Eliminating the term "cross-sell"

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Cross-selling re-imagined: 4 steps to better client service & increased revenue

Sit in a leadership team meeting of any professional services firm and you’re likely to hear the term “cross-sell”.

More often than not, you’ll probably hear it referenced within the context of a plea for leaders to do more of it, and head-scratching as to why it's not happening at the level expected.

In many firms, cross-selling is a much sought-after but often unrealized hope for firm leadership. Everyone wants to have it, but few do it effectively.

Of course, the idea behind cross-selling is simple: Generate more revenue by selling multiple services within the firm to a single client. Simple, right? If a client is a tax client, cross-selling would mean they also purchase audit services, forensics, or ERP services.

There’s a reason so many firms struggle to cross-sell successfully, and I believe it can be corrected. Today, I want to share why the common approaches to cross-selling don’t work, the foundational mindset shift that needs to happen, and how firms can take the idea of cross-selling from a hope to reality.

The grim cross-sell reality

I didn’t come up with the phrase, but I’m a believer in the saying, “Hope isn’t a strategy”. Yet, if you look at the way many firms approach cross-selling, they’re essentially relying on hope.

Cross-sell initiatives inside of firms typically include things like:

• Creating cross-sell mandates

• Adding cross-sell to balanced scorecards

• Running campaigns within the firm

• Hoping that cross-selling will ‘organically’ happen

• Assigning sales reps to canvas clients looking for opportunities

From my experience as the CEO of Baker Tilly, a top 10 CPA firm, these types of strategies don’t work. New mandates are put in place or annual campaigns are run without moving the needle in a significant manner. So the average number of services per client typically remains very low, and leadership continues to preach the need for more effective cross-selling.

Rinse and repeat year after year...

It’s a shame because clients could benefit greatly from firms getting this right. So what needs to change? Well, it starts with a simple, but critical mindset shift.

It’s time to eliminate the term cross-sell

The core reason firms struggle to implement the idea of cross-selling is because of the term itself.

It’s an internally focused idea.

It describes what we, as a firm, are going to do and reflects how we are going to benefit. No wonder that approach doesn’t work!

Rather than looking at cross-selling as something we are going to do, we need to shift our focus to the service value we provide for clients. What are they going to get? How will they benefit? How can we, as service providers, add additional value?

Isn’t every professional services organization’s goal to maximize its service value to clients? It should be. And if so, wouldn’t it make sense to deliver multiple integrated solutions to help clients in a variety of ways?

It makes sense to me…

It’s called “professional services” for a reason. It’s about getting back to the foundation of serving our clients and helping them accomplish what’s important to them. Will we, as a firm, benefit from providing integrated solutions to clients? Of course! Likely, the firm will generate more revenue. That’s a result, though, not a strategy.

Continuing to push internally to cross-sell isn’t going to deliver the results that firms are looking for. It starts with shifting the focus away from our internal goals and focusing on the client. Cross-sell needs to be eliminated in favor of "cross-serve".

At the end of the day, it's about providing a higher level of service to clients in the form of delivering multiple integrated services. Let's keep service at the core.

Making cross-serve a reality

Whether you are a firm leader or an aspiring one, here are 4 things that you can do to create an environment where cross-serve (providing integrated services) becomes a reality:

1) Ask the question, “What aren’t we providing?”

Some of the best professionals I’ve ever worked with were intentional about identifying what they weren’t doing for their clients.

They compared services to other clients and thought about what else they could do to provide value.

Of course, it’s simple in theory, but I rarely find it executed at a high level.

It takes intentionality to slow down, pull yourself out of the work, and rotate your lens to see what additional opportunities exist to add value to your clients.

This is the basis of great service. It’s called professional services, remember?

So take the time to look at the broader landscape and ask, "What aren't we providing to this client that might benefit them?"

2) Build integrated services into your strategy.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it hundreds of times in the future…

All roads lead to/from strategy.

The best way to align people to delivering integrated services is to ensure it’s part of your firm's strategy.

Define what’s expected.

Document it.

Distribute it.

Enforce it.

One of the pillars of my CEO candidacy at Baker Tilly was collaboration, and the idea of cross-serve was a central part of it. In order for us as a firm to enhance and protect our clients' value, it meant we HAD to deliver multiple integrated services to execute our mission.

Since that was part of our defined strategy, if a partner or team member was against leveraging other internal departments to serve a client, they were off strategy. Plain and simple.

And being off strategy is unacceptable.

3) Be aware of the behavior you are incentivizing.

Many firms, especially smaller ones, are built on a sum-of-the-parts model.

Partners build their individual book of business, and the firm's revenue is a result of the aggregate of those books.

I refer to that as a vertical organization.

While that may work for a time, if firms want to grow and enable scaling, they have to become horizontal organizations.

Horizontal organizations are made up of their parts.

Each practice is treated as a business, and all practices collaborate to provide more value to clients and more revenue for the firm. That’s the foundation of meaningful growth.

The #1 thing that gets in the way of creating a horizontal organization is the way people are rewarded.

Good luck creating a horizontal organization if your compensation structure and incentives are built to reward individual performers or practices.

As a leader, you might have to take a hard look in the mirror and be willing to rewrite your incentives to reward new collaborative behavior. Structure dictates behavior.

Telling people to cross-serve isn’t going to cut it. People have to be rewarded accordingly.

4) Leverage technology to build engines.

While technology can’t do everything, it’s often much more effective than humans at analyzing large amounts of data and identifying trends.

So use it to your advantage to create a cross-serve engine that works to identify opportunities while your people sleep.

I continue to be energized by the number of technology companies providing innovative solutions to CPA firms. I am an investor and strategic advisor to ​Propense​.ai, a company using AI to analyze a book of business and identify cross-serve opportunities for clients.

Remember how we talked about the power of identifying what services you aren’t providing to a client? Well, you can use technology to do that for you. Propense.ai analyzes client data to learn what suites of services often pair well together and suggests what services to offer and the best time to do so.

When you leverage technology, you’re now building an engine to ensure that identifying and delivering integrated solutions is part of your process. You are no longer relying on hope as a strategy.

The Bottom Line

The traditional view of cross-selling simply isn’t going to work in the future. In fact, I’d argue it hasn’t worked for a while. That’s why so many firms are left scratching their heads on how to implement cross-selling programs that actually work.

It’s time we change our vocabulary and approach from cross-sell to cross-serve and emphasize delivering integrated services.

As a professional services organization, you will benefit the most if, and only if, you are focused on providing additional services to your clients that align with their goals.

The firm of the future will get this right and likely never get stuck on how to enforce cross-selling again.

With intention,
Alan D Whitman