Ford Harding’s advice on growing books of business with clients

Here’s the final post of my four-part Q&A with Ford Harding about professional service firm cross-selling and increasing a firm’s revenues from strategically appropriate clients

Lowe: What’s your best advice to professional service firms and their rainmakers about how to grow their firm’s book of business with their clients? 

Harding: My first advice is personal change rather than institutional change:  “treat the cross market like any other market.” You need to provide just as much service, just as much attentiveness to the people in your organization, as you would to someone on the outside. Leave it to the management of the firm to make the other people want to do it more. But from your perspective, treat them like any other market.

There is a tendency to feel that because you are part of my company, you should do this for me and I shouldn’t have to work at making you do it.  That is a misguided approach, and won’t get you the results you want.

Lowe: We should think of all our colleagues as our clients?

Harding: From the management point of view, you want to create an environment in which people are encouraged to cross-sell, and grow the firm’s overall book of business with clients, and there is some incentive for doing it. But it is very tricky to try and force somebody to do it.