From the category archives:

Business Development Strategy

How to Nurture Business Development Capabilities

13 August 2010

I’m currently on vacation in France, sipping on Stella Artois and musing on why the French always seem so much more sophisticated than we Brits. For holiday reading I’m skimming through Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book – “What the Dog Saw” – a collection of some of his New Yorker essays. I like Gladwell. Sometimes his [...]

Read the full article →

Reducing Switching Costs: A Key Strategy for Accounting and Other “Ongoing Service” Providers

28 July 2010

I exchanged a few emails last week with Direct marketing legend Drayton Bird (how’s that for a name drop!). I helped Drayton out with a little bit of advice when he wrote his huge book on Direct Marketing for Lawyers, and we were discussing the differences in business development for lawyers vs accountants. Apart from [...]

Read the full article →

How to Use Linkedin to win new business: poll results

28 January 2010

As you might know, as (apparently!) a Linkedin Expert, I’ve been asked by Cisco Webex and Linkedin to do occasional blog posts related to the European Business Awards they’re running. One thing I was interested in finding out was how people were using Linkedin to win new business. Many people, myself included (in this article [...]

Read the full article →

Focus, Focus, Focus

12 January 2010

One of the big weak spots in my own business development is focus. I’m a great starter, not a great finisher. As soon as I hear of a new, promising approach I love to check it out, research it, try it out for myself. It makes me a great resource for deep up-to-date knowledge on [...]

Read the full article →

Get More Clients with the Client Breakthrough System

28 November 2009

For the last few weeks I’ve “secretly” been running an e-book and email training course for consultants, coaches and trainers on how to attract and win more clients. Well, secret in the sense that I’ve not mentioned it here. The Client Breakthrough System is to my knowledge the most comprehensive – yet free – ebook [...]

Read the full article →

Keep out of the “Muddy Middle” when Selling Professional Services

16 June 2009

For many decades, perhaps the most successful client development strategy for both professional service firms and individual professionals has been one of focusing on a small number of high value clients. As Andrew Sobel points out in “All For One”, a consultant or accountant only needs a handful of good clients to make a great [...]

Read the full article →

Referrals: You’ve got to have a System

13 June 2009

We all know that referrals can be the most powerful and profitable source of new clients. Yet most of us find that we’re simply not generating enough referrals of a high enough quality to reach our practice growth objectives. What’s the problem here? Are we mistaken in our assumption that referrals are such an effective [...]

Read the full article →

Three Painful Truths for Business Developers

12 December 2008

Painful Truth #1 – Your Customers are Busy No, I mean really busy. Business executives today are overloaded, overstressed and over-sold-to. We used to live in a world where business opportunities were in short supply. Today, business executives are bombarded hourly with offers from sales people offering to slash their costs, double their profits, turbo-charge [...]

Read the full article →

Book Review: Making the Number – How to use Sales Benchmarking to Drive Performance

7 December 2008

Making the Number is a new book focused on Sales Benchmarking by Greg Alexander, Aaron Bartels and Mike Drapeau. The book sets out a clear methodology for benchmarking sales activities and performance and shows readers what to measure, how to measure it, and how to use this information to improve sales performance. There’s a lot [...]

Read the full article →

The Importance of Good Follow-Up

20 October 2008

We all know that good follow-up is vital in sales. According to the Gartner Group, almost 70% of leads are mishandled in some way. So great follow-up will give effective salespeople a huge advantage over less rigorous competitors. But how many times have you come back from a meeting or networking event and received this [...]

Read the full article →

Topgrading for Sales: A Review

18 July 2008

The folks at the Topgrading team (http://www.topgradingforsales.com/) kindly sent me a review copy of their latest book: Topgrading for Sales – so here’s the review. A quick caveat: Topgrading focuses primarily on recruitment – and I’m far from an expert in that area. In fact, in my 15+ years working in consulting organisations I managed [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries