- Helping professional services be more successful
Working with professional services firms
We work with a whole range of professional services organisations who sell services to business clients/customers. They range from major accounting and consulting firms, major law firms, management consulting and IT consulting businesses. We design bespoke interventions to help them be more successful. Most of our work is focused on business development and people development. We do consulting, training, coaching, and competency framework development all with a very strong pragmatic approach.
Who we work with
Accountants, law practices and other professional services firms are facing unprecedented challenges balancing client needs with regulatory requirements and their own aspirations.
As competition grows and fees are squeezed, JA Consulting helps firms focus on what’s important to them be that account planning, sales coaching, partnership assessment, sales and presentation skills development or conference facilitation.
Over the years we’ve worked with all of the Big 4 and a number of major law firms and some major consulting firms; indeed, our expertise in this field spans more than 30 years.
We typically help firms win more business or focus on developing people and their skills to positively impact profitability.
One client tells us…
“Originally this particular opportunity was likely to generate a fee of £50k. The coaching challenged me to the point where a higher figure was quoted. We ended up agreeing a fee of £90k.”
Partner, Accounting
What we do
Whilst we have a whole range of tools and processes at our finger tips we are careful to not be over formulaic. We are careful to select appropriate approaches that have a deep research base.
Here’s a selection of activities clients ask us to get involved with:
- Adding value: targeting, and winning, new business.
- Transforming how sales success is achieved
- Account management: helping both the individual and the firm make the most of the opportunities in the market.
- Bid support, creating winning strategies and tactics
- Introduction to sales and negotiation
- Becoming the Go To Expert
- Enhanced negotiation: developing the strategy, tactics and skills needed for successful outcomes.
- Helping partners manage their business challenges, be that organising themselves, their departments or their firms.
- Helping individuals achieve their ambition of partnership and balancing the inevitable tensions that brings.
- Management and leadership development.
- Executive coaching
Many of our conversations are about the reality in the market and how to differentiate an offer when many professional services firms’ clients see very little difference between competing firms.
That failure to differentiate is why too many clients choose their provider on price alone.
Clearly the work we do in this area is highly confidential, so we don’t often talk about our clients’ successes, but here are a few that we can tell you about:
- A 25% (multi millions) increase in revenue for a large tax group within a Big 4 firm.
- The winning of a major new FTSE 100 client for a silver circle law firm.
- Creating a novel value billing approach that netted a profit margin 4x greater than predicted.
- A recent programme for a major firm got “the best feedback we’ve ever seen”.