You don’t have a cross-selling problem. You have a “nobody knows what anyone else does” problem.
Cross-selling appears on an awful lot of professional services firms’ business development plans. “We need to cross-sell more.” “We need to get more services into our existing clients.” “We need partners to introduce their colleagues.”
All perfectly sensible. After all, if you already have a strong relationship with a client, introducing another part of the firm should be easier than winning a brand new client.
Except there’s one fairly fundamental problem. People often don’t really know what the rest of their firm does.
It’s obvious to you because you work in it
Ask someone in your Employment team what Corporate does and, broadly, they’ll know. Ask them which specific problems Corporate solves, which clients are a particularly good fit, what might trigger a need for their help and which colleague they should introduce, and it gets much harder.
The bigger and more complex your firm, the harder it becomes. You might have multiple offices, dozens of services, sector groups, international teams, specialist offerings and new partners joining throughout the year.
Nobody can be expected to understand all of it. Yet your cross-selling strategy often relies on them doing exactly that.
Why internal presentations don’t solve it
This is usually where the internal presentations start. Each team gets 20 minutes at a practice meeting to explain what they do.
Up goes the PowerPoint. Here’s our team, our services, some recent matters, our rankings and the types of clients we work with. Thank you very much. And everyone goes back to their desk.
Three months later, Marketing and BD is wondering why there haven’t been any referrals.
The problem isn’t that people weren’t listening. It’s that knowing what another team does isn’t the same as knowing when to introduce them.
Give people triggers, not a list of services
If you want someone to spot an opportunity for another part of the business, make it easy for them. Don’t give them a list of 17 services. Give them things to listen for.
“If your client tells you they’re planning to acquire a business, speak to us.” “If they’re expanding internationally, bring us in.” “If their board is talking about a particular issue, we’d like to know.”
Suddenly, you’re giving people clues. They don’t need to understand the technical detail of what their colleagues do. They just need to recognise a situation where a conversation might be useful, and that’s a far more realistic ask.
People need to know who to call
There’s another part of cross-selling that often gets overlooked, and that’s relationships.
You can know perfectly well that your client could benefit from another service and still hesitate to make the introduction if you don’t know the person you’d be introducing. Will they look after my client? Will they respond quickly? Will they understand the relationship, or will they immediately start selling? Will they keep me informed?
Your client relationship is valuable. Introducing a colleague means putting a little of that trust in someone else’s hands.
This is why internal networking matters so much. Cross-selling isn’t only about knowing what your firm sells. It’s about knowing and trusting the people who sell it.
Stop asking everyone to cross-sell with everyone
In a large firm, this becomes overwhelming very quickly. If you have 15 practice areas and six sectors, there are theoretically opportunities everywhere. In reality, some combinations are much more likely than others.
So find them. Which services naturally sit together? Where are clients already buying more than one service from you? Which client situations create obvious openings for another team? Where do you have strong relationships but relatively low penetration? And which two teams really should know each other much better than they do?
Start there. You don’t need everyone in the firm thinking about every possible cross-selling opportunity. You need the right people spotting the right ones.
Look at your existing clients
Your client base is probably the best place to begin. Take a priority client and map what they currently buy from you, then look at what they don’t.
That doesn’t mean assuming you should sell them everything. That’s a very quick way to turn a good client relationship into a shopping list.
Instead, ask what you know about the client’s business, what’s changing for them and what their priorities are. Ask where else you could genuinely help, who in the firm already has relationships with them and who should know each other internally.
There might be no opportunity at all, and that’s fine. Cross-selling should be driven by something the client actually needs, not by your desire to increase share of wallet.
How Marketing and BD can connect the dots
This is an area where your Marketing and BD team can add enormous value. They often have a much broader view of the firm than individual fee earners do. They see the sector plans, client plans, campaigns, pitches, relationship data and market insight.
That means they’ll often spot that one team is trying to grow a particular service while another team already has relationships with exactly the clients it wants to reach.
But their role shouldn’t be to send an email asking everyone to “think about cross-selling opportunities”. They can make those opportunities easier to see by bringing the right people together, mapping relationships and identifying complementary services. They can create simple trigger points, share useful client intelligence and help fee earners prepare for client conversations. And they can make sure someone actually owns what happens next.
Maybe cross-selling isn’t the problem
So the next time “increase cross-selling” appears in your marketing and BD plan, dig underneath it.
Do your people actually understand what their colleagues do? Do they know what to listen for, and who to introduce? Do they trust those colleagues with the relationship? And have you identified where the most realistic opportunities are?
Telling people to cross-sell more won’t fix any of those things. Often, the problem isn’t a lack of willingness to introduce colleagues. It’s simply that nobody has made it easy enough to know when, why or to whom.
Get those foundations in place, and you’ll find that cross-selling starts to feel far less like a target and far more like something your people do naturally.
Need help?
If you’d like help with your marketing and business development, a marketing consultant with a fresh pair of eyes can make all the difference. I work with B2B businesses and professional services firms across London, Kent, the UK and Europe, specialising in professional services marketing and BD. Get in touch or book a free 30-minute consultation.
