According to a global research study of nearly 1,800 partners in professional and financial services firms, there are five statistically significant approaches to business development. Yet when it comes to high performance, there’s one clear winner: the “Activator” approach.
Activators are network builders who practice three key behaviors that help them expand and deepen relationships to gain a competitive edge. They commit to business development; they connect with clients, prospects, and colleagues; and they proactively create new opportunities.
Only 22% of accounting, consulting, and law firm partners and investment bankers fall into the Activator category, according to the study. The good news: Professional and financial services firm leaders can encourage and support Activator behaviors among all their partners with the right culture, training, and technology.
Commit, connect, and create with DealCloud
Intapp’s DealCloud platform offers a robust set of capabilities that support and enable Activator behaviors. For example, DealCloud’s relationship management functionality centralizes client communication data so professionals can easily access and apply client data and insights. Thousands of professional and financial services firms around the world are using DealCloud to:
- Track contacts and follow-up activities in a centralized hub. Convincing busy partners to manually enter and maintain client records in a firmwide database can be challenging. DealCloud’s “zero-entry” data-capture tools automatically update contacts, enrich them with key details, and synchronize them with engagement data. These automations save partners valuable time — while also giving them the accurate, up-to-date information and insights they need to strengthen their business development activities.
- Expand networks and identify opportunities to connect clients with firm colleagues. The most successful business developers don’t just build networks —they also track and understand the strength of their relationships among their connections and colleagues. By automating relationship capture and scoring, DealCloud helps partners discover who knows whom, and how well. The resulting relationship scores can then be used to monitor relationship strength and historical changes over time — creating a rich source of intelligence for the entire firm.
Imagine that a partner is targeting a company for an opportunity or investment. Using DealCloud, the partner could access the targeted company’s detail page to review the network analysis of firm colleagues and the target company’s employees. The partner could use that information to identify any strong relationships between, for example, a firm colleague and a board member at the target company. The partner could then reach out to that colleague to facilitate an introduction to the board member. By discovering these kinds of firm connections and understanding their strength, the partner can gain a warm introduction and a competitive edge.
- Leverage third-party data integrations to monitor and share relevant news, trends, and information with clients and prospects. In today’s fast-paced world, partners need both real-time market intelligence and proprietary information to compete. DealCloud’s DataCortex solution gives them seamless, easy access to multiple sources of key market data, including Equilar, BoardEx, S&P Global Market Intelligence, and more. Equipped with this extensive information, firms can augment their institutional knowledge about their clients, contacts, and the industries in which they operate.
Partners can use also use this trove of data to better target their outreach efforts and share valuable information with prospects to create new business opportunities. For example, imagine a partner learning that a client recently purchased a company operating in a different country. The partner could proactively reach out to the client with information and advice related to compliance with that country’s regulations, positioning themselves as an expert advisor for follow-on work.
In today’s competitive environment — in which client loyalty is diminishing and partners are under increasing pressure to expand their books of business — taking an Activator approach to business development is a smart move. Purpose-built technology like DealCloud can encourage and support these successful behaviors across your firm to unlock intelligence and drive new business opportunities.
Discover how DealCloud can enhance Activator behavior in your firm.