Professional Service Firms are probably the least likely of all businesses to know what their results next March are going to look like. Most professional service pipelines look rather more like a cliff edge than they do a smooth flow.

Part of the reasons for this are inherent in the nature of professional service businesses. There’s a huge variety in the type of engagements professional firms sell – from short assessments to huge multi-year projects. And many engagements have very long sales cycles – sometimes lasting many years.

But many of the problems are also self-inflicted.

Particularly painful is the boom-bust cycle driven by the fact that in professional firms, the business-winners are almost always responsible for delivering the work too.  The pattern seen time and time again is that once the professional sells a piece of work, they bury themselves in delivering it and neglect business development. When the work ends, they haven’t built up a pipeline of new work – so they go through a painful dry period when they run around trying to drum up new business. Eventually they sell something and the cycle repeats.

The pattern is well known, and the solution rather obvious: professionals must keep working on business development while they’re engaged on projects. Sadly though, very few professionals do this.

Why is it that so few professionals carve out adequate time for business development when they’re actively engaged on client work?

Part of the problem is that most professionals much prefer client work to business development. They studied and trained to do client work. They’re good at it. And it’s often quite technical and rational in nature – much more suited to most professionals’ personalities than the confusing, fuzzy world of relationships found in business development.

So professionals will often find any excuse to avoid doing business development. And being busy with client work is the best excuse going.

Many professionals also don’t understand the “economics” of business development. They have no real concept of the amount of effort they need to invest today in activities like networking, or in contacting new clients in order to get a payback 3, 6 or 12 months downstream. As a result, they don’t feel a real sense of urgency about doing business development activities.

Professionals are also rarely good at planning and organising themselves when it comes to business development. Marketing and selling often isn’t viewed as a “proper” activity to be managed like other functions or projects. So they may set themselves a goal like “do more speaking engagements” – but will rarely make a concrete plan to do so. As a result, when they get a few hours spare one afternoon, instead of knowing that the next task in their plan is to search for potential events to speak at, or to contact the organisers of these events; they have to think from scratch. And by the time they’ve figured out the things they need to do, their time window has passed.

One critical problem many professional firms have which cripples their ability to invest in business development is the performance measurement and reward system they have in place.

Many professional firms still measure and reward senior staff primarily on their own billable hours. It sounds ludicrous, and it flies in the logic of leverage, the core dynamic behind the profitability of professional firms. But it’s still the case in many professional firms today.

Wise firms take a more enlightened view to billing targets. As professionals gain in experience and seniority, their billability targets decrease, and their targets for various forms of practice development (chief among them being business development) increase. And, of course, their career and competency development models place increasing emphasis on client relationship and business development skills. Client acquisition and sales targets take primacy over individual billing targets.

What can professional firms do to address these challenges?

Unfortunately, it’s not so easy to get professionals to “fall in love” with business development activities. They will almost always prefer the technical work of their profession. But it is possible to make business development less painful for them – and to make it clear just how important it is.

The first step is to make sure professionals understand the economics or mathematics of selling – the lead times on typical sales activities, and the success rates. Translating future end goals (either revenues or billable hours) into the business development activity levels needed today will help make sure they don’t underestimate the importance of engaging in those activities.

Secondly, prioritising the key marketing and sales activities that will deliver the desired end results, then developing detailed actions plans for them must be a mandatory activity for all senior professionals. Planning needs to be drilled down not just at the practice level, but for all key individuals. And then the plan must actually be implemented: moth by month, week by week, day by day.

Finally, firms must ensure that their competency models, their promotion criteria, and their performance targets integrate the business development skills, activities and targets needed to achieve the firm’s growth goals.

Put together, these three simple actions can make a real difference in making next March’s targets rather more achievable and predictable for professional firms.