Accelerating trends amongst professional services firms
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Chapter 2
4 core competencies of the professional service provider of the future
Research by HSO (2022)
62%
of respondents say their firm is increasing its focus on business development efforts
41%
of firms reported hiring of increasing business development staff as one of the top new investments in the past two years
63%
of respondents say the continued investment is not just in head count but in the form of budgets that are projected to increase over the next two years
1. Consolidated enterprise-wide data
Professional service providers hold a wealth of data. The challenge is to collect and connect it. Modern relationship management applications can collect data in a passive way, meaning you don't have to ask professionals for their time. This creates a new level of information, including, for example:
- Documents and publications
- Emails and calendar information
- Staff numbers on projects, cases, practice areas
2. Relationship intelligence
To extract value from your consolidated data, you need intelligence tooling that brings information to users, such as insights into strength of relationships, touch points, sales cycles, revenue by client, practice, region and so on. For example:
- Identifying pitch and RFP team members.
- Identifying people to attend feedback sessions with clients
- Insight into sales and margins, by case, project, client, etc.
- An overview of clients within a specific region including connected associates
- Revenue numbers by practice area for the past 6 months: where are we seeing specific trends?
3. Automation
Data management is very time consuming, but necessary. Automating tasks such as data entry or preparing profiles and c.v.'s of team members can help a lot. When you combine relationship and data intelligence with automation, you can save professionals a lot of time, optimize marketing, sales and project processes and improve time management. For example:
- Automatically create a task with a deadline to reach a specific contact and ensure that feedback from that contact moment is captured in CRM.
- Identify cases that have reached a certain threshold for gathering experience
- Automatically update bounce back emails; automate an alert to his/her contact to update and monitor who replaces that person and where the contact has gone.
- Update customer contact information by company association and job title.
- Notifications for contract renewals and proactively reaching out to the customer
4. Real-time insights
When you work in a competitive industry, being proactive is vital. That means you need real-time reports on your most relevant KPIs. But you also need insights into your customers' opportunities and threats in their industry and the potential impact on their business. However, the amount of data available is a major challenge. Intelligence helps create the insights that are relevant to you and your customers.
"The challenge for our customers is: how to find the data, how to manage it, how to effectively communicate information and insights, and how to remain a relevant source of information for your customer."
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Relationship intelligence: in practice