Professional Services

International expert and consultant David Maister offers a brilliant and accessible guide to every management issue at play in professional firms. Professional firms differ from other business enterprises in two distinct ways: first, they provide highly customized services and thus cannot apply many of the management principles developed for product-based industries. Second, professional services are highly personalized, involving the skills of individuals.

As Darwin famously observed, the beaks of each generation of Galapagos Island finches change to accommodate shifting food resources, allowing the birds to survive by adapting their capabilities to the new environment. Today's business people should take note: In the post-crisis economy, traditional career strategies spell professional extinction, but the fluid new "gig economy" offers tremendous potential for anyone willing to adapt.

How to Win Client Business When You Don't Know Where to Start provides a masterclass in teaching the practical techniques and concrete strategies that professional services providers were never taught in school or on the job. Pragmatic lessons take the place of the vaguely defined principles found in competing books to turn listeners from sales novices into rainmakers.

Years ago, developing and sustaining a book of business was not as big a problem for accountants, attorneys, financial planners, and other professionals as it is today. Clients were more loyal to the firms they worked with, and unlikely to shop your services, compare rates, or jump ship. Times have changed! And if you don't change along with them...well, you're not going to enjoy yourself or have as much control over your career as you deserve. Believe it or not, you can enjoy the process of expanding your client base.

How Clients Buy is the much-needed guide to selling your services. If you're one of the millions of people whose skills are the "product," you know that you cannot be successful unless you bring in clients. The problem is, you're trained to do your job-not sell it. No matter how great you may be at your actual role, you likely feel a bit lost, hesitant, or "behind" when it comes to courting clients, an unfamiliar territory where you're never quite sure of the line between under- and over-selling. This book comes to the rescue with real, practical advice for selling what you do.

I’ve written this book because selling your business is quite possibly the biggest financial transaction of your entire life, and you’ve never done it before and will likely never do it again, and you really need to be smart about this. I recently did a quick study on the likelihood that a firm in a particular, narrow vertical would have a successful exit—defined as someone else purchasing, for real money, a majority of your firm’s equity.

We are in the golden era of boutiques. The business models of your clients are being disrupted. This makes it virtually impossible for them to have all the required expertise in-house. They are looking for external expertise. They have big budgets to spend. Clients are buying from boutiques in record numbers. The sun is shining. Time to make hay.

Anthony Fauci is arguably the most famous–and most revered–doctor in the world today. His role guiding America sanely and calmly through Covid (and through the torrents of Trump) earned him the trust of millions during one of the most terrifying periods in modern American history, but this was only the most recent of the global epidemics in which Dr. Fauci played a major role. His crucial role in researching HIV and bringing AIDS into sympathetic public view and his leadership in navigating the Ebola, SARS, West Nile, and anthrax crises, make him truly an American hero.

LinkedIn the Sandler Way, the first audiobook release from Sandler Training and LinkedIn, offers powerful, cutting-edge best practices for effective social selling with LinkedIn. Its 25 discussions uncover big ideas for prospecting and selling online - ideas that typically haven't yet become part of a sales team's daily culture. Within just a few days, you can learn, adopt, and model these LinkedIn best practices so that they become consistent behaviors for everyone in your organization who sells for a living.

There's a Customer Born Every Minute reveals the lost wisdom of famous entrepreneur and showman, P. T. Barnum. Barnum was much more than a showman; he was a dedicated businessman and entrepreneur with a razor-sharp mind. In this delightful and absorbing new edition, Joe Vitale reveals the secrets of Barnum's success and shares the 10 key business practices that Barnum developed and lived by.

The Customer Success Manager has become a critical asset to organizations across the business landscape. As the subscription model has spread from the cloud and SaaS to more sectors of the economy, that pivotal role will only grow in importance. That's because if you want to compete and thrive in this new environment, you need to put the customer at the center of your strategy. You need to recognize you're no longer selling just a product. You're selling an outcome.

Never Say Sell explains how to scale individual engagements into long-term business relationships. Cowritten by Tom McMakin, the coauthor of How Clients Buy and expert in account development, and colleague Jacob Parks, this book provides insights into how key rainmakers at firms like Accenture and IBM drive growth from existing relationships. Never Say Sell is a business development guide for professional service providers like consultants, accountants, and lawyers, whether they are sole proprietors or members of account teams tasked with expanding key accounts.

In recent years, professional services providers have had to rethink their sales methods and adapt to profound changes in the way clients buy services. In response, Winning the Professional Services Sale argues for fundamental changes in the seller's mindset and sales strategies. Rather than pressing the sale, salespeople must help clients buy - the way that works best for each client. This new approach gives buyers what they now want in a services seller: a consultative problem solver, change agent, and solution integrator, all rolled into one.

Productize draws on the 25+ years of experience that Eisha Armstrong has in successfully creating, launching and growing productized services. Eisha knows what works and what doesn't and she is passionate about making sure organizations learn from each other and avoid reinventing the wheel.

Having worked in the emergency services for more than 15 years, Dan Farnworth has seen it all. There was the time he was called to take away a dead body - only for the 'corpse' to jolt back into life and demand to know what he was doing in her house. Earlier in his career, he unwittingly disturbed a crime scene as he shared the sad news of the victim's death with her son.

In the newly revised second edition of AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Study Guide: Foundational (CLF-C02) Exam, a team of veteran IT professionals and educators delivers an up-to-date and easy-to-follow introduction to Amazon's industry-leading cloud technology and the introductory certification exam that demonstrates your understanding of it. The AWS Certified AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Study Guide is an essential resource for any IT professional that works directly with Amazon Web Services, as well as students in IT fields.

Horrifying, heartbreaking and eye-opening, these are the stories, the patients and the cases that have characterised a career spent behind bars. The no-holds-barred memoirs of a GP who went from working at a quiet suburban practice to treating the country’s most dangerous criminals - first in young offenders’ institutions, then at the notorious Wormwood Scrubs and finally at Europe’s largest women-only prison in Europe, Bronzefield.

With the wisdom of a seasoned industry expert and the clarity of an effective educator, Smith walks you through each aspect of building, operating, and excelling in your professional services firm. Dive into the depths of strategic thought, embrace the magnetic power of authentic branding, and discover client-centric strategies.

The story the Vanguard Group as told by its founder, legendary investor John C. Bogle, Stay the Course traces the history of Vanguard - the largest mutual fund organization on Earth. An engaging blend of company history, investment perspective, and personal memoir, this book provides a fascinating look into the mind of an extraordinary man and the company he created.

More and more professional services firms are “productizing” their services to grow and scale. But successfully marketing and selling standardized services or products is very different from marketing and selling traditional professional services. Commercialize, a follow-on book to Productize, explores why commercializing new ideas is the most significant stall point when B2B services organizations productize. The book then outlines how the most successful firms commercialize packaged services and new products and get to revenue impact fast and efficiently.