Business Development: Reporting that Matters: Practical Tracking and Reporting to Leadership for Small Teams
An opportunity for marketing and business development teams at most firms is to produce valuable reporting to guide leadership in understanding how to grow the firm. However, with stretched teams and limited time, it’s hard to know where to focus.
When we look at the first step, it’s client data, which is a firm insight. Understanding what our current clients look like and insights from where our revenue currently comes from. The next area is our future revenue – our pipeline – where are our opportunities coming from and what is their status?
When we think about our marketing and business development team reporting, we can look at events, inbound leads, and proposals to provide leadership with insights to what is working and what needs to be improved.
Then, with an individual in business development, what should those professionals be tracking and we, as leadership, be doing to support them?
This article will dive into practical reporting that teams can pull together to help leadership make decisions on revenue generation then evaluate and guide on what activities are the most valuable for the firm.
Where are you starting from?
Let’s start from the beginning, what data do you have?
If you are a solo, you might need to start with the basics, but if you have a full team, you probably have access to better information and tools. Let’s go over what both might look like.
Starting as a Solo or from scratch
If you are starting from scratch with providing insights and KPIs to leadership, there are really 3 main things to do:
- Gather data and provide insights
- Build a pipeline report
- Track marketing and BD activities
The best way to get the right information is to pull the last 12 months of clients by Partner by revenue. Some of the data that might make sense to gather:
- Partner
- Client Name
- Client Contact
- Client Email
- Client Phone
- Service provided to client
- Industry
- Referral Source Name
- Revenue
Once you are able to generate this list, you can build a chart showing where revenue is coming from by industry, a list of your top clients for client relationship management, and top referral sources.
Starting as a team or enhancing your reporting
Once you have the basics down, one of the best things to be able to chop up and send to leadership is your revenue data. This consists of two things:
- Revenue forecasting (prospective client opportunities)
- Revenue quality (current industry, service and realization)
Most firms struggle with capturing the total opportunities they are seeing across the board. Getting this organized is a huge opportunity for marketing teams as this will help with answering key questions from leadership: ‘Where will we land this year?’ ‘How’s business doing across industry/service/practice groups?’
The easiest way to collect revenue forecasting information is if your team is already handling proposals and inbound prospect calls. This gives you a nice baseline on total opportunities or pipeline for the firm. Here’s what the next addition of having the practice/service or industry groups reporting on their opportunities looks like:
- Company Name
- Person Name
- Title
- Industry
- Service requested
- Estimated $
Additional data points to consider gathering:
- Referral source
- Current provider firm
If you could get this data collected and provide a pipeline report for revenue forecasting, leadership may not have seen this data. This will help them understand where the firm will land in a given year.
The easiest way to collect revenue quality information is to download it from your billing software. Once you have the spreadsheet, you can build a dashboard (read: pie chart) showing revenues by industry and service/practice group. Depending on the data available, you can then break it down further and include realization numbers.
This data is invaluable to understand what the highest growth opportunities are for the firm and where dollars and time should be spent.
Marketing and BD Team KPIs
What KPIs should you be tracking for your BD and Marketing team?
Events –
This can include internal hosted/external events, sponsorships of events and associations, and conferences. How do you know what ROI looks like?
One easy way to do this is to track the attendees that become marketing qualified leads. MQL’s that have the right persona – that is – companies that fit our ideal client profile and the attendees are ideal buyer’s, like a CFO, owner, or controller.
Next, we perform follow up activities and see how many of the MQL’s turn into sales qualified leads, as in, we have had a conversation with them and they are interested in learning more.
Report – Event attendees -> MQL’s -> SQL’s -> Opportunities -> Clients
Inbound – Phone and Web Leads
How is inbound handled at your firm and are you tracking how many of these lead to opportunities?
Understanding how many leads you are generating through inbound that are turning into clients is a big opportunity to learn where your efforts are leading to results. The first step is to centralize inbound to one person or team. Once that happens, then it’s developing a framework to qualify those inbound and move them out or move them into a SQL.
Report – Inbound -> SQL’s -> Opportunities -> Clients
Proposals and RFP’s
How are our proposals and RFPs performing by industry and service/practice group?
This is a big insight for most firms to understand as we are usually swamped with ‘proposal’ activity. Having an understanding of how your proposals and RFPs are performing will allow you to know where to spend your time and how to make a decision on when and how to propose on a project.
Most firms are wasting time proposing on opportunities they don’t have a chance to win. Track this to make better decisions for your firm.
Report – Proposals by industry/service/practice group -> close won or lost
We have reviewed 3 different reports
- Event ROI
- Inbound Tracking
- Proposal Results
The ultimate purpose is displaying Lead to Close: when new conversations present themselves, what percentage of them are leading to new clients?
Once we know where the best chance of gaining a new client is – whether industry, practice, or service group – we can help leadership understand where to spend money and time if we are behind our goals for the year. This will help stretched marketing and BD teams know where to focus their time to make the biggest impact for the firm.
BD activity tracking
If you have a BD professional on your team or have a hybrid marketing/BD professional, odds are leadership has not provided a great structure to what success looks like for this role. Making BD work for CPA firms is a complex challenge, but a general way to look at an originator (someone responsible for generating new clients) in this role is:
Events/Calls/Referrals – contact in database (lead) – SQLs (prospects) – discovery meeting – opportunity – proposal – client
When you look at the outbound activity generation – events attended, calls made, referrals gained – how many of those turn into leads? Leads are defined as an initial contact with a potential client.
Then continue on down the path –
leads to sales qualified leads or prospects
prospects to discovery meeting with the BD professional or the full team
discovery meeting to actual opportunity (that will be logged in the pipeline report)
opportunity to proposal or pricing
proposal or pricing to a client.
Ultimately, the goal is to understand what activities generate the best return on clients.
Summary
This should give you a great starting point to develop reporting for leadership at multiple levels – firm revenue and pipeline, marketing and BD KPIs, and BD professional activity reporting.
While they are simple, they are not easy….ask what is one practical thing you would like to share with leadership to help them generate revenue. Most of the time, this is where can we focus our efforts to make the largest impact on the firm.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Ralph MacNamara is a Principal and Chief Growth Officer at Kaufman Rossin, a top 50 IPA Firm. He is responsible for implementing the firm’s go-to-market strategies for all service lines and industry teams. He lives in South Florida and is an avid boater.
Neil Barrow is a business development dude with 15 years of experience in sales and business development, spending almost 10 years in public accounting. He is the founder of RevOps Advisors, helping firms create or rethink their business development function. He is a Certified Cicerone (beer sommelier) and is a terrible golfer. He lives in Fort Worth with his wife of 10 years and kindergartener.