Winning significant opportunities in today's environment

Note: Gale Crosley, CPA, is founder and principal of Crosley & Company and consults with CPA firms on revenue growth issues and opportunities.

By Gale Crosley, CPA

Recent events in the profession will continue to result in more and larger clients evaluating a potential change in their CPA firms over the next couple of years. Firms that invest in the expertise necessary to win significant opportunities have a once-in-a-lifetime ability to grow their revenue substantially.

In evaluating this ability to win, I find the chasm between business development best practices of corporate America and those of professional CPA firms is shockingly wide. The business development function in private industry started to take shape half a century ago, while professional firms launched active programs only within the last 10-plus years. Why don't professional firms peek over the fence and learn from corporate America?

The traditional perception is that CPA firms are "different," and thus need a different approach to be successful. This might not be the case. In a book called Diffusion of Innovations, Everett Rogers sites numerous examples of cultures, societies and groups that adapted successful strategies of their own from the models of other groups, crafting innovations necessary to be relevant in their own environments. CPA firms can do the same thing. Nowhere are these principles more powerful than in the area of winning major opportunities, where corporate America clearly has something to teach.

What is a major opportunity for a CPA firm? One that's significantly larger than the firm's average-size opportunity, or one that's strategically important to the practice. Corporate America long ago learned that these opportunities call for an approach that's different from the average deal. Why? Because these opportunities are more competitive and therefore generally more complex to win. They take longer to win. They require more sophisticated battle strategies.

Yet professional firms typically attack these giant opportunities just like the routine ones, and thus, predictably, they lose more than they win. What do they do next? They scratch their heads and conclude, mostly wrongly, that price was the decision criterion. This might be true occasionally, but for the most part it is an unschooled conclusion. Usually, what happens is this: The lack of sophisticated strategy and execution on the part of the professionals allows the prospects to control the buying process and apply their own value metric to the transaction.

Due to the buyer's lack of sophistication (in terms of assessing quality and value), and the professional's lack of sophistication in shaping a compelling value proposition, the easiest understandable metric is price. Price might in fact end up being the justifiable decision criterion, but it didn't need to be, and it shouldn't have been. If this were preordained, then every value-based vendor would have no clients — including Starbuck's, Ferrari and the highest-priced professional service firms. Most of the time, a price-based decision is indicative of unsophisticated opportunity development by the professional.

Mistakes happen frequently during the process of trying to win a major opportunity. Most of these are due either to inexperience or a lack of belief in the fundamentals required to win these larger deals consistently. When I perform loss reviews with my clients, I often find one or more of these misfires. The most common error is one partner trying to win it alone. Often the wrong partner is trying to win the opportunity, or the partner is calling on the wrong buyer (not the ultimate decision-maker) because the partner doesn't know how to get to the decision-maker.

Ongoing and frequent strategic opportunity planning with the best minds in the firm can increase the odds of winning significantly, but most often this doesn't happen. As a result, the firm makes the wrong moves during the process. Moreover, there often is a lack of awareness that every move during the process is significant. Just as in a game of chess, in which a move of a pawn might appear innocuous but is part of a larger strategy, the cycle of large business opportunities has a similar rhythm. Taking the time to interpret the meaning of a buyer's move is part of the ongoing strategic planning needed to win significant deals.

Another problem arises when the buyer is allowed to control the entire process because the partner doesn't know how to maintain some control. We see manifestations of this when the momentum surprisingly slows down or speeds up, the partner is caught off guard with unanticipated news, or the client "goes dark" (doesn't communicate), and the partner doesn't know why.

The good news is that all these obstacles and challenges have been identified by corporate America — and solved. CPAs can borrow these best practices to significantly increase their chances of winning. If your firm wins 90 percent of all business proposed, because most business is referred, then you are probably not aware of and pursuing enough opportunities, and you could be growing faster. If you are winning less than 20 percent of all proposals, you likely are wasting your time in writing these proposals rather than pouring that effort into actions that will be most effective with major opportunities.

Once you assess where your firm is, converting your resources into the appropriate places to take advantage of major opportunities is the single most valuable action you can take to grow revenues more quickly.

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