Business development in professional services is changing as clients demand more coordination, more insight, and more measurable value from their advisors.
Buying committees are larger, decision cycles are longer, and expectations for cross-practice expertise continue to increase. Clients want to see that your firm understands their business as a whole, not just the narrow issue in front of you.
At the same time, many firms still rely heavily on a small group of high-performing partners to drive growth. For decades, this approach produced strong individual books of business. A few rainmakers built deep networks, opened doors, and generated a disproportionate share of revenue. But it produced results in a different market. It embeds structural risk that becomes more visible as firms grow, diversify, and face generational transition.
The challenge now is moving growth beyond a few individual rainmakers and building an approach that your entire firm can use.
Table of contents
Why the “rainmaker model” is breaking
As firms grow, diversify, and approach generational transition, the limits of the rainmaker model become harder to ignore. Concentrating revenue, influence, and client knowledge in the hands of a few individuals, making firm-wide growth dependent on them.
That risk becomes obvious during leadership transitions. Industry data illustrates this: 31% of managing partners are over 60, and equity partner retirements are accelerating. When they leave, significant client relationships and deep client understanding often leave with them, along with the access and influence the firm assumed it owned.
As senior partners step back, firms often discover that what appeared to be a firm-level relationship was, in practice, concentrated with a single individual. The history, informal influence, and political nuance were often never documented or shared.
Scalability presents a second constraint. When origination is concentrated among a small group of partners, growth capacity rises and falls with their personal bandwidth, effectively setting the firm’s growth ceiling by their time rather than by market opportunity. Cross-practice expansion depends on individual initiative rather than coordinated account strategy. Emerging leaders have limited exposure to strategic client development because access to key relationships is controlled informally.
There’s also the issue of fragmented knowledge. In many firms, relationship intelligence remains dispersed across inboxes, contact lists, and private notes. That leaves your leadership team without a reliable, firm-wide view of who knows whom and how strong those relationships truly are.
For marketing teams tasked with driving targeted growth that lack of visibility is especially limiting. Without shared insight into executive access and engagement history, campaign strategy becomes broad by necessity, leaving marketing to operate on incomplete information rather than aligning outreach to active partner conversations and existing influence inside priority accounts.
While the rainmaker model rewards individual ownership, business development in professional services depends on institutional ownership and coordinated visibility that allows growth to be measured and managed across your firm.
The shift to “firm-wide” business development
Business development in professional services can’t rely on a small circle of high performers to drive most new revenue. If growth is going to last, it has to involve partners, practice leaders, and client-facing professionals working in a coordinated way.
“Firm-wide” business development doesn’t mean turning every partner into a full-time seller. It means recognizing that every client interaction has development value and ensuring the firm captures, shares, and activates that insight. Relationship strength, referral patterns, industry connections, and client touchpoints become part of how you think about growth across the firm.
You can already see this in the data. In Thomson Reuters’ The 2025 Future of Professionals Report, 34% of legal professionals said that time saved through technology is being redirected toward strengthening client relationships and professional networks, signaling that relationship development is becoming a broader organizational priority.
A partner heading into a client meeting can review a consolidated view of the firm’s recent touchpoints with that account, see which colleagues have relationships with key stakeholders, and walk in prepared with context that would otherwise sit in someone else’s inbox. After the meeting, engagement activity is captured automatically, keeping marketing and business development teams aligned with ongoing developments without anyone having to manually enter data.
Greater visibility across practices and geographies makes account expansion planning and execution much more deliberate. When you can see where influence sits within a target account and where coverage is thin, you know exactly which partner should lead the next conversation, who can make a warm introduction, and where the firm lacks executive-level access. That insight changes timing and sequencing, so that cross-sell opportunities surface earlier in the client lifecycle, when strategic priorities are still being shaped.
Of course, none of this works without reliable relationship intelligence. Broad participation in business development in professional services depends on capturing interaction data without adding administrative burden. Professionals will not update systems consistently on their own. The technology has to fit the way you already work and surface insight that actually helps you take action.
3 Pillars of a modern BD engine
Growth won’t scale through intention alone. Business development in professional services only works at scale when your systems reflect how professionals actually work and turn everyday relationship activity into usable insight.
Coordinated growth depends on three capabilities.
1. Institutional memory (the CRM must know what the partners know)
Institutional memory keeps client knowledge from living with just one person, allowing relationship context, stakeholder dynamics, and client history to survive transitions and lateral moves.
When you maintain institutional memory, a partner preparing for a renewal discussion can see every meaningful interaction across the firm, not just their own. A newly assigned relationship lead can quickly understand prior expansion attempts, sensitivities inside the client organization, and which colleagues hold influence with specific executives.
This is why CRM deployments fall short. A database of manually entered contacts doesn’t create institutional knowledge. The system has to reflect how client relationships actually evolve over time, capturing real interactions instead of just storing contact details. Otherwise, succession planning and account growth continue to rely on what individual partners remember.
2. Automated admin (fee-earners won’t do data entry)
For client knowledge to remain useful, relationship activity has to be captured in a way that fits how your professionals already operate.
Email exchanges, meeting invitations, and calendar interactions reflect the real rhythm of client engagement. When those signals are captured and connected automatically, you can see who’s engaging which stakeholders and how those relationships are progressing.
In practice, a partner’s outreach, a follow-up meeting, or a multi-party introduction contributes to your understanding of the account without requiring additional administrative steps. In business development in professional services firms, that means your account view reflects real client activity as it happens, not weeks later during a review.
If engagement data depends on manual updates, gaps can emerge quickly. Over time, those gaps distort account planning and erode confidence in the system. Consistent capture keeps your institutional knowledge credible and usable across the firm.
3. Relationship visibility (transparency across practice lines)
Seeing the full picture changes how you approach the conversation.
When your firm’s relationship network is mapped across clients, prospects, industries, and practice lines, you can see how connections extend beyond a single account. You know who has access to which executives, where influence overlaps, and where coverage depends too heavily on one partner.
That transparency allows you to distribute engagement deliberately, making gaps in coverage visible while there is still time to address them. You can use your mapped network to decide who engages next and who makes the introduction, bringing the right partner into the discussion when their access and credibility matter most.
In business development in professional services, growth depends on understanding how relationships connect across the firm and using that network deliberately.
How technology bridges the gap between marketing and partners
While your marketing team and practitioners and partners both work toward growth, they rarely share the same real-time view of relationship strength or engagement history. That disconnect is one of the most limiting challenges in business development in professional services today.
Technology closes that gap by creating a common source of truth.
When relationship intelligence flows into your systems automatically, marketing can see which accounts already have strong executive access and which ones require new introductions. From a marketing perspective, your campaign strategy can be much more targeted, rather than broad outreach which may not land. Instead of broad outreach that may miss the mark, messaging can align with a recent meeting, a pending renewal, or a strategic initiative the client raised last quarter.
Partners and practitioners benefit just as directly. Before heading into a client meeting or agreeing to support a pursuit, they can review engagement history across practices and understand who already has influence with the client. Marketing efforts can then reinforce those conversations instead of operating separately.
Alignment and shared visibility changes the quality of collaboration and helps you shorten your feedback loops: marketing can adjust targeting based on live engagement patterns and your professionals can prioritize outreach based on documented influence instead of instinct.
Technology supports judgment and experience by making engagement visible across the firm. When that visibility is consistent, marketing strategy and partner activity reinforce each other.
See how your firm can coordinate marketing and partners around the same information by booking a demo with our team.
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