Business Development for Professional Service Firms - 2022 Conference

Introduction

This live virtual classroom conference chaired by Tony Reiss, with a panel of experts will discuss business development for professional service firms.

Each session will provide opportunity for questions and answers.

Conference Agenda

This live and interactive 5 hour conference will cover the following:

10am-11am: Improving Client Service through an Effective Key Account Programme Tony Reiss

What can firms learn from other sectors, where key account programmes have been running for many years. This session will provide the results of an in-depth survey showing what the best firms do to delight their clients.

Specifically this session will cover the importance of:

• Choosing the right clients
• Getting to the top
• Focusing on building the relationship rather than just selling
• Providing training and opportunities to practise
• The role of management in ensuring best practice actually happens
• Techniques for building commitment to a key account programme and changing a firm’s culture to be more client-centric

AM break

11.10am -12.10pm: Creating Blogs that Convert

Amy Hobson, Social B

This session will show you how to integrate your blog into an overall digital strategy that engages and converts your target audience.

Ever feel like you are just making blogs because you know you should? Ever wonder if people love them but never actually do anything afterwards?

This session will provide you with a robust step-by-step formula that you can use when writing, publishing and measuring your blogs. This tried and tested strategy is designed to help you turn your blog into a key touchpoint on your customers’ digital journey that brings you results. This session will cover the following:

• How to establish your blog objective
• How to pick the right title
• Writing to convert
• Measurement at its best
• Tracking performance - reporting for you and your boss

12.10pm - 1.10pm: How to Attract More Clients on LinkedIn

Amy Hobson, Social B

This session will cover:

• Identifying your key target audiences on LinkedIn
• LinkedIn content - what works well & what doesn’t
• How to create content for your audience (meeting their wants, needs, and challenges)
• Top tips to ensure your profile is up to date and remains so
• Time saving - where people waste time and how to ensure your time is well spent

Break for lunch

2.00 - 3.00pm: Sales and Marketing Alignment

Richard Mayer

Taking the time to build, foster and maintain relationships between sales and marketing teams is now more important than ever as buyers are engaging sales later in the buying process. Focusing on and improving the internal relationship between sales and marketing will help professional service firms operate more effectively and in turn, better manage their customer prospecting and customer retention/grow opportunities creating higher value engagements.

This session will cover the following:

• Impact of misalignment on revenue growth
• The alignment gap - aspiration v reality
• What sales and marketing teams demand from each other
• Overcoming key challenges to achieving true alignment
• Solutions

PM Break

3.15-4.15pm How Business Development Functions Can Add Greater Value

Tony Reiss

This session will analyse the desired contributions from members of a business development function in terms of whether the work output is:

• Strategic or operational
• Reactive or proactive
• We will understand the importance of finding time to try to deliver the following:
• Being more proactive
• Educating partners so they appreciate the tasks in any single marketing project (e.g. organising a webinar)
• Encouraging junior fee earners and PA’s to get involved in business development

The session will cover the following:

• The importance of the BD team contracting well with fee earners and how to do this
• An examination of the role of BD team members becoming internal consultants to enable the function to be more influential
• The art of influencing and the four different styles of conversation to change the thinking and behaviour of partners, so they become more effective at BD

Recording of live sessions: Soon after the Learn Live session has taken place you will be able to go back and access the recording - should you wish to revisit the material discussed.