A recruiter can ruin your Professional Services firm’s reputation with a single email

Very few firms audit the outbound communications of their recruiters. Similarly, very few recruiters offer to allow their clients access to those outbound communications. This has greater potential for reputational damage than an errant sales person harassing a single customer, as that would affect just a single client relationship. In this case, a recruiter that makes your firm look incompetent can dissuade an entire category of skilled professionals from ever wanting to work there, or to recommend that company to a colleague. 

Is Your Services Team Getting the Recognition it Deserves?

Several years ago, I worked as a senior consultant at an embedded Professional Services Organization (PSO). Our team developed business processes and technical solutions that saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. We received no recognition from executive management, and it took time and distance for me to understand how to avoid the same fate for my current team.

What if your mentor forgot to mention a few important details about management?

The survey covers a small amount of demographic data—participants’ roles, how they learned to manage a professional services organization, and how many years they've been doing so. Current professional services consultants, managers, and executives can participate in the survey. There are twenty knowledge questions, drawn from a pool of over two hundred, organized around the eight areas of a professional services firm. This is to determine roughly how well each participant knows the topic; an exhaustive study would be possible, but also exhausting. This survey should only take about ten minutes for participants to complete.

Answering the most common question asked of Professional Services Managers

Professional Services Managers handle assigning consultants to projects. As a result, one of the most familiar internal emails and questions we receive from sales teams is, "when's the next time a consultant is available?" It is possible to see this request multiple times a week at the start of a quarter, and multiple times an hour towards the end of the quarter. Regardless of the structure of your Professional Services Organization, answering the same question for different people repeatedly throughout the day is entirely avoidable.

Social Marketing for Professional Services on YouTube

Just under a year ago, we started a web series at work for our senior consultants to work directly with clients in front of a live audience on YouTube. I’ve learned some things along the way that might help similar Professional Services organizations in their social media marketing efforts. Called, “the show,” the intent was to do something more ambitious than a dull vendor teleconference.

In the Hot Seat: A Proven Strategy for Evaluating a Job Applicant's Presentation Skills

We ask professional services personnel to perform a broad spectrum of tasks, regardless of their written job description. It is an essential skill to deliver a successful presentation, whether to a small working group, boardroom or an auditorium. As a hiring manager, you may have asked questions about applicants' presentation skills and techniques. You may even have gone so far as to ask for them to make a presentation to you and a colleague as part of the hiring process. In doing so, you may confirm that they can stand upright, narrate bullet points clearly, and advance slides on time.

Document and validate your assumptions

I recently had to pick my jaw up from my desk during a client kick-off call. While scheduling calls are a blight, kick-off calls for significant engagements are often worthwhile. These meetings serve to make introductions and validate assumptions. We had already agreed with the client on the scheduling via email, and the contract was signed. The shopworn phrase of how assumptions "make an ass of you and me" depends on if the Statement of Work documents the assumption.

Forecasting Bottom Line Profitability at the Professional Services Organization

Most Professional Services managers or directors annually participate in the management accounting exercise of forecasting future billings and profitability. The prevalent model in experience-based Professional Services Organizations (PSO) are time and materials-based billing projects, where charges to the client are based on the actual hours consumed, typically up to a not-to-exceed number. However, the dominant model in an efficiency-based PSO is deliverable-based billing, often at a fixed price. Two distinctly different formulas are required to calculate billings and profitability across these practice areas and billing types.

Strategic Client Portfolio Management for the Professional Services Firm

Strategic client portfolio management is a challenge for most Professional Services firms. As a result, professional services managers at a significant number of firms are just avoiding the topic. This is unfortunate, as it means sales teams and senior partners are pursuing potential and existing clients based solely on their own intuition rather than a systematic assessment. Firms that strategically decide on which clients are the most important for their limited sales and marketing resources have a competitive advantage when compared to spreading these resources too thin.

Standard terms and conditions can still confuse clients

Statement of Work documents are one of the most common contracts a Professional Services Manager will touch in the course of their day. These documents are typically based on a master template that incorporates many common terms, conditions, and assumptions.  These standard terms can confuse potential clients, even well after an engagement has been booked.

Traditionally, Professional Services Key Progress Indicators (KPIs) focus on the financials of the embedded Professional Services Organization or firm. KPIs are useful as a dashboard for understanding and communicating the health of the business, and for decision-making. However, those decisions primarily concern the Professional Services Organization and are of limited interest to the rest of the firm. Bookings, billings, backlog, revenue per region, utilization – these are not top of mind for a sales team.

Utilization is one of the more common Key Progress Indicators (KPI) for a Professional Services firm. Firms will often set the utilization KPI between 65% and 80%, and expect their professionals to spend the rest of the year on non-billable activities, training, holidays, and vacation. While the number of days in a calendar year is a standard amount, there are several ways of calculating the number of possible workdays in a year. It is important to understand the ramifications of that calculation and how it affects the Utilization KPI.

Outside of the disciplines of advertising and public relations, professional services firms historically have struggled with marketing activities. Unless there’s a Request For Proposal out in the vertical market served by a given firm, there’s not a lot of effort to differentiate the value of a services firm to potential clients. At external professional services firms, a senior partner might have a personal book of business that they manage and that could generate opportunities for the firm. The buyer’s side of the equation is similar. Clients primarily hear about new services firms from their existing network, or indirect sources of advertising about the value and capabilities of a firm.