Winning Business and Building Recurring Revenue Streams

BackgroundOne of the fundamental challenges for professional service
providers in the business services sector is overcoming the dependency
relationship clients have with their business adviser. While this
dependency creates a sense of importance for the adviser, from a
business perspective, it is a major barrier to leveraging value from
the time and expertise of the adviser.A secondary challenge for many
business advisers is that the process of selling their advisory
services is centered on their ability to convince a prospective client
that they have the skills and knowledge to help the client or that
they have a "personality" fit.These two issues are often further
compounded by the inability of the adviser to introduce additional
services or solutions to the client. This means the value of the
client is not being leveraged and that a potential "advice gap" for
the client will be filled by an alternative service provider.The
outcome is that the process of winning clients, leveraging the value
of the adviser's time and leveraging the total value of the client is
compromised. For most business advisers, this means that their ability
to generate income is a function of the number of clients they have,
the number of hours in the day they are prepared to work and their
hourly charge out rate.The Client/Adviser RelationshipThe
client/adviser relationship is a unique one. It essentially progresses
through a series of phases as the relationship matures and becomes
more sophisticated. This is like most other social relationships
except that the client is paying for the services of the adviser and
rightly has an expectation of value being added in excess of the cost.
These phases are outlined in the following: �Credibility - The process
of establishing sufficient confidence in the ability of the adviser
for the prospective client to appoint the adviser. Implications for
Advisers: Important to have strong referral networks (where
credibility is conferred), a strong brand name or the ability to
establish technical competence quickly.
Assessment - The process of determining whether the appointment of the
adviser was a good business decision. Implications for Advisers:
Critical to demonstrate value of advice and to deliver in the short
term on promises and outcomes.
Satisfaction - A period when the client feels comfortable about their
decision to appoint the adviser and the relationship. Implications for
Advisers: The adviser must not take the relationship for granted and
be consistently vigilant to ensure they are adding value and
demonstrating value.
Justification - The period when the relationship may start to feel
"stagnant" and there is a sense that the adviser has nothing new to
offer. Despite the strength of the relationship, the client again
revisits the cost/benefit equation. Implications for Advisers: Seek
new ways to revisit issues and opportunities. Ensure that the adviser
has integrated the intellectual property they bring to the
relationship into the day-to-day processes of the business.
Partnership - Having survived the previous phases, this stage reflects
a relationship of mutual respect, aligned interest and trust between
the client and the advice business. Implications for Advisers:
Continue to innovate but engagement with the client must now be
focused on delivering leveraged value for the client and
adviser.Leveraging Time & Opportunity To enable the adviser to
successfully traverse these phases requires one of two things. The
adviser will need to dedicate significant personal resources by way of
time and intellectual engagement or bring other resources and
processes to the client relationship that delivers value without the
same personal time commitment. As such, the secret to building a
successful and valuable business services enterprise is not to
establish "dependency" relationships with clients but "partnership"
relationships where a variety of people and resources are used to
ensure the value proposition for the client is significant,
sustainable and recurring.