development Strategies’), just 4% of firms rate themselves as highly effective at cross-selling and a worrying 77% rate their firms as ineffective.
Where does cross-selling break down?
So where do firms go wrong? What are the things that typically get in the way of cross-selling? I’m going to apologise right now for our extreme overuse of the letter ‘C’, but here’s what we came up with:
Compensation
a belief by individual fee earners that they will not be fairly rewarded for referrals
Control
a fear of relinquishing ownership of a valuable personal relationship
Contact
not knowing colleagues well enough or spending sufficient time with them
Competence
doubting the knowledge, skills and ability of colleagues (particularly ‘unproven’ new joiners)
Client focus (lack of)
not thinking from the client’s perspective or appreciating what they most value
Cynicism
operating in a low trust, sceptical or suspicious environment (particularly relevant during times of change)
Cooks
too many (or too few) senior client contacts spoil the broth!
Chemistry
Not selecting the right people to lead and develop the client relationship.
There are no doubt many more, but this strikes me as a pretty good list of the main challenges and blockers firms face in this area.
Having reviewed this list we went on to explore each of the four areas in a little more detail, before breaking out into a workshop session to capture some thoughts and ideas on what participants could actually do to improve their chances of cross-selling success.
I’ve captured below the main outputs from this exercise – a useful list of practical things you can do to begin creating the right culture and climate for cross-selling to take place….
1. Hold a fun ‘speed-dating’ session after work or as part of your internal conference programme – where employees from different teams are tasked with meeting and learning about people from other teams.
2. Face-to-face forums where you mix up people from different teams, service lines or practice groups.
3. Fact sheets (one sided, plain English) on your services (perhaps written by your graduate or new starters as part of their induction).
4. Tap into your hospitality, sponsorship, sports & social and corporate responsibility activities.
5. Include a slot in team meetings for someone from another area of the firm to come in and talk-through what they do (short and simple elevator pitch with client benefits highlighted and stories and anecdotes used to bring to life).
6. Have a look at the material on your website – is there stuff you are communicating externally that could be repackaged and used internally?
7. Celebrate cross-selling wins – not just new clients.
8. Is compensation getting in the way? Have a closer look at your reward strategy..
9. Weave success stories into all communications – magazine, e-zine, intranet, etc.
10. Focus on your leaders – what else could they be doing to champion cross-selling and, more importantly, demonstrate the right behaviours. Can they become your chief match-makers?
11. Tap into your firm’s competitive spirit by using quick-fire online quizzes (or perhaps a live ‘pub quiz’) to test employee knowledge of your products, teams, etc.
12. Start up a corporate choir (like Ernst & Young) or ballroom dancing (Lovells) ‘club’!
13. Run [optional] breakfast briefings or ‘lunch and learn’ session where people can turn up to learn about products and services in return for a free lunch.
14. Embrace social media as a way of connecting people.
15. Follow the lead of Deloitte and run a ‘film festival’ – equip employees with cheap USB cameras and encourage them to make short films about other teams.
16. Tap into you new starters – get to them while they are fresh and ‘untainted’ – ensure they are given a good understanding of your services during their induction.
17. Feed the grapevine – create the right environment in your office for people to talk to each other inf0ormally.
18. Go and find your cross-selling success stories – proactively go to your ‘star’ partners and fee earners and interview them, capturing the secrets of their success and packaging their story, identifying good practice, tips and lessons learned.
19. Get the partners out there – if you have a regional office network, get them to commit to spending a day a week/month in another/other offices.
Of course, there’s a whole other side to this which we didn’t touch on during our session – including having the right technology and systems in place and getting the reward strategy right. I can’t help feeling, however, that the softer side – the areas we did explore – is fundamental to success in this area.
If you work in a professional services business and you’d like to explore any of these ideas further, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me.
Lee
