Webcast Takeaways: Building New Business: Five Ways Firms Are Driving New Revenue With Automation And AI

Thanks and appreciation go out to our distinguished panelists for their time and insightful commentary on this topic.

• Jeff Poczatek, Vice President, Global Sales, Affinity
• Jonathan Gross, Managing Director, Pemeco Consulting
• Brian Erickson, Managing Vice President, Pariveda

If you were unable to attend, you may go here to view this webcast on-demand.

What did our audience learn during this discussion? The following is a brief recap of some key takeaways from the webinar.

The 2024 Professional Services Outlook

Affinity's survey connected with 160 consultants across the U.S. to help understand expectations for project volume through the remainder of 2024, especially in the light of a little bit of a slower 2020, 2022 and 2023.

At a high level, the survey captured three things: the perception of the market and trends around identifying new projects through the rest of this year; how firms are thinking about process, technology and relationships to find new projects; and how firms are becoming more efficient within their tech stack.

The 2024 Professional Services Outlook survey may be viewed here.

How are firms adapting their sales strategies to address emerging market trends and client needs?

• 57% of the survey respondents cited two areas of focus: Building stronger relationships to ultimately get into future deals; managing existing clients and extending those relationships.
• It is important to properly leverage data in order to collect the right information and develop the ability to cohesively weave "who knows who" and how, in order to drive consistent development momentum and critical top line metrics.
• Firms are discussing AI as a process and how to best use it from a sales standpoint and are exploring how to best integrate AI and capitalizing on its benefits.

How are firms leveraging technology and data analytics to enhance their sales processes and identify new opportunities?

• The survey data suggested 62% of firms don't feel like they have great processes in place.
• Capturing data – emails, calendars, contacts, accounts— and getting that information into a centralized, manageable repository, is important, but how that data is compiled, assessed and prioritized for utilization is an equally important element.
• Effectively harnessing existing tools like CRM, ERM and accounting systems allows predictive analytics and AI-driven insights to optimize information, identify potential clients, personalize pitches and forecast market trends is the pivotal element.
• Having the proper tools in-house reduces the need to purchase third-party data. Smaller firms competing against bigger firms and deeper pockets, can derive great benefit from leveraging technology.
• Accuracy is important. As in all things related to data and analytics, your final results are only as good as the information you have collected.

What factors should firms consider relating to employing new technology for these purposes?

At a high level, AI seems to be top of mind for everybody. The survey data indicates that 96% of firms are or plan to leverage AI for deeper data analysis and automating some core tasks.

• Key priorities included identifying new clients, followed by scoring and analysis based on the firm's network.
• Calculating the strength of relationships and prioritizing where to focus time and effort was an important element as well.
• It is important to have a "playbook" or established processes for taking the best steps forward when engaging those prioritized and targeted contacts.

Guardrails are important.

• Privacy laws are evolving from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. This needs to be kept in mind when considering employing these capabilities.
• It is important stay abreast of changes and regulatory updates in order to accommodate client driven data management requests such as unsubscribes and even system-wide data removal demands.
• Consideration needs to be given as to how to govern your data and control it systematically. You must consider the internal processes and protocols to manage relationships and ensure well-established and positive associations aren't inadvertently damaged.

Regardless of relationship scores and the use of AI to drive stronger relations, at the end of the day, it's about personal interaction and how you can deliver meaningful impact to those people.

"Ultimately having this information is terrific, but having a game plan for what you're going to do with it is going to make or break the effectiveness of the strategy. Regardless of the technology and/or your process, it's a people-centric equation. Whether it's tools, process, you name it, the name of the game is people." – Jeff Poczatek, Vice President, Global Sales, Affinity

If you were unable to attend, you may go here and follow the instructions to view this webcast on-demand.