Business Development

And of course we have to do this for ourselves as well.

Transitioning from technical skills to leaderships skills can be a real challenge in professional services firms. Understanding these challenges enables us to help your people develop these skills earlier in their careers as well as help ‘late-comers’ to the party.

Theories around building trust, adding value, networking, and being a trusted business advisor are great but the most important thing is putting it into practice. We will help you do this.

We will help you try things out with role-players and peers, moving on to ‘real play’ with nearly clients; then, sit alongside you as you refine your target list and call your real potential clients.

We will also help you rehearse and refine your pitches to support responses to RFP’s as well as less formal sales opportunities.

Our business development workshops & support

We are used to tailoring workshops and support to each organisation we work with, so please do get in touch for more information on how we work.

There are however a couple of tried and tested methods we would recommend, including:

WOW Workshop (Winning Our Work)

During this two day in-house training course, we build on the latest theories surrounding business development and human interaction; enabling your team to develop an understanding of what it takes to build life-long clients.

Through engaging role-play centred around an evolving case study with accelerated timelines, we encourage and coach teams to implement the steps required to build trust and maintain deep and enduring business relationships with current and future clients.

We will calibrate the level of challenge to ensure you get a really good workout, whilst at the same time build your confidence and appetite to get back to work and start winning more work!

This is a great workshop for those dipping their toes into business development as they transition from being technical doers of work to leading client relationships.

Harnessing ‘The Wolf Pack’

Far from encouraging businesses to view potential clients as ‘prey’; our Wolf Pack approach focuses on helping teams learn, and practise, the most effective ways in which to work together to win new clients.

In nature, the wolf pack is revered as highly strategic, yet supportive of each member – playing to the strengths of each individual to achieve their shared goal – nabbing that deer!

This approach works really well with teams of relatively senior people who are working together on a particular sales target: breaking into a new market, launching a product, expanding an existing client portfolio, etc.

We help the team work out how best to combine and leverage their individual strengths and networks to court potential clients and win billable pieces of work.

Typically this starts with a morning spent on aligning the team, followed by an afternoon of actually contacting clients. We help you get past the typical reasons for procrastinating and make sure you leave the day with some actions completed and a healthy sense of momentum to keep you going.

We then follow up with you over the coming months to help keep that momentum going, by celebrating successes, sharing stories and helping you address any obstacles you encounter along the way.

You will be pleasantly surprised by the strength and resilience of the wolfpack!