How to overcome cross-selling hurdles – inside, and those that clients erect

Here’s the 3rd 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 advice would you give a firm that is approaching selling –- even selling “solution sets” -- from a fragmented perspective?  Think of global corporations that sell in silos. 

Harding: Somebody has to be responsible for it and it has got to be a short rope. It has to be very clear who is responsible and there is not a lot of room for deflecting off onto other people.

Lowe: What about simply setting up account teams and using an account management approach?

Harding: That is part of the solution, but you also have to set up some processes for teams.  For example, “What do we communicate to each other? Who has ownership for meetings? Who can call whom? What are our strategic goals for this client over the coming year, 5 years?”

Lowe: One of the things that I have heard from clients of professional firms is that they want to resist putting all of their dollars into the bucket of one firm. One of these clients actually said to me, “I am not allowed to spend more than X percent of our annual budget on one particular provider, because of conflict of interest concerns. Our parent company tells us we have to break it up.”  How does that impede the professional firm from doing a good job of cross-selling?

Harding: If you have the right relationship with the CEO that is all irrelevant. He or she can change the rules.

Lowe: Are the clients of professional service firms drifting towards the purchaser model, increasingly using a procurement mentality?  What are your thoughts about clients becoming too fragmented to articulate their own spending levels or perhaps too centralized using a procurement model?

Harding: My prediction is that it will go in cycles in any given firm.  I can think of a particular pharmaceutical firm which has supported practically three-quarters of my clients over the past 5 years. They are buying huge amounts of professional services, particularly consulting (and other things as well). It is a very decentralized, very fragmented organization. At some point, somebody is going to look at what all is being sold and say, “Let’s put a lid on it.”

Next time:  Harding’s advice on growing books of business with clients