How can professional firms leverage client relationships to drive revenue growth?

Neil Sevitt is a Consultant at Armstrong Watson and has more than 40 years’ experience advising businesses and providing them with innovative solutions to proper and grow. At the recent Law Firm Ambition Conference in London he led one of the key sessions covering cross-selling strategies law firms can adopt to drive revenue growth.

Professional firms are fortunate in that they tend to have a bank of clients where, due to nature of the work undertaken, they’ve built a strong relationship, usually at a senior level. Assuming that all clients ‘belong’ to the firm rather any one individual fee-earner, then the possibilities for cross-selling and expanding services offers can be considerable.

A cultural shift to encourage cross-selling

To fully realise the opportunities borne out of strong client relationships, and in turn generate additional fees, firms may need to embrace a cultural shift. Encouraging collaboration and cross-selling across departments requires strategies and a shared mindset. Practical measures firms can take to achieve this include:

A firm-wide awareness of services

Cross-department communication

Encourage weekly meetings among senior team members. This can generate good discussions about client interactions and activity, and upcoming plans. It’s a simple yet effective way of sharing information that can spark valuable connections and drive collaboration.

Accountant management

By bringing services lines together to discuss major clients of the firm, this can help expand the opportunities for services provided to clients. It creates potential for new discussions with them, ensuring they are aware of the full breadth of services available to them.

Client follow-ups

Don’t let the relationship end once the work is completed. Proactive follow-ups with clients, for example after the completion of a transaction, can lead to further work as they consider their next venture or activity.

Strengthen relationships

As well as building strong professional relationships, take time to get to know your clients interests beyond their business, for example about their family, hobbies and holidays. Creating broader relationships can help ensure that clients keep coming back.

Connect with other advisers

Get to know who else is advising your clients - their accountants, bankers and independent financial advisers. Clients appreciate a joined-up approach and like to know their advisers can work together. Other advisers can also be a valuable source of referrals and insights.

Listen to your clients

Client service reviews or “client listening” can be an excellent way of finding what clients think of the service, the team and the wider firm. Client listening should be undertaken by someone not connected to the client relationship, but usually a partner within the firm. This is a chance to find out what the client buys or has bought from the firm, and therefore what they have not bought or what services the firm provides but are being bought elsewhere. This process can be described as ‘selling without selling’; a simple process of internal consultation, client meeting and follow-up can add huge value to the relationship and uncover untapped opportunities.

Incentivise all colleagues

Incentivising colleagues either quantitatively or qualitatively can be an encouragement to help this happen. Whilst partners and fee-earners should not need incentivising to increase fees, sometimes measurements of internally generated opportunities can give them the nudge they need.

Let clients discover more of what you offer

With simple and cost-effective actions, and a collaborative mindset, professional firms can unlock significant growth from their existing client based, whilst giving clients the opportunity to benefit from more expertise under one roof.

Firms need to embrace the culture of sharing clients internally to maximise the return from each. The clients of the firm are there to provide services to - let the firm offer them the opportunity.