If part of your job is helping your firm win new work, a lot of your week probably goes on things that never appear in the plan.
Recommendations wait a long time for sign-off, and partners often describe the firm in their own way. In the organisations we’ve worked with, problems like these are usually connected, so fixing one on its own tends to move the pressure somewhere else.
So we’ve built a short audit to show you where complexity is building up in your business. It gives you something practical to do this month, and a result you can take to your leadership team.
Who’s writing this?
We’ve spent 25 years working with professional services firms on the marketing challenges that come with complex organisations.
Much of that work is international, across around 30 markets, which means we’ve seen similar problems play out in very different firms. The audit’s questions are based on the ones we come across most often.
Working out where complexity really sits in a firm, and what to tackle first, is a big part of what we do. The audit is a quick way to start doing that for your own firm.
What’s inside?
The audit has fifteen questions and takes about five minutes. It’s designed for whoever is closest to how the firm wins work day to day, and for sharing with the people who decide what happens next.
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“It’s usually clear when something is slowing things down. Knowing which problem to tackle first is much harder.”
– Forrester
Two situations we see often show why it’s hard to know where to start. In one, a brand recommendation is approved, then reopened by partners who weren’t part of the original discussion.
In the other, a pitch team pulls a proposal together, each practice asks for its own credentials to lead, and the client ends up reading about several smaller firms instead of one strong one.
Problems like these usually start well outside the teams responsible for winning work, in how decisions get made and how the firm has grown across practices and markets. Those teams tend to be where the problems show up first.
Over time, the problems also tend to build on each other. When sign-off is slow, the firm’s story is harder to agree, and when that story isn’t clear, buyers find it harder to choose your firm. Solving that usually means getting the leadership team to see the same picture.
A score that shows how much complexity is building up in your firm.
How your firm looks across stakeholder, brand, market, organisational and digital complexity, with any area that’s holding things up flagged.
What usually sits behind each flagged area, and how those areas might be affecting each other.
One practical step you can take this month, without waiting for a budget or a new project.
A link and a short summary you can send to your CMO, managing partner or whoever on the leadership team would need to act on it.
