Jo is a technically brilliant accountant who has been rapidly promoted through the grades at a large professional services firm. Along with her strong technical skills, Jo has always been great with clients, building strong relationships and providing an efficient, flexible and supportive service that they really appreciate.
Six months ago Jo was delighted to be promoted to Partner. However, today that delight has turned to despair. It’s the first time that she has been responsible for meeting a revenue target. Jo does not see herself as a salesperson. She knows she is great at what she does, but she is finding the challenge of generating revenue difficult and for the first time in her career she has doubts about whether she can succeed.
So, what are Jo’s chances of success?
As Daniel Pink argues in his book, To Sell is Human, we are all in sales.
The good news is that Jo is already showing some of the key behaviours and personal drive characteristics that are critical in business development: she is driven and focused on her own progression; she is confident in her abilities; she has spent many years building trusted relationships with her clients and provides them with insights that they find valuable.
The areas that Jo now needs to work on include her self-belief when it comes to winning business and increasing her client base. She needs to accept that her role has changed and to recognise how her existing skills, attributes and activities can help her achieve her business development goals. Equally, she needs to identify which skills and activities may be missing from her toolkit, and be supported to develop these. And she needs to re-focus her goals and personal drive to incorporate the business development elements of being a Partner.
This will be a familiar scenario for many consultancy organisations, where your highly valued consultants / accountants / lawyers (i.e. your technical experts) are promoted to senior / Partner positions and given responsibility for business development. Many will thrive in their new role. Others will flounder. At worst, your valued employee will leave the organisation as they feel the pressure of ‘underperformance’ for the first time in their careers.
Our Acuity® for Strategic Sales assessment model is proven to enhance revenue performance by up to 23%. By evaluating individuals against 9 key capabilities Acuity can provide targeted and personal feedback to help them address their development needs.
If you want to retain your top performers and enable them to hit the ground running when promoted into roles requiring a focus on business development, let us help you to support them on that journey.
Sarah Clapperton is a Director at Bloojam Consulting. She is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist with 15 years experience in the assessment and development of leaders.