The £100k opportunity that started with a coffee 18 months ago
Imagine this.
Someone from your firm meets a potential client at an industry event. They have a good conversation. Nothing comes from it. A few days later, they connect on LinkedIn.
Over the next six months, the potential client occasionally sees your content. They attend a webinar. They bump into your colleague at another event. Eventually the two of them meet for coffee. Still no opportunity.
Another eight months pass. Then one Tuesday morning an email arrives asking whether you’ve got time to talk about something. A few weeks later there’s a £100k piece of work on the table.
So which marketing activity generated the opportunity? The first event? LinkedIn? The webinar? The second event? The coffee? Or the relationship built across all of them?
Welcome to the joy of marketing and BD attribution in professional services.
Everyone would like a straight line
It would make your life considerably easier if business development worked like this. You spent £5,000 on X. X generated 20 leads. Three became clients. Those clients generated £100,000. Therefore X worked.
Sometimes you can draw that line. But in professional services and most complex B2B, buying journeys aren’t that neat, particularly when you’re selling high value work where trust matters.
People might know your firm for years before they buy anything. They might meet three different people from your business. They might read your content without ever clicking on it. They might attend an event, ignore you for 12 months, then call when something changes inside their organisation.
The activity that looks like it generated the opportunity is often just the last touchpoint in a relationship you’ve been helping to build for years.
Where this gets difficult
You’re increasingly expected to demonstrate return on investment, and that’s a good thing. You should be able to explain where the budget is going and whether it’s contributing to the firm’s objectives.
The problem starts when every individual activity is expected to show an immediate financial return.
Take an event. You spend £10,000 sponsoring it. Nobody instructs you the following week. Did it fail?
Perhaps. But what if it created ten useful conversations with organisations you’re actively targeting? What if two existing clients spent proper time with your team? What if one target agreed to a follow-up meeting?
The answer isn’t that everything is automatically worthwhile because something might happen eventually. That’s just as unhelpful, and partners can smell it. What you need is a way of showing progress before the revenue arrives.
Measure the movement, not just the mandate
The most practical version of this is a simple relationship ladder. For every organisation on your target list, record which rung they’re on.
- They don’t know you. No relationship, no contact.
- They know of you. They follow you, read your content, attend the odd webinar.
- You’ve met. Someone from the firm has had a real conversation with them.
- You’re in dialogue. Regular contact, a reason to speak again, they take your calls.
- They’re asking questions. Scoping, pricing, tender lists, an introduction to a colleague.
- They’ve instructed you.
Set the rungs at the start of the year and check them quarterly. Your report then becomes “eleven targets moved up at least one rung this quarter, three went backwards, and here’s what we’re doing about those three”. That’s a far better conversation than a slide full of email open rates.
It also gives every activity a job. An event isn’t there to generate revenue by Friday. It’s there to move six named organisations from rung two to rung three. That’s something you can plan for and something you can honestly assess afterwards.
Not every interaction is equal
This is where you can add real value, because 100 new contacts aren’t necessarily worth more than five conversations with the right people.
A webinar with 200 attendees isn’t automatically better than a roundtable with 12. And 20,000 LinkedIn impressions don’t matter much if none of the people you’re trying to influence are among them.
Marketing reporting often gets dominated by whatever is easiest to count. Website visits, email opens, social engagement, event registrations. They’re useful, and you should keep an eye on them, but treat them as diagnostics for your own team rather than the headline you take to the partnership.
A quick test for any metric before it goes in the board pack: if this number doubled, would anyone in the business behave differently? If not, it’s a diagnostic, not a KPI.
Marketing doesn’t end when the activity does
Here’s the gap I see most often. You can create the conditions for a relationship to develop, but someone still has to develop it.
The event finishes. The webinar ends. The report is published. Then what?
Build the follow-up into the activity itself rather than hoping it happens. Before an event, agree who each attendee is going to speak to and why. Book a 20 minute debrief within five working days while people can still remember faces, and use it for three questions. Who did we actually meet? What did we learn about their priorities? Who’s doing what next, and by when?
Write those actions down with names against them. If nobody will take an action from an event, that tells you something worth knowing before you renew the sponsorship.
Because if the person in our story had never arranged that coffee, the £100k opportunity probably wouldn’t exist.
Ask the client, and write the story down
Two more habits are worth building, and both are close to free.
The first is simply asking. When a new instruction lands, or during a client feedback conversation, ask what prompted them to get in touch and how they first came across the firm. Clients are usually happy to tell you, and it’s the most reliable attribution data you’ll ever get.
The second is keeping an opportunity story log. Every time a significant piece of work comes in, spend ten minutes writing the history. Who knew them, how the relationship started, what touchpoints happened along the way, how long it took.
Do that for a year and you’ll have something genuinely powerful: real evidence, from your own firm, showing how long relationships actually take to convert and what tends to be involved. That’s the argument that protects your budget when someone asks why you’re sponsoring the same conference for a third year.
A better question than attribution
Of course you should measure what you’re doing. You need to know what’s working, what isn’t and where to invest.
But in professional services, the best work rarely arrives neatly labelled “generated by campaign A”. It arrives because somebody knew you, trusted you, remembered you and thought of you when the right problem appeared. That relationship might have been built through ten interactions over 18 months.
So alongside “which activity generated this opportunity?”, start asking “what helped build the relationship that made it possible?”
Track the movement, own the follow-up and write down the stories. You’ll find the answer is much more useful, and much easier to defend at budget time.
Need help?
If you would like help with your marketing and business development, bringing on a marketing consultant with a fresh pair of eyes can make all the difference. I work with B2B businesses and professional service firms in London, Kent, the UK, and Europe, specialising as a legal marketing consultant. Please get in touch or book a free 30-minute consultation.
