Professional services firms often face an uphill climb in advancing their business development maturity and maximizing revenue. In our experience, firms typically progress through five stages on the path to an optimized business development function: Hero, Reactive, Proactive, Forward-Leaning, and Collaborative.

This holiday season, discover the overlooked strategy that not only breaks the ice—but could lead to your most valuable connection yet. It starts by seeking out the one person everyone else ignores.

We all know that it is best practice to have a business development plan. It’s even better to follow one. But during exceptionally busy periods, like around the holidays, a simple business development theme (or BD theme) can be more manageable. 

Many individuals, practice groups, and firms create strategic plans in Q4 only to have implementation stall several months into the new year. Incorporating the right steps now is essential whether you are creating a firm-wide strategic plan, a plan for a practice group, or an individual partner. Following are a few tips to get you started.

“The best way to ask for business is to identify their difficulties. Shift the focus of the conversation away from what you want and over to what they need. Start with, ‘what are your biggest challenges right now?’” - David Ackert (The Short List).

Obviously, the goal with any referral relationship is an equal exchange of value, but if you find yourself in an imbalanced dynamic, here are a few courses of action that will right the scales.

It’s true that there is often no linear relationship between the opportunities you chase and the ones you win. But there is a highly dependable principle when it comes to business development: investing in relationships always pays off.

There is very little in life that’s truly predictable. Take your revenue, for example. It’s impossible to know who will send you your next client. Perhaps a referral source will think of you. Perhaps a stranger will Google you. Perhaps an existing client will refer a colleague. Perhaps someone at your firm will suddenly retire and you’ll inherit their spoils. Perhaps not. 

If they had gone into the process with clearer goals, they might have known what to ask for when they met with their contacts, including introductions to the people who could get them what they actually wanted.

Budget season can be a stressful time. With so many moving parts, it can be difficult to keep track of everything and make sure that the budget reflects the firm’s priorities. Here are 7 tips, to help you get through budget season with ease.

Many firms encourage their business developers to create business development plans. And, while not everyone participates in that process, those who have a concrete roadmap they can follow – and marketers who can help them take an action-oriented approach – are better positioned to convert those plans to actual business pipelines.   

Here are seven ways to thrive in a down economy by providing business development training to employees: employee onboarding, sales team training, business development coaching, remote or distributed teams, professional development, upskilling initiatives, and continuous learning culture.