Using coaching and a sales management approach to build a portfolio focusing on key accounts……. 

BACKGROUND

Our client is one of the big 4 professional services firms operating in a highly competitive market. We were asked to work with a significant chunk of their Tax department in London. ​

Like all tax departments our client’s best people have very high level technical skills. Indeed, some of them are recognised as world leaders in their fields. This particular case focuses on a broad transformation of the whole partner population.

THE CHALLENGE

To help the whole department focus their efforts to get more activity and that activity to deliver results. A big part of the challenge was to build confidence in the partners to have broader, more strategic, conversations with a wider range of stakeholders in client organisations whilst still retaining their status as tax professionals.

HOW THE CLIENT BENEFITTED

Through regular, short, interventions partners and directors spent more time meeting clients and developing opportunities for their own service line and for other service lines. In some areas the client sub-teams also developed radically different BD approaches. ​

Most significantly over the 18 month period of the assignment their top line grew by £45M – the client credited £20M of that growth to our intervention.

WHAT HAPPENED?

Working with a small team of JA Consulting’s most experienced coaches we set up regular short coaching meetings with clearly identified actions – typically focused on target clients.​

We made sure we understood the department’s strategy and the clients they wanted to focus on. In some sub-groups that strategy was either not clear or not viable. In those cases, we worked with the lead partner and their leadership team to develop the strategy.​

With each partner or director we focused both on the individual’s strengths and on what they thought their clients wanted from them. ​

We worked with each partner to create a clear action plan and then using a coaching approach helped the partner implement that plan. ​

That meant a mix of holding the partner to account, building their confidence to carry out stretching actions and, in some cases, using our own network to give them confidence building insight.

RESULTS

Coachees said they felt momentum was achieved and that the coaching acted as a catalyst allowing their development to accelerate whilst building on their confidence. Here’s what our client had to say about the coaching:​

“We knew this was going to be really challenging. Our senior tax people have been used to lots of inbound work but, as the market started changing and our growth ambitions extended, we knew we had to get more focussed activity from all the senior people. ​We tried doing this ourselves using our existing sales director resource but that did not give us the degree of change we needed: we found that partners were too dismissive of that resource. ​What Tim and John did was to give us a process and, most importantly through their direct approach, quickly got us to be far more proactive. ​End result; over 18 months we added £45M to our top line. We reckon that at least £20M of that was because of the coaching that John and Tim did.”