Be the best (consistently)…
Service delivery is EVERYTHING. Think about your favourite restaurant. We’ll wager it’s not just about the food or the wine list, it’s the whole end to end experience from start to finish.
In professional services, it’s no different. Think you need to be a smooth talker or LinkedIn lurker to win new business? Rubbish. Some of the best business developers don’t sell at all—they serve. Deliver brilliant work, keep your promises, and the work will start chasing you.
This week’s Three Things describes how to turn excellent service into effortless sales. Enjoy.
#1. Be so good they can’t ignore you
Forget schmoozing. If you’re the team who delivers on time, on budget, and without a faff, you’ll become the person customer’s trust. And trust wins deals. No slick pitch deck. No golf days. Just good old-fashioned reliability and a reputation for getting the job done.
Want to know the science behind it all? David Maister’s Trust Equation is the holy grail in professional services:
In short: be competent, be dependable, be human—and don’t make it all about you.
#2. Make your customer’s look good
It’s not about you. It’s never about you. Your job is to make your customer the hero of the story.
That might mean:
- Giving them a polished deck they can shamelessly drop into a board pack.
- Arming them with bulletproof talking points before a regulator meeting.
- Turning your advice into a results-driven story they can share with their CFO.
One junior GC at a retail client was quietly handed the keys to the legal department after their external advisor helped them solve a messy shareholder row—and gave them the words to win internal support. Another compliance partner helped an in-house counsel become the firm’s go-to on operational resilience with a three-line email at just the right moment. That partner now gets all the firm’s regulatory work. Funny that.
Make your client look brilliant, and they’ll make you indispensable.
#3. Spot the next problem
The best time to win the next bit of work? When you’re still high-fiving over the last one.
You’ve earned trust. You’ve got inside knowledge. Use it. A simple: “You know what we should be thinking about next?” can open doors to whole new projects.
And here’s the secret weapon: active listening. Really tune in during assignments—catch those offhand remarks, the passing frustrations, the “we’ve been meaning to look at that” moments. That’s where your next proposal lives. The ability to hear what’s not being said—and gently help solve it—makes you more than a supplier. You become a strategist. A fixer. A mate.
Need help getting your team to turn delivery into demand? You know where we are. No pushy pitches. Just good advice, great training, and the occasional LEGO metaphor.
