Navigating Go-to-Market Challenges for Professional Services Leaders

In the world of professional services, firm and practice leaders play a broad and multi-dimensional role with a wide range of responsibilities. They oversee strategy, financials, intellectual property and service offerings, while managing client relationships and the day-to-day operations of their delivery teams. This broad remit can make it challenging for leaders to effectively manage and execute their go-to-market (GTM) plans. While many pro serve businesses excel at delivering high-quality solutions to customers, they struggle to translate this success into consistent organic growth. This is due to the very nature of their business: a constant balancing act between impactful client delivery and the business development activities required to fuel growth. 

Diverse Landscape with Common Challenges

There is a wide array of professional service organizations (e.g., legal, financial, engineering, creative/design, consulting, advisory), but they all share a common business model with similar GTM challenges. Unlike product-based businesses, professional service organizations rely heavily on human capital. Even as larger, more mature firms build out alternative revenue streams (e.g., software, tools, IP subscriptions), their core “product” is also their greatest sales asset: the delivery experts that service customers on a daily basis. While only the most senior members of these teams are typically tasked with selling, firm leaders often cite an inability to nurture, develop and scale their collective sales engine. In this article, we will explore the most common GTM challenges that professional service firms face and provide insights on how to address them. 

Challenge 1: Lack of Standardized Sales Roles and Responsibilities

This challenge typically manifests for one of two reasons. In smaller businesses, founders or practice leads play an active selling role, but often become the only “trusted” sellers. With continual pressure to close, leadership becomes overly involved in deal pursuits and the management of key client relationships. While this helps ensure short-term results, it comes at a long-term opportunity cost: other team members never develop from a selling and business development standpoint. Instead, they are left to play reactive and poorly defined support roles that never materialize into sustainable sales production. 

In larger firms, the sheer size and autonomy of independent practices, regions or business units, along with the variation in their respective offerings and sales motions, make it difficult to define a consistent sales model. This is only exacerbated by M&A activity, where acquired teams are typically left alone or only partially integrated into the business. The result? A mix of roles that reflect legacy needs and capabilities, rather than the optimal or desired go-to-market (GTM) model moving forward. This inconsistency leads to sales inefficiencies, poor execution and ultimately missed opportunities. 

Challenge 2: Immature Sales Processes and Training

Early success in professional services is predicated on key subject matter experts (SMEs) and talent rather than well-defined processes and programs. Over time, this reliance on individual expertise leads to gaps in sales processes, support models and talent development programs that are essential to scale the business. This is especially true in seller-doer models, where practitioners are promoted into a “part-time” sales role but typically lack the experience or core competencies required to be an effective sales professional. Without investment into sales-centric training and development, firms end up relying solely on learning through experience and struggle to build a scalable, cost-efficient sales engine. 

Challenge 3: Insufficient Business Development and Sales Time

Most professional service businesses deploy a team of senior leaders or seller-doers that are responsible for juggling sales, account management, overseeing delivery and IP development. This leaves sellers struggling to allocate the appropriate amount of time to business development (BD) and sales activities (among these competing priorities). The urgency of the client’s needs and delivery frequently takes precedence over BD efforts, resulting in a reactive rather than proactive approach to sales. This imbalance can hinder the firm’s ability to generate new business and expand existing accounts, which can prove costly when market conditions or demand slow down.   

Challenge 4: Misaligned Incentive Compensation Programs

It’s widely accepted that incentive compensation programs are a critical lever in motivating and rewarding sales efforts. However, the structure and philosophy behind these incentive plans vary widely in the world of professional services. This is driven by the variety of roles that “impact” revenue (e.g., partners/managing directors, business development, account or client relationship managers, senior-level delivery leads, sales support, etc.), as well as the different sales culture and performance management philosophies that exist in the space.

Consider the following questions: 

• What roles and levels should be eligible for sales incentives? 

• Who “owns” sales? Who “owns” delivery? Is it a shared responsibility? 

• How should we reward team vs. individual efforts? 

• How should we prioritize growth vs. margin vs. quality of service/delivery? 

• How do we acknowledge broader firm and IP contribution efforts? 

Even this short list of questions can steer an organization’s incentive plan structure in wildly different directions. Oftentimes, we’ll see organizations start with a corporate, practice area, or BU-level incentive plan, but these programs do not effectively reward individual sales efforts. While adding individual performance elements into a partner or seller-doer compensation plan is a logical step, it requires strong governance and alignment among firm leaders regarding their priorities and desired behaviors. Without this alignment, the incentive program is likely to prove ineffective. 

Challenge 5: Poor Visibility into Sales Effectiveness

While other industries have prioritized the measurement and reporting of sales effectiveness, many professional service providers fundamentally lack this capability. Leaders will monitor the essential business results (e.g., bookings, backlog, utilization), but are missing the team and tools required to distill insights regarding sales performance and effectiveness questions: 

• How many accounts and contacts are sellers actively covering? 

• What is our current level of sales activity (e.g., meetings, calls, emails)? 

• What is the size and shape of our pipeline? 

• What is our deal size, velocity and win rate? 

• What is our performance distribution? 

Without being able to answer these questions (among others), leadership is left to rely on gut and intuition rather than facts regarding GTM activity, process and performance levels.     

Strategies for Overcoming GTM Challenges

Allow the sales motion to dictate the customer coverage and engagement model. The optimal sales model (i.e., seller-doer vs. separate sales and delivery teams vs. dedicated hunting and client/account management teams) will depend largely on the buyer-level, buying process and complexity of services being sold. For example, the sale of bespoke consulting or expert-based advisory services into the C-suite often requires the SME and delivery oversight found in a seller-doer model. While the sale of highly standardized services or pre-defined solutions can lend itself to a more traditional, dedicated sales model. We’ve seen many organizations try forcing themselves into a traditional sales model but then struggle to gain traction. Instead, leaders should allow the nature of the services being sold to dictate their core sales model. This will allow for clearer discussions regarding go-forward sales roles, responsibilities and expectations. 

Build a sales process that reflects the buyer’s journey. This applies to all industries, but is often overlooked in professional services. First, identify any customer personas that serve as potential buyers, day-to-day users, or influencers in the purchasing process. Conduct research to validate their needs, use cases, interests and motivation for purchase, but also understand their journey to making a potential purchase (e.g., What event/need typically prompts an inquiry? What information or research do they typically gather? What are the qualities they’re looking for in a vendor? How do they prefer to engage with potential vendors? What are the greatest points of frustration and friction in the buying process?)

After mapping out the buyer journey, pull together a team of experts to build a sales process. Make sure to address the critical moments that matter most in the customer’s decision-making process. Strive to alleviate any pain points in the purchasing process. Identify the unique sales scenarios (e.g., unique buyers, industries, product/service offerings) that may warrant an adjustment or deviation in the sales process. 

Invest in sales training. Take the time and energy to build a customized sales training program. Start by identifying the key gaps in your team’s sales acumen and methodology. Make it a priority to address those competencies first. Avoid off-the-shelf programs that follow a pre-determined methodology and won’t allow you to incorporate the “voice” of your business. Make sure to include your leadership team in any sales training programs, as they will ultimately be responsible for ensuring the training program is applied on a day-to-day basis.   

Leverage delivery SME’s to drive expansion. Strong collaboration and communication between sales and delivery teams are critical to expansion selling efforts. Delivery’s proximity to the customer and their challenges make them a well-informed asset when it comes to identifying the “next” opportunity. However, as organizations grow, these teams can become siloed or disjointed – i.e., sales becomes more focused on the pipeline; delivery becomes more focused on the current engagement (rather than the bigger picture). The most successful firms narrow this gap by ensuring that A) sales teams stay closely connected with delivery team leaders, B) delivery teams are kept informed of key sales and marketing efforts (e.g., new events, research, point-of-views), and C) senior delivery leads are empowered (and sometimes even incented) to identify and participate in sales pursuits. 

Build out Revenue Operations. Sales or revenue operations (“RevOps”) is one of the fastest-growing areas of GTM investment, but is less common within professional services. Many firms operate with poorly coordinated “shadow ops” teams, relying on a collection of finance, HR and operational resources to complete even the most traditional RevOps activities (e.g., data management, analytics and reporting, sales tool administration, training and enablement, etc.). With a centralized and focused RevOps team, leaders can quickly improve their visibility into sales effectiveness, gather insights and proactively address GTM issues. 

Conclusion 

Navigating the GTM challenges in professional services requires a strategic approach that aligns Sales, Marketing and Delivery functions. By standardizing sales models, investing in training and development, optimizing time allocation, aligning incentives and leveraging revenue operations, professional services firms can improve their chances at driving sustainable growth. The journey may be complex, but with the right strategies in place, commercial leaders can drive their firms toward success.