BD Coaching to Boost Your Firm’s EVP

Are you a leader who is being kept up at night and whose hair is turning grey prematurely, all because of The Great Resignation? In this blog, we share our thoughts on how you can proactively take steps to protect your firm from this trend by offering your subject-matter experts a meaningful Employee Value Proposition (EVP).

Research released by PwC Australia in October 2021 shows that a company’s “ability to attract and retain key talent – and minimise fallout from The Great Resignation – will be compromised if the EVP doesn’t provide what workers want”. What role, then, can Business Development (BD) Coaching play in boosting a firm’s EVP? The way we see it, BD Coaching plays a starring role.

Let’s start with those three words, The Great Resignation, they’re everywhere. With 38% of workers planning to leave their current employer during the next year, professional services firms can protect themselves against it by delivering a meaningful EVP when it comes to attracting and retaining talent.

In their research, What workers want: Winning the war for talent, PwC identified seven levers to help leaders organise their thinking and drive effective change. The first is Remuneration and Reward and another is Career Development. When it comes to professional services firms, specifically, we see BD Coaching as the link between these two levers.

Whether at a legal, accounting or engineering firm, the pathway to Partner is heavily weighted on a professional’s ability to win work. Consistently winning work is not a game of chance but rather a set of business development habits and behaviours that are applied and honed over time.

Professional services firms that provide its lawyers, accountants, and engineers with business development coaching at every stage of their careers can find themselves in a win-win for several reasons:

• Business development coaching is a career development opportunity for its professionals (Lever #5 in the PwC research),

• Positive BD habits that are learned early in their careers develop and strengthen over time; by the time they are on the Partner path, winning work is part of their regular routine, rather than a daunting new skill to learn and,

• Great revenues = greater remuneration. A firm whose people are consistently generating solid revenues ultimately put the firm in a better position to offer greater remuneration and rewards (Lever #1 in the PwC research).

Surprisingly, the PwC research showed that 48% of employers have no intention of updating their EVP. We see this as a massive opportunity for a firm to gain a competitive advantage. What about your firm, does it recognise the value of revisiting its EVP?

So, can BD coaching help professional services firms protect themselves against The Great Resignation? We think it’s a no-brainer, especially given the significant ROI on BD coaching that our clients have experienced.