Selling in the Professional Service Firm

I don’t write about professional services firms very often but more and more, they are developing a selling culture.  Of course, a selling culture in a law firm doesn’t resemble a selling culture in an insurance agency, but at least they’re trying.

When we evaluate the partners and associates in the professional firms we look at a number of things that we don’t look at in traditional sales organizations.  Two of those things are whether the individuals would enjoy performing some business development activities and whether they would prefer business development to practicing their chosen field of expertise.

One firm had some people who not enjoy doing business development work but would prefer it to the professional work they were expected to complete.  This raised some questions about how someone could prefer doing something they didn’t enjoy.  My explanation follows:

I don’t enjoy taking the trash down to the bottom of the bottom of the driveway, yet I would very much prefer it to cleaning toilets.