A Different Kind of Selling
The job of professionals like consultants, lawyers, and accountants, he explained, is fundamentally different from that of a typical salesperson. And so it offends professionals — who are, as a group, trained to be detail-oriented, data- driven critical thinkers — to call them something they’re not.
As doer-sellers, professionals own the entire business development and service delivery lifecycle: they must build awareness of their own expertise in the market to generate demand, identify and close new client business, deliver the work to the client, and then renew and expand the relationship over time.
The relationship between the B2B salesperson and a customer is momentary, usually starting and ending within a few months. But the relationship between a professional and their client can (and should, in most cases) last years, even decades.
Partners in professional services firms own the business, they don’t work for the business.
In professional services, the professional is the product.
The Rainmaker Genome Project
Clients, even long-standing ones for whom firms have delivered unquestioned value in the past, are much less loyal than they once were.
“Provided the professional or firm we used in the past delivered good work, we would be inclined to hire them again if a new need arose.”
Seventy-six percent of participants told us that as recently as five years ago, they would have agreed or strongly agreed with this sentiment. Today, however, only 53 percent.
Purchasing in “soft-spend” categories like professional services, once a black box shielded from corporate procurement departments, is rapidly becoming more formalized.
It’s also given rise to alternative fee structures — such as fixed fees, capped fees and performance-based fee models — as procurement looks to extract more value for money from the firms they work with.
Seventy-three percent of these firms reported that they are pursuing business development training for their partners, and the remaining 27 percent reported that they were considering investments in this area.
We discovered that all professionals could be placed into one of five business development profiles: Experts, Confidants, Debaters, Realists, and Activators.
When our team compared the relative business development performance of these five profiles, we found that many of the most common behaviors are, in fact, negatively correlated with performance.
We found that only one of the five identified profiles had a positive statistical impact on performance. What makes their approach so different ?
Rather than performing business development intermittently when client work allows, these professionals do so consistently, with a near-metronomic cadence that would make any professional salesperson jealous. Instead of building protective moats around their clients designed to insulate them from others, these professionals actively collaborate. They are super-connectors. These professionals make their own business opportunities by proactively engaging clients with new ideas to mitigate risk, cut costs, and grow the topline of their businesses. We call these top performers Activators.
Why Activators Win
We chose instead to focus on attributes like skills, behaviors, time spend, resource utilization, mindsets, and so on. These are things that can be changed with the right training, coaching, and support from the organization.
- The Expert is best described as the reluctant business developer — far more comfortable doing the work than selling the work. Experts tend to adopt a reactive business development posture — waiting for a prospective client to find.
- Our second profile is the Confidant. A Confidant is best described as an old-school trusted advisor. They tend to focus on a small handful of clients and predicate their business development approach on being extremely client-centric. Over time, Confidants develop deep relationships with their clients — especially with senior-most executives and key decision-makers. The consistent refrain we heard from Confidants is that their best client relationships are as safe as they’ve ever been.
- Debaters would be uncharitably described by their colleagues as “sharp-elbowed, opinionated know-it-alls.” They are highly confident in their subject matter expertise and look for opportunities to reframe clients’ understanding of what they need. We found that Debaters were most prevalent in spaces in which there was little differentiation between service providers, and rates tended to be more commoditized. Debaters don’t do particularly well in professional services. As a business largely founded on relationships, professionals need to tread carefully between pushing the client’s thinking and pushing the client away.
- Next, we have the Realist. These professionals are completely transparent about what they can and can’t deliver, what an engagement or matter will cost, and what the client should realistically expect in terms of outcomes and value.
- Our final profile is the Activator. Activators are super-connectors. Their professional network is arguably their most important strategic asset. For an Activator, a robust professional network represents potential, not kinetic, energy. It needs to be activated to result in paid work. Rather than waiting for the phone to ring or responding to a need the client already knows they have, Activators proactively alert clients to needs they often don’t know they have.
When we look at representation of these profiles across the professional services industry, we find that it’s fairly evenly distributed.
- There’s a pronounced spike in Confidants, at more than 30 percent of the professionals in law and accounting.
- Consulting, on the other hand, spikes in Realists — which is perhaps a function of the fact that consultants struggle more with instilling confidence in clients that their engagements will deliver the projected impact.
- In PR and communications, 40 percent of professionals are Experts.
- Investment banking has a surplus of Debaters.
- The only segment in which we find Activators to be the dominant profile is in executive search and talent advisory.
Activators represent the biggest proportion of the high-performer population, comprising 27 percent of this group. Realists finish second at 24 percent, and the percentages trail off from there, with Confidants at 21 percent, Experts at 15 percent, and Debaters at 13 percent.
Only 15 percent of professionals who major in an Activator approach fall into the low-performer category.
The Activator model is not a sales methodology. Instead, it’s a road map for any professional who is looking to develop more of an Activator element to their own business development efforts.
Most professionals in the market today find that they are engaging their clients in more of a team-based fashion as clients demand more holistic solutions to their increasingly complex issues.
Most client-facing teams benefit from a diversity of skills and strengths. A great client-facing team will include Experts who have renowned, market-leading capabilities, Confidants who can build deep client relationships and smooth over any issues, Realists who can manage client expectations, even Debaters who can push the client’s thinking when needed. Still, as a practical point, we recommend that the professional who is running point on the team and acting as the primary commercial interface to the client have strong Activator skills.
- Experts are reactive business developers who lean heavily on their public reputations as accomplished subject matter experts to attract clients.
- Confidants are old-school trusted advisors who focus on building competitive moats around their key clients by forging deep relationships.
- Debaters are highly opinionated professionals who seek to reframe the client’s own understanding of their needs.
- Realists are truthful, transparent, honest brokers with their clients.
- Activators are super-connectors who invest heavily in building and nurturing their professional networks and then converting their network connections into paying client relationships.
How Activators Commit to Business Development
The first pillar of an Activator approach: committing to business development.
Because professionals are responsible for selling and delivering the work, business development easily gets crowded out by other tasks.
This doesn’t happen to Activators. Activators see business development as a core part of their job that needs to be protected.
Nearly 90 percent of Activators report that they reserve time for this every week.
Eighty-two percent of Activators believe it is necessary to be in contact with clients at least once per month to maintain their relationship. Only 62 percent of non-Activators report this level of ongoing commitment to client relationship maintenance.
Activators do spend 37 percent more time on business development than non-Activators, but they don’t spend most of their time on it.
Another incorrect assumption is that Activators spend far more time on new client acquisition than developing and growing existing client relationships.
There are two habits central to an Activator’s commitment to business development: rhythm and prioritization.
Habit 1: Business development rhythm.
Business development rhythm refers to the idea that Activators have figured out how to make business development a regular habit.
Developing a consistent, metronomic cadence. Avoiding intermittent business development.
There are three major problems with inconsistent business development. The lack of new contacts is the most obvious and fundamental. The second problem with intermittent business development is that it leads to opportunity “spoilage”. The third and most devastating problem with inconsistent business development: it’s inefficient.
Getting into the habit of business development.
Habit-formation experts say that developing a “short memory” is critical. Developing a new habit or routine is about patience and consistency, not perfection.
Habit 2: Prioritization.
If business development rhythm is all about where to spend time, there is an equally important flip side: prioritization — or, where not to spend time. It turns out that Activators are as committed to the rhythm as they are ruthless about where they should not devote time and energy.
Early-stage Activator activities: Targeted outreach strategies (including LinkedIn) Networking, especially at firm-hosted events Speaking engagements.
Early-stage non-Activator activities: Blogs, posts, and bios LinkedIn thought leadership Raising internal awareness.
Late-stage Activator activities: Creating (and assessing) opportunities Targeted client and prospect contact Proposing work.
Late-stage non-Activator activities: “Service account management” or internal servicing of rainmaker accounts RFP responses “Wishful” client contact (e.g., checking in with existing clients to see if there is additional work available).
Overall, when we look at Activator behaviors, what we see is a consistent pattern of more proactive activity, whether it is in early-or late-stage client development.
Activators are disciplined in reading the signals about client growth potential and, when necessary, transitioning them away or even suggesting an alternative firm.
Activators have more midlevel clients with the potential to become big clients.
How Activators Connect Broadly and Deeply
Activators connect both internally and externally, on multiple levels.
- First and foremost, like any good professional, an Activator’s professional network contains a robust number of clients and prospective clients.
- The second type of connection we find in an Activator network are key stakeholders within the client organization.
- The third type of connection we find in an Activator’s network are colleagues from their own firm. Unlike most professionals who protect and hoard client relationships, Activators purposefully bring their colleagues into their client relationships.
- The final type of connection in an Activator network is outside experts.
While Activators each have their own personal areas of expertise, they rely as much on their unique ability to be “general contractors” for expertise.
The two critical habits that together underpin an Activator’s connection ability: network management and stakeholder management.
Habit 1: Network management.
An Activator’s professional network is arguably their most important strategic asset.
We found that there are distinct tiers within an Activator’s network, each of which has a different profile and set of characteristics as well as a different required engagement model.
- Our analysis showed that Activators have roughly 20 “critical contacts” who are their closest relationships; just below that, they have a tier of approximately 30 “important contacts”. These 50 contacts are ones that Activators engage with high frequency and in a multichannel fashion.
- Below this tier are about 100 “active contacts” whom they engage quarterly. Beyond the top tiers are about 250 networking targets that Activators are engaging with on LinkedIn.
- And, finally, an additional 500-plus other LinkedIn connections.
Activators are extremely proficient at deciding who should be in their 150-person network.
While Activators devote substantial energy to curating and managing their most meaningful 150 professional relationships, they also spend substantial time building and managing the bottom tier of their networks.
MIT and Harvard Business School researchers conducted a large-scale experiment over five years. Specifically, they adjusted the PYMK (“people you may know”) algorithm so some people would receive weak tie recommendations and others strong tie recommendations. It was the moderately weak ties that led to the most job mobility; the effect was even more pronounced in digital and high-tech sectors of the economy.
Activators perform six times more daily actions on LinkedIn than average (sixty per day versus ten per day for non-Activators).
The average number of connections for Activators was just shy of 3,000, while non-Activators averaged just over 1,500 connections.
As Dunbar explains, “The layers come about primarily because the time we have for social interaction is not infinite. You have to decide how to invest that time, bearing in mind that the strength of relationships is directly correlated with how much time and effort we give them.”
Habit 2: Stakeholder management.
The second key habit underpinning an Activator’s approach to connection is stakeholder management.
In general, most professionals agree that there are more stakeholders on the client side involved in service provider evaluation and selection than there once were.
Consensus decision-making causes all kinds of problems for professionals trying to pitch their services into client accounts.
Targeting the right client stakeholders. Activators know that to navigate the vagaries of today’s buying committees, they need to find a champion on the client side.
Title, seniority, and role need to be ignored when you’re hunting for a champion.
How Activators Create Value
The third and final pillar of the Activator approach: creating value for clients.
Activators deliver value. What makes them unique, however, is what type of value they deliver to clients, how they deliver this value, and when it’s delivered.
The what of Activator value delivery. In its simplest form, there are three ways that a professional can support and deliver value to a client.
- First is the impact of a professional’s work on a client’s business.
- Second is the way in which a professional delivers work to a client and whether it is done in an honest, transparent, credible, reliable, and forthright way.
- And finally, a professional can support a client’s personal goals and motivations.
Activators recognize that there are many professionals and firms that deliver great work and do so with integrity. What sets Activators apart is the attention they pay to a client’s personal goals and objectives.
Activators rely as much on their networks as sources of value for their clients as they do their own personal expertise.
The when of value delivery is also unique for an Activator. Where the strategy of the average professional is to wait for the client to find and reach out to them, Activators do the exact opposite.
There is a distinct pay-it-forward element to what Activators do.
Activators are working to avoid situations in which the client’s needs are already understood, and they are being asked to compete against other professionals and firms for the business.
Activators understand that it takes a critical pair of habits to proactively deliver value to clients: relationship development and insight development.
Habit 1: Relationship development.
To build a deep client relationship, you need to deliver business impact, you need to do it in a trusted way that supports your client’s personal goals and objectives.
What’s most important to understand about this framework is that it is “MECE,” or mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive. Each element of this value equation, in other words, is independent of the others.
Each of these sources of value.
Economic impact. Economic impact is probably the most familiar to professionals. It can essentially be broken down into three drivers: increasing growth, lowering costs, and mitigating risk.
Trust. A “trustworthiness equation,” defined as credibility plus reliability plus intimacy, divided by self-orientation. Another excellent framework comes from The Four Factors of Trust by the Deloitte duo of Ashley Reichheld and Amelia Dunlop.
The ability of an individual such as a professional in a services firm to build trust is a function of their ability to be human (inclusive, empathetic, kind, vulnerable, and respectful), transparent (willing and able to talk about everything), capable (able to create solutions that deliver improvements), and reliable (taking ownership and delivering consistently and dependably).
Individual goals and objectives. The hard truth for professionals is that the ability to deliver business impact — while no trivial matter — is never exclusive to them or their firms. The second thing professionals get wrong is that they assume supporting clients on a personal level is about being personable with their clients. This value driver is all about understanding and supporting those things that are important to your client as an individual.
Relationship visits. DCMi’s research with top client developers determined that it takes about four relationship visits to get one pitch meeting.
Habit 2: Insight development.
Clients despise “empty check-ins.”
Activators don’t do this. They set themselves apart by making sure their outreach and engagement efforts with clients are insight-based.
The ability of a seller to show up with new ideas for how the client could make money, save money, or mitigate risk had more statistical impact on a client’s purchase decision than the vendor’s brand, reputation, product quality, service quality, or value-to-price ratio combined.
Insight differs from classic thought leadership in two key respects.
- First, unlike thought leadership, which is designed to demonstrate credibility and therefore tends to be confirmatory, insight is revelatory.
- Second, executed well, insight leads to the vendor’s unique capabilities.
These insights must tie directly back to some capability where you outperform your competitors.
One Activator said his most impactful outreaches start with the phrase “I thought of you because . …”
An insight-development framework.
First, as The Challenger Sale authors argue, an insight-based message must guide a client to what the professional or firm does uniquely well in the market.
One word of caution for professionals looking to engage clients in an insight-based way: don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
So, given a choice between sending an imperfect outreach or sending nothing, professionals should err on the side of early and frequent engagement.
The Activator Mindset
Activators share three mindsets that underpin their business development habits and their client engagement approach: self-determination, other-focus, and resiliency.
Our personality is the combination of characteristics that make us who we are as individuals.
Mindset is very different. Mindsets are more flexible and can be changed through training, coaching, and other development experiences.
Self-determination theory holds that human beings have three basic psychological needs:
- The need to be autonomous.
- The need to achieve competence.
- The need to experience relatedness.
Activators reject the notion that business development results are a matter of luck or circumstance.
Activators also don’t believe that business development happens on the client’s terms.
Activators do not believe client engagement and business development are innate skills.
Activators believe that business development is a shared pursuit, not a zero-sum game in which some professionals win and others lose.
The average professional is usually focused more on trying to prove their expertise than they are on helping clients accomplish their own objectives.
For an Activator, client-centricity is more than good service or being attentive: it’s about demonstrating genuine empathy — but not the sort of emotional empathy many of us are familiar with. Instead, we’re talking about cognitive empathy.
In her book The Empathy Effect, Dr. Helen Riess, a medical doctor from Harvard, identifies several scientifically derived elements of empathy, including posture and affect.
In terms of posture — that is, how one’s views are positioned relative to the client.
Identifying and naming the emotions you perceive in others — that is, their affective state — is also a technique that Activators use.
The third defining mindset of the Activator is resiliency. Resiliency is the degree to which a person bounces back quickly from criticism, rejection, or setbacks. Often paired with buoyancy — what Dan Pink called one’s ability to float “in an ocean of rejection”.
In his book Learned Optimism, Seligman suggests we ask ourselves three key questions.
- First, “Is this permanent?” While Activators view a client relationship as permanent, they also recognize any given interaction with their important clients may not always go well.
- The second question Seligman suggests we ask ourselves is “Is it pervasive?”
- The final — and perhaps most important — question Seligman recommends is, “Is it personal?”
The Activator approach is not reliant on personality: anyone can learn to be more of an Activator.
Activators share three distinct mindsets that together lay a powerful foundation for their business development approach with clients.
- First, they are self-determined.
- Second, they are other-focused. They have cognitive empathy toward their clients.
- And third, they are highly resilient.
The Moments That Matter to an Activator
There are five clear pivot points when Activators distinguish themselves in the client engagement process: initial contact, opportunity creation, pitching, fee negotiation, and client setbacks.
- First, from a commitment standpoint, Activators are choosier about the moments they invest time in.
- Second, when it comes to connecting, an Activator’s success in these pivot points is powered by the network asset they’ve invested in.
- Finally, Activator pivot points are infused with value creation.
The most concentrated networking happens at events.
- First , Activators advise that professionals prioritize events that are focused on a specific industry or subspecialty .
- Second, they advise that professionals consider joining an event committee.
- Third, Activators advise setting goals for any event a professional attends.
- Fourth, Activators recommend always “working the event.”
- Fifth, Activators say to follow up, follow up, and follow up some more.
- Finally, Activators recommend reevaluating event value every year.
An Activator networking conversation has six parts:
- Intro questions.
- Transition to business questions.
- Value delivery. The shift to a business conversation gives you the right to introduce your business background at this point.
- The curiosity phase. After sharing some insight and background, it’s time to return to questions.
- Securing the next step.
- The close. Many early networkers struggle with how to get out of a conversation as much as how to get in.
When we look at how professionals use LinkedIn, we see a few general patterns. First, we have the nonusers who are easy to identify in professional services. The second pattern we see is influencers. Influencers are all about posting “one-to-many” content and collecting followers.
Of the five profiles we identified in our research, the Expert profile is the most likely to use LinkedIn like an influencer.
The final pattern we see is the Activator pattern. Activators also post content, but their use of LinkedIn is more about one-to-one outreach, connection, and engagement than one-to-many broadcasting.
With a compelling profile in hand, Activators then focus on building and activating their networks.
Activators tend to define their LinkedIn networks more broadly than most. They consider not just their first-tier connections, but their second-tier connections as well.
One Activator told us that when thinking about clients, he always asks himself, “What do I think the client should be worried about six months, two years down the line? And how can we get ahead of that for them?”
Delivering insights to clients should follow a general four-step flow. An insight-based outreach is different in four key respects.
- First, it starts with a hypothesis about what the professional thinks is weighing on the client’s mind.
- The second step in an insight-based message is to disrupt how the client is thinking about the issue right now.
- Third, professionals should justify their claim. Focus on what The Challenger Sale authors call ROPE, or return on pain eliminated.
- And, finally, the message should connect to the professional or firm’s unique differentiators.
The pitch , whether an informal call to confirm work or a formal presentation in response to an RFP, is a distillation of all the value and relationship conversations that came before it.
At a high level, there are four key elements to an Activator pitch:
- Understanding the audience.
- Differentiation through insight.
- Proof points.
- Two-way learning and team-based delivery.
Activators never deliver a pitch without holding a pre-pitch call with the client. There are three simple agenda items: to understand last-minute dynamics, confirm attendees and agenda, and set the tone.
Activators tell us that there are three benefits to a pre-pitch call:
- Avoiding wasted time.
- Getting critical signals.
- Looking “sponsored” in the meeting itself.
Another differentiator for Activators during pitches is an understanding of how to create value through “peak moments” in a pitch.
Activators therefore optimize for memorability.
In their book The Power of Moments, Chip and Dan Heath looked into what parts of experiences we remember. Typically, they found, people remember the best or worst parts of an experience — or the last part of the experience.
They then looked deeper at what made for those “best moments” and discovered four characteristics: elevation (of senses, stakes, surprise), insight, pride, or connection (especially through moments of shared meaning).
For Activators, this appears first and foremost in the use of insights.
By being other-focused, Activators increase overall value by understanding what would add value to any fee negotiation. By being self-determined, Activators recognize the control they have over the outcomes and bring confidence to the negotiation — leveling out the playing field because they recognize that perceived power is as important as actual power in a negotiation. And by being resilient, Activators stick with the negotiation long enough to find creative solutions that bring more value to both parties.
Activators do not feel like they are born negotiators, but rather that they are prepared negotiators.
Perspective-taking and empathy in negotiations were explored deeply by researchers Adam Galinsky, William Maddux, Debra Gilin, and Judith White. They found that cognitive perspective-taking increased an individual’s ability to discover hidden agreements and to both create and claim resources at the bargaining table.
When both sides perceive similar levels of power, they tend to be more open about what they are looking for and more creative in finding solutions.
- If there is a struggle to reach fee alignment, the Activator’s first step is to add value rather than to discount. Tversky and Kahneman’s research shows that people in negotiations prefer multiple small gains over single equivalent large gains.
- If alignment is still not found, Activators move on to “stage two” negotiations: confining discounts and aiming for concessions in return.
- The final stage for Activators struggling to get to fee alignment is to wait.
There is one final phrase we heard from Activators generally, but particularly when it comes to negotiations: “Is this fair?” — a question that Chris Voss recommends.
In a tough or high-stakes moment, the phrase “Is this fair?” can defuse the tension remarkably well.
The final pivot point for Activators is in how they handle client setbacks .
There’s a phenomenon in customer service called the service recovery paradox , which refers to the fact that a customer’s loyalty to a company often increases after a service failure, provided the company effectively resolves the issue.
Research shows that rebuilding trust is easier when the initial basis of trust is strong.
Activators also recognize the easy confusion between budget and value.
Activators communicate frequently about both budget and value with their clients. And since perceived value can decay over time, Activators will remind clients of past value and make sure to deliver additional value when facing impending renewals, budget conversations, or negotiations.
What is the Activator way to handle a “No thanks?” Activators tell us that they always check their assumptions and dig deeper to make sure they are being rejected.
After a bad meeting, most Activators typically wait a day or so before looping back and engaging the client in an open discussion.
The hardest “no” of all comes after losing a pitch.
Once that call or email comes in, we tend to see two typical responses. The first is to move on. The second response we see is for the professional to reach out to the client to ask for feedback as to why they weren’t selected for the work.
Activators know that both of these approaches miss an important opportunity. Activators engage in what is called a “loss call” — a moment that capitalizes on one more of Cialdini’s principles of influence: reciprocity.
The call has a very simple structure:
- “We’re disappointed, of course, but we know these decisions can be difficult and completely respect it.”
- “We would love to get your feedback as to where we were strong and where we fell short” or “Do you have any advice for how we might approach future opportunities to be more successful?”
- “We really enjoyed getting to know you, the team, and the company.”
- “I would like to offer up my support and thought this [insight, connection, other offer] would be helpful to have as you and your team embark on this work.”
Many Activators who have lost opportunities but stayed in touch methodically find that later, the work eventually comes.
The themes of committing, connecting, and creating help activators turn contacts into new business one activity at a time.
Building an Activator Firm
The first thing for leaders to understand is that their professionals, as a group, generally detest business development training.
The best way to deliver Activator training is through small, carefully constructed cohorts.
We’ve found that an intensive, shared experience like participating in a training cohort with a dozen colleagues you’ve never met before is much more effective at breaking down barriers to collaboration than almost anything else a firm can do.
The two big drawbacks of cohort-based learning are difficulty scaling the training across large organizations and having to put much more design thought into cohort construction than one would in a ballroom-like setting where all professionals are being trained together.
Who are the ideal learners for a training cohort? In our experience, they generally fall into three categories: newly promoted partners, lateral hires, and tenured professionals who are looking for a “reset” moment. While enthusiastic learners are clearly in the wheelhouse for new training programs, firms shouldn’t ignore the tourists or the prisoners.
One of the biggest gripes professionals have about business development training is that they see it as sales training. Sales is a process, whereas client development in professional services is a cycle. A second shortcoming of B2B sales training is that it tends to be more focused on skill development than behavior chang. Most B2B sales training tends to be very focused on how to follow specific processes and use specific tools to make sales reps more effective. One final difference is that most sales training is designed to show salespeople what to do.
So a professional services program will be more about providing general guidance than specific step-by-step instructions. It’s as much about how to think.
One of the standout examples of using firm resources to encourage Activator behaviors is how law firm McDermott Will & Emery approaches its firm-sponsored events.
One of the biggest opportunities to do this, Coleman’s team decided, was to manage their firm-sponsored events differently. At Coleman’s direction, the firm’s business development and marketing team built a standard playbook for all firm-sponsored events that consists of three primary components: goal-setting, targeting, and engineering.
The firm’s leaders expect to see positive ROI from any event within six months — whether the event is big, small, formal, or informal. What should the ROI of an event be? A 5 × return is at once aspirational enough to be stretchy for most firms but not so high that it is unattainable without flawless execution. A successful event will return five times the cost of the event in new client business.
For any firm-sponsored event, the team targets contacts to be invited or engaged during the event.
Engineering. In the leadup to any event, McDermott’s business development team makes sure firm participants are prepared for the conversations they want to have at the event.
Our research clearly shows that Activators are heavy users of relationship intelligence platforms, knowledge management tools, and CRM.
The key point for firm leaders to remember is that, in a professional services setting, technology can reinforce existing behaviors, but it can’t by itself conjure new behaviors.
It’s impossible for the average professional to stay on top of it all — especially when they are simultaneously executing client work. AI promises to change all of this by pulling together disparate data sources and feeding real-time data and alerts to professionals so that they never miss an opportunity.
Client teams use a series of measures to understand the progress they are making toward their growth goals. On the input side, the number of connections between Baker McKenzie’s lawyers and decision-makers and influencers within client accounts is monitored and benchmarked relative to competitors using a variety of technology tools. On the output side, important measures include client revenue, profitability, share of wallet, and number of practices and markets served.
Firms cannot turn their professionals into Activators by paying them to do so.
Most research suggests that pay is not a particularly effective tool to get knowledge workers like professionals to do anything.
Dan Pink in his book Drive. Pink points to numerous studies that conclude that compensation results in better performance within the workplace only if tasks consist of basic mechanical skills. If the task involves cognitive skills, decision-making, creativity, or higher-order thinking — as does all of the work of a fee-earner in professional services — extrinsic motivators actually results in lower performance.
None of this is to say, however, that aligning compensation to Activator behaviors isn’t important.
Rewarding Activator behaviors is important not to get professionals to behave like Activators but to recognize that they already are.
Too many pitches in consulting firms, McIntyre explained, are handled by the person who happens to get the call, not the team that is objectively best positioned to support the client.
Asking partners to proactively collaborate on new business opportunities and getting them to actually do it are often two different things, especially in firms that have long built their go-to-market approaches around individual expertise and incentives.
Monetary compensation isn’t the only part of a firm’s rewards system that leaders should align to Activator behaviors . Moments of celebration and recognition send messages to professionals about what the firm values most.
As an industry, professional services firms are notoriously guilty of focusing on lagging indicators like billable hours, utilization, contract value, firm rankings, and Net Promoter Score to manage their businesses.
In her book Leading Professionals, Laura Empson — a professor at Bayes Business School at City, University of London — explains that “Individual professionals — highly educated, highly intelligent, and highly opinionated — are generally reluctant to see themselves as followers. … They value their autonomy and confer authority on their leaders on a highly contingent basis.”
The concept of Wildly Important Goals, or WIGs, was coined by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling in their book The Four Disciplines of Execution.
The authors discuss how the “whirlwind” of day-to-day business operations tends to get in the way of making progress against long-term goals. Aside from the whirlwind of everyday business, leaders themselves often compound the problem by asking their teams to focus on too many priorities. To overcome this challenge, these authors argue, successful organizations declare a very small set of objectives — typically no more than two or three — to be their WIGs.
One of the keys to getting a firmwide transformation like Activator to stick is to task specific working groups with the responsibility of driving action internally. This is exactly what Hogan Lovells did when they convened their Strategic Sales Group.
Over the past few years, the Strategic Sales Group has identified and executed on several new programs in support of their growth goal, including: A firmwide Sales Academy. A Win of the Week Series that celebrates pitch wins or teams that have demonstrated recent sales success. A Pitch to Win approach that includes a “pitch mentor” deployed from the Strategic Sales Group. Pitch to Win also leveraged a new opportunity engagement and qualification process called Ready-Set-Go, which ensures a fast start on new pitches.
Win rates have increased from 24 percent in 2019 to above 48 percent from 2021 to 2023.
In the doer-seller world of professional services, where professionals navigate the chaotic day-to-day demands on their time, asking for behavior change requires leaders to put forth a compelling vision, communicated with clarity and aligned on a single goal everyone can rally around.
A Powerful Reset
Above all, Activators pride themselves on being helpful to others.
Activators start by delivering value, which forges a stronger, trust-based relationship with the client. These relationships aren’t built on invoices, but on the professional’s fundamental desire to be helpful to the client and deliver value, irrespective of whether the client pays them for it.
For most professionals, a pitch has a binary outcome: the business is won or lost. But Activators don’t pitch for business so much as they evolve their relationship with the client. Engaging in paid work is the natural culmination of the value they’ve already delivered and the investment they’ve already made in the client relationship.
Activators don’t need to lead with their credentials because the client already knows who they are, the client already trusts them, and there is already a relationship in place.
Study Methodology
The first step is to build a study model that “chalks the field” for the research.
In our case, we were studying business development effectiveness of professionals.
Our team settled on a set of 108 different variables we hypothesized might have an impact on a professional’s individual business development effectiveness.
The survey instrument itself used a variety of question types, including MaxDiff, an approach that forces respondents to tradeoff between different bundles of options.
Finally, to make sure the dataset was clean, we checked for and eliminated any instances of straightlining (i.e., when a respondent demonstrates a pattern of question response that indicates they are simply trying to get through the survey as quickly as possible).
The survey gave us our independent variable set. To provide a dependent or outcome variable, we then asked the leaders of the forty-one firms that participated to assess each professional’s business development effectiveness relative to their peers on a range of standard business development dimensions.
Our model also included a set of control variables — for instance, age, gender, tenure, geographic market, and professional specialty — to ensure the findings would be broadly generalizable.
Where the statistical analysis showed us what top performers do differently, the interviews revealed the how and the why behind their approach to business development.
For those non-Activator rainmakers, it stands to reason that they’ve managed to avoid the attributes of their primary approach that are negatively correlated with performance.
