To support your growth journey, we invite you to complete our Business Development Diagnostic Tool.
This tool includes 20 quick questions designed to assess your current approach to go-to-market strategy, business development and conversion skills.
It will provide you with immediate insights into key strengths and potential opportunities to refine your efforts, ensuring you’re positioned for optimal growth moving forward.
Take this short quiz to see how many of the scenarios apply to you. Simply answer TRUE or FALSE:
1. A few partners/directors generate the majority of the new business.
2. We have little point of difference and so struggle to stand out in the marketplace as we struggle to verbalise how we are better than similar competing firms. Our tender winning ratio is below 50%.
3. We rely heavily on ‘word of mouth’ to grow revenues and have less than 10 ways to generate new business leads. To make matters worse, staff very rarely ask for referrals as they don’t know how or when to do it.
4. Cross-selling is a goal of the practice, but it doesn’t seem to happen.
5. Fee earners consider themselves technical experts rather than marketers or worse, salespeople.
6. We attend and host networking events but achieve little.
7. We don’t maximise the potential of the latest technologies available such as webinars, podcasts, online video, social media etc
8. The firm does a lot of marketing via brochures, sports tickets, sponsorships, PR and advertising but can’t track any specific client to the initiatives.
9. The website produces few leads and little new business.
10. We find it difficult to get in front of potential new clients and struggle to turn leads into fee-paying work.
11. Many staff are willing to market but don’t know what to do.
12. We have a written marketing plan but struggle to put it into action.
13. The business does not premeditatedly identify industries where it has experience or expertise, with the aim of pursuing specific clients in those industries.
14. We find it difficult to prove our expertise and show our track record in our field so we don’t win as much of the ‘quality’ more profitable work available as we should.
15. No formal referral strategy in place with joint venture partners.
16. We are competing in an increasingly price-competitive market where we are discounting regularly to win work or having to make write-offs. Our margins are therefore not as good as we would like.
17. Business development does not come up in appraisal meetings as it is not part of our culture.
18. There are no incentives or bonus for generating new business for fee earners or support staff.
19. Few partners/fee earners have individual business plans in writing.
20. We do not have much income from proactively reaching out to potential new clients.
Bonus Question: Are we able to attract the best human talent in the marketplace to our firm?
Your Results
Be honest. How many did you answer TRUE for your professional practice?
If it is more than six you may be leaving valuable money ‘on the table’ and benefit from some assistance going forward.
If you would like some guidance on how to improve your results, be sure to reach out.