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New Executive Education Portfolio to Help Professional Services Firms Gain Competitive Advantage
Given the challenging economic times, professional services firms are finding innovative ways of capturing new business.
"In recent months, I've had the opportunity to speak to a number of managing partners of professional services firms about the impact of the economic downturn on their respective organizations," says Anne Nemer, assistant dean and director of the University of Pittsburgh Center for Executive Education (CEE). "Across the board, all have described in some way how the downturn has provided an impetus to innovate and develop strategies to emerge stronger and better positioned to compete in the future. It is clear to me [from these conversations] that business development is at the top of their lists in terms of an opportunity for growth and improvement."
Firms that expect to grow in this environment are re-evaluating their business development culture and processes. To assist firms in the Pittsburgh region with this undertaking, CEE is partnering with Sales Innovation, LLC to offer a portfolio of customized sales and business development resources. These programs combine the academic rigor of a top-ranked business school with the consultation of experienced practitioners. The programs are customized based on an initial assessment of the organization and the skills of its professionals. Customized content, support, practice, and feedback are provided to the entire team in a way that is accessible—with online content and forums available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Classroom time is devoted to experiential learning activities such as debate, role playing, and group discussion.
"While businesses are under increasing pressure to constantly improve results, there was a dearth of university-based training programs in this market to address business development and sales performance improvement," Nemer says. "For that reason, CEE is very happy to be partnering with Sales Innovation to offer this portfolio of resources to organizations throughout the Pittsburgh region. Sales Innovation has an outstanding track record for delivering the highest return on each organization's investment and helping organizations achieve continuous improvement in individual and company-wide business development and sales performance."
Business Development Innovations for Professional Services Firms the Sales Innovation program offering at the Center for Executive Education, addresses the specific needs of professional services firms. With the input of legal industry advisors, a customized curriculum was developed to help professional services firms manage best practices in business development.
"The best business development and sales leaders take a holistic approach to managing their organizations and focus on a number of basic interdependent elements," says Kathleen Apanowitch, executive vice president of Sales Innovation. "The most fundamental of these elements is the organizational leadership philosophy. It starts at the top with leaders who foster a customer-focused culture."
Successful leaders realize that everyone in the organization, regardless of their position, has a meaningful role to play in building and maintaining the relationships the organization has with its prospects, customers, and others like vendors and suppliers, and therefore everyone is in a position to impact the organization's ability to attract and retain profitable clients. This external focus is essential to creating a sustainable competitive advantage.
For many organizations this external focus represents a culture shift from passive marketing to active business development. According to Apanowitch, marketing and business development are not mutually exclusive, but rather interdependent. An organization's marketing activities spread key messages to a target market. Those responsible for business development are out on the front lines feeding competitive and market intelligence back to the marketing professionals to ensure that the organization's value proposition and messaging is current and relevant.
At its core, business development is a process of identifying specific businesses or individuals that an organization would like to acquire as clients and then following a well-defined strategy for converting those prospects to clients.
In a typical professional services firm, the 80/20 rule applies; that is 80 percent of the organization's business is generated by 20 percent of the senior partners. "These are successful rainmakers who have developed consultative long-term client relationships by leveraging their extensive business and personal networks," explains Apanowitch. "These skills are essentially self-taught early on in one's career and honed through experience, trial, and error.
While instilling professional competencies, professional schools do not always teach their students these essential communication and relationship-building skills. The October 14 program for professional services firms provides the much-needed strategies and resources that managing partners need to create an active business development process and an environment in which all of their staff can develop and succeed.
Professional services firms stand to benefit from a more structured approach to business development. According to Apanowitch, "Associates will gain the knowledge, process, and discipline to succeed in business development and accelerate their track to partnership. Partners will gain the opportunity to sharpen their business development skills and provide leadership and coaching to associates. And the firm not only will gain additional revenue from existing customers and from new customers that meet its ideal client profile, it also will gain associates who are better prepared to lead in the future."
For more information about Business Development Innovations for Professional Services Firms open-enrollment program or to register, visit www.business.pitt.edu/cee/programs/courses/business-development.php
