Momentum ITSMA’s Account Growth Matrix, shown above, is a useful tool for framing these client growth demands and understanding the implication for marketing. The Matrix plots the complexity of an assignment, service, or solution on the vertical axis against the client relationship on the horizontal.
Professional services firms differ widely in their growth strategies. This means marketing needs to fulfil a different role for each. You may be a leading accountancy firm with all the audit clients the regulator will let you handle, looking to cross-sell new services. This is essentially the top left-hand side of our chart but may feel top right i.e. that you don’t know the client, given the siloed nature of many professional services firms.
These new services can also bring added complexity. You may have established relationships, but to grow you have to position something different. This can be potentially multifaceted, across different jurisdictions, and requiring significant customization and configuration.
This is likely to have an even longer buying cycle requiring significant engagement and collaboration, potentially between multiple stakeholders and third parties (such as intermediaries). Marketing needs to surround these connections and be prepared to support sustained engagements over a long period of service design, development, and implementation. It is far from business as usual.
Or you may be a smaller law firm, unable to compete with the Magic Circle on complexity of service offering, but with ambitious growth targets, nonetheless. You may therefore be hanging your hat on the desire to win a place on the panel of chosen new clients. This could see you firmly entrenched in the bottom right-hand side of our matrix.
Marketing has to support a different type of sustained activity to displace a competitor and build credibility around an alternative offering from a new provider. This could take months or even years to initiate new conversations and build this equity. And this will require education, thought leadership, and a new point of view. All based upon an intimate understanding of the prospect’s challenge.
It is most likely that your overall strategy will be a combination of these. Perhaps dependent on whether the firm is looking to protect the market share it has or compete, win, and scale around the share it doesn’t.