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Consulting firm founders and go-to-market leaders (aka marketing and business development leaders) aren't doing themselves and each other any favors right now. For that matter, many are setting each other, and in turn the firms they work for, for outright failure.
A common story
Tell me if this sounds familiar...
An industry expert gets tired of working at a big firm, or in industry, and goes out on their own. They have a deep network, deep expertise, and are generally liked by people they have worked with. They fairly quickly build up a book of business too large for them to handle on their own, so they bring on some contractors, some of whom later become partners as the firm grows.
Their network naturally expands through the partners and as they do great work, and this lasts for years; sometimes decades. But then things slow down and growth plateaus. The partners are tired of doing it all, including the majority of the business development, so the decision is made to bring on a dedicated sales leader and build a business development team.
A few years later, and the firm has cycled through several sales leaders, even though they each came with industry pedigree and a "rolodex". Now there is an extra half million in payroll, and the partners are still heavily involved in business development with no end in sight. So the decision is made to bring on a marketing leader or agency to fill the "top of the funnel" so the business development team can have more conversations.
A few years later, and the firm has cycled through several internal and external marketing resources, even though they each promised to to build a demand generation engine. But the majority of revenue is still coming through the networks of the partners and based on the reputation the firm has developed over the years.
Everyone is frustrated. Why isn't this working!?!?
Sound familiar?
Let's cut the bullshit
All parties involved are embellishing, not understanding each other, and having unrealistic expectations. Usually this is unintentional, though you do need to be careful of the minority of charlatans out there.
Founders and partners, let's have realistic expectations about what you are trying to achieve. Many of you are looking to duplicate yourselves. You are thinking that you can extricate yourselves from being the face of the firm. You believe that by bringing in an experienced seller, who understands the industry and has connections, you will be able to do this. But the problem is that people don't build relationships directly with firms. They build affinity to firms through relationships with people, based on the ideas, expertise that these people share in the marketplace.
And nobody - and I mean nobody - will understand the business and be able to build the kind of affinity to your firm like you and your partners can. This doesn't mean that you need to continue doing all the business development, but we'll get into that shortly. But it does mean that you shouldn't expect to duplicate your business development success by hiring a sales leader.
Sale leaders, let's be honest about what you can achieve and what resources you will need. Some of you are relying on experience that's outdated at best, or irrelevant at worst. Just because you successfully sold consulting services 5 years ago, doesn't mean you will be able to do it again, in this market, in today's noisy digital-first world. Even if your previous go was in the same industry, many of your contacts might have already retired or moved on.
Getting in touch with people is significantly harder today than it was 5 years ago. Heck, it's harder than it was 2 years ago! You need marketing and sales enablement to be successful. But most sales leaders are naturally confident in their abilities, as they should be, and it is this confidence that often gets them in trouble because they oversell their ability, and don't dig enough to understand the lack or resources they are potentially walking into.
Marketing leaders and agencies, let's be honest about what you can achieve and how long it takes. Some of you feel so under pressure to show results, that you are more focused on proving your worth than actually doing the hard work to get the results that are required. Selling complex services requires full mastery of all 4Ps, yet most of the effort is put into Promotion, and they you wonder why the needle isn't moving much.
You get so focused on driving short-term impact that things like brand, pricing, and service design are forgotten. Working on these requires a long-term focus. But forgoing them in favor of short-term lead generation, creates a false sense of progress and usually pushes the higher level business impact even further into the future.
There is no easy button
So let's be honest with ourselves and with each other. Growing a firm is hard and doing it well and sustainably takes time. There is no easy button. We inherently know that it doesn't exist in our primary expertise domain, because we took the long road to get there. We spent years, and decades of hard work, learning the ins and outs, finding patterns, extracting the insights, and figuring out how it all works.
But for some reason, many believe that this easy button does exist in other domains, because they believe that their domain is much more difficult and complex. This is a common view of the sales and marketing function, especially from those who come from a more technical expertise domain.
But here is the problem - marketing and sales are functions who's primary role is to deal with people. People are illogical, emotional, and complicated. So while it may seem like there should be an easy button for sales and marketing. There isn't.
No miracle salesperson or marketer is going to come in and make it rain - not right away at least.
The predictable revenue model is broken, and it never really worked very well in the consulting environment anyway. You can't simply hire a bunch of sales people, even if they have industry experience, and expect that they will quickly bring in a bunch of new business. Not to mention that finding good sales people in professional services is extremely hard. Most are too far away from the work itself to be able to sell successfully, and many senior consultants don't have the time or often the skillset to sell.
MarTech, attribution, automation, AI all seem like they will make marketing easier and data-driven. But it's a false promise, and one that often bites professional services marketers. Most of the MarTech out there isn't built to support a relationship-based consultative sale. And too much focused is often placed on technology when bigger problems exist around positioning, alignment, people, and process.
Headwinds in the current market
Now let's layer on top of all this current market headwinds, and you should realize that to grow a firm, you really need to reframe how you think about go-to-market, and focus on understanding the ecosystem.
The macro environment is causing all organizations to think longer-term, and focus on effectiveness and ROI. This is happening across all business functions. This means that every investment and budget line item is being scrutinized based on the following line of questioning:
- How does this support our business objectives?
- How quickly will we see the impact of this spend?
- What is the magnitude of impact that we can expect?
- How confident are we in our ability to forecast the time lag and magnitude of this impact?
The speed of technology innovation, namely generative AI, is creating exponentially more noise. This is being felt both in the volume of content that is available for consumption as well as the volume of forecasts about the potential impacts and use cases for AI in organizations, including decreasing costs by replacing people, or making people more efficient.
The proliferation of fractional everything, as well as the globalization of services with a significant increase in cheaper offshore resources, is creating a scenario where everyone has more choices when it comes to professional service providers, which in turn creates more skepticism about what all of these options can actually deliver.
So what does all this mean for your firm?
1. The specificity of expertise matters - you need to own a thought leadership position in the minds of your ideal clients. This means bringing your people front and center. It means you, the founders and partners, need to be front and center as the face of your firm.
2. Investment risk has increased - you need to focus on de-risking the buying decision for your prospective clients. This means building credibility and trust throughout the entire customer journey.
3. The way people research has changed - you need to find ways to influence the ecosystem. This means influencing everything from AI search algorithms to the network of peers and influencers.
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The solution starts with understanding and agreeing where your gaps are, and aligning on the priorities needed to fix them.
