The Art & Science of BD

Stacy Dreher: Too often we think, oh, you have a great personality. Because you have a great personality, you're going to be really good at selling, right? Just because you have a great personality doesn't mean that you can close deals. The science piece of that is really where having a methodology and having sales training can really help get you to the finish line.

Neil Barrow: I'm joined today by Stacy Dreher. She is the CGO of James Moore & Co. It's a CPA-led advisory firm based in Florida. She spent 20 years, that's a long time dealing with lawyers and CPAs to help them grow their with their practice, which means she's fluent in both complexity and patience.

So at her firm, there are actually this fun fact 3 Stacy's. So her alias is Stacy D alongside Stacy J and Stacy with an E. They're also in meetings together often, which keeps everyone on their toes. I love that Stacy.

Thank you for joining me today.

Stacy Dreher: Happy to be spending some time chatting about sales and business development. It's a topic that I am really passionate about.

Neil Barrow: Well, we, I can't wait to hear your perspective. I know we've talked a little bit and gotten to know each other a little bit through the association for accounting, marketing and some of the other stuff, right, that we're working on. But ultimately, like I, I love to hear what y'all are doing over there and I can't wait to share that story. So we're actually going to introduce a new segment today called the Combo Meal, three for five.

And so that's where the guest is going to share, has shared with me ahead of time 3 opinions, three thoughts around business development that they want to bring to the conversation today. And so let's read what's on your menu, Stacy. So the first one is, you know, a great topic. All of these are great topics, but a fun one, which is sales training.

So tell me a little bit about the sales training and what you mean by that.

Stacy Dreher: I think sales training is such an important aspect of business development. I think selling is an art and a science. And too often we think, oh, you have a great personality because you have a great personality, you're going to be really good at selling, right? I mean, don't people usually think that?

And I think, you know, that's more of the art side of selling. But I think just because you have a great personality and that you can connect well with people doesn't mean that you can close deals and like be a good business developer. And I think the science piece of that is really where having a methodology and having sales training can really help get you to the finish line.

Neil Barrow: I love that and I can't wait to talk a little bit about what y'all are doing on that front. Let's move on to the second menu item qualification. So what do you mean by that?

Stacy Dreher: Yeah. So qualification, I'm referring to lead qualification or as a business developer qualifying a particular opportunity business developers and you know I'm at a CPA firm, so our partners are also doing selling. We're all time constrained, like we only have so many hours in the day as a partner to do business developer business development activities and as a BD, you have sales quotas, right? You have, you have new business goals that you need to hit and you don't want to spend time on opportunities that are not a good fit for your firm, right?

And so I think sometimes in business development, it's like we gotta chase everything, right? We have to bring in the new business, we have to chase it all. But really we need to take time to stop and really spend time with the company, the opportunity to determine is this, are we a good fit for them? Are they a good fit for us?

And we turn away a lot of business. We'll be we'll be in a meeting or in the second meeting and we try and disqualify, right, because we don't want to bring in a client that's not going to be good for us. And so we are, we are really willing to walk away at the end of meeting number one or meeting #2 like, hey, I don't think, I don't think this is going to work. So I think if you can cut that off early before you go through an entire sales process and spend 3 months with an opportunity to find out, hey, this isn't a good fit or they're not going to hire us or they're just chasing price.

So I think that qualification piece at the very beginning is important.

Neil Barrow: I love that. OK, last thing, behavior, attitude, technique. First I'm hearing about this. What is that?

Stacy Dreher: So behavior attitude technique is actually a Sandler sales methodology process and it's a triangle. And this is all about OK, let's start with behavior. Behavior is are you actually doing the activity? So as a business developer, are you making the phone calls?

Are you going to the networking events? Are you following up with prospects? You have to have the behavior in order to succeed. The attitude is really all about what's your mindset going into conversations.

So I think we can fall into that trap of fear of rejection, right? As a business developer, if I need to spend some time making cold calls, like I don't want to do that because I have a fear of rejection, so therefore I'm not going to do it. So realigning your attitude with thinking, OK, most cold calls are going to result in a rejection, right? So you're going to go into that knowing that that's what's going to happen and knowing that they shouldn't turn into opportunities because really the goal of calling is you're sorting, not selling.

So a good cold call isn't necessarily getting to a yes. It's trying to figure out quickly if it's going to be a no, right? So just changing your attitude and then putting yourself in an equal playing field with your prospect. So I think, you know, you talked a little bit about that feeling of being sold to like as a as a business developer or as a partner.

You're you're not trying to sell to somebody, you're trying to solve a problem that they have and you have to treat yourself as an equal to your prospect, right. So stop acting like a vendor, like don't, don't over accommodate, don't defer, like start acting like a peer. We are peers and treat yourself as an equal. That's the attitude.

And then the technique is going back to the sales training. OK, so you have you have the behavioral, you're going into it with the right attitude. Do you have the right technique?

Neil Barrow: Yeah, I love that, you know, it's, it's kind of, it's very similar around, you know, really what you're talking about is activity, the mindset around it. And then do I have the tools to execute on those things? OK. We had some great menu items on our combo meal sales training, qualifications, behavior, attitude and technique.

So let's weave a little bit of that through your experience. I can't wait to hear some of the stories, you know, that you've that you'll share with us, you know, over your 20 year history, but let's kind of back up and get started. How did you get started in BD sales growth marketing, right? So tell me a little bit about how you got started.

Stacy Dreher: So I transitioned into the legal industry. You know, the opportunity just kind of fell in my lap and that's where I got started on both the marketing side and professional services business development. So I did both. That's when I started working up the ranks as a marketer and then I also did sales for them.

And then I eventually got to more of a management role where I was overseeing both, which was interesting experience to be able to have both the sales and business development experience as well as the marketing

Neil Barrow: and. And what is your first like, what did you learn during that time like about, you know, law firms in particular, like you know, what were you working on specifically? So you said marketing and business development and then you managed the, the group and the team. So tell me a little bit about some of the things that you had worked on.

I mean, was it sure? Did you work on some of you like your menu items during this time like did this? Is this when it started kind of creeping up? Like those are the things that we need to focus on or tell me a little bit about?

What you're working on?

Stacy Dreher: Yeah. So certainly in that role is when I started to get more serious about development, right. And that was kind of the first more professional sales and business development role that I had. Our firm was unique where our department brought in 98% of the new business.

So it was really an eat what you kill environment. It wasn't a traditional law firm or CPA firm where lawyers are selling. It was a growth team and through digital marketing and sales activity, me and my department brought in all of the clients for the firm. So we had to succeed.

We had to figure this out. So I, yeah, I started with different sales training and reading a lot of books and trying to hone my skills. It was a lot of dialing for dollars initially and then creating events across the country. So making connections with potential prospects around the country, bringing them together in events for our lawyers to sort of step in as the subject matter expert.

So certainly the behavior was if I'm not doing the activity, I'm not bringing in clients and this firm isn't going to succeed and I'm going to get fired like so. It was a quick reality check of I have to figure out what behavior I need. I have to have that right attitude of we need to get these clients. And then the technique piece was slower to come along, I think.

Neil Barrow: Sure. I think that's, you know, when we're first starting out, right. I think in business development, it's like we've got to have a high activity motor because we don't have anything else like we don't have that behavior, that activity. It's we're going to have a bad time, right?

Like it's, it's not going to go well. And

Stacy Dreher: I think, you know, the qualification piece too, it's similar. Lawyers are similar to CPAs where you really need to qualify a particular opportunity before you bring a lawyer into a meeting who's billing $500.00 an hour, right? Because they don't want to waste their time with somebody that's not going to be a good fit for them. So I made mistakes along the way of, you know, early like any opportunity, let's bring it in and basically learned that is not a good way to approach it.

Neil Barrow: Yeah. And so you were in marketing business development and you ended up leading that team. It was just for context, was this like more of a personal injury or like individual type law practice or was this more of a commercial like corporate?

Stacy Dreher: B to B, So we were a boutique niche nationwide firm. We practiced in the area of eminent domain law. I'm not sure if you're familiar with that, but we represented property owners when their property was being acquired for public use projects like a road widening or a redevelopment project. So I think you know, people have said, oh, you were an ambulance chaser, right?

Thinking like a personal injury lawyer, like where we're showing up in a hospital trying to sign someone up. And it wasn't like that. I mean, to give you context, we worked, there was a huge redevelopment project in Brooklyn, NY when they rebuilt the Nets stadium and they acquired a lot of businesses, multifamily property to build this. And when you're a business owner and they're taking your building and they're taking your property and they're offering you a fraction of what that's worth and you're thinking about how do I relocate my business and carry on.

So it was deeply personal to people and it was actually something that I was really passionate about. We helped a lot of people, so we worked across the country.

Neil Barrow: OK. And you know, that's helpful context. I think you keyed in on a couple different things, right, which is like when we think about the volume that it would take, right when we're working with property owners, like specific people who have a specific problem, like individuals instead of like big companies that typically CPA firms are chasing. It requires that marketing and business development combo.

Like you've got to have a really tight process. And I think that's really interesting because your experience of seeing how the marketing and events and like more broad like getting eyeballs on us paired with the very intentional, like how are we making calls to people that might have this problem? Like that is a very powerful combination that I'm sure that has taken you into your next journey, you know, share with me like, OK, well, what was your next opportunity that look like, you know, after the law firm.

Stacy Dreher: Sure. After the law firm is when I transitioned into the firm I'm with currently. So I made the leap from the legal industry to the CPA industry.

Neil Barrow: Let me let me ask one question there. So what's the difference? Like legal industry, CPA industry? Tell me, tell me a difference.

Stacy Dreher: From a marketing and business development perspective, there really isn't much difference.

Neil Barrow: Yeah. And that's my, that's been my experience as well. Like there's nuances that every firm's different. There's nuances, but from like a fundamental level, like it's basic.

It's basically it's, it's very, very similar.

Stacy Dreher: Yeah, although I think my experience in the legal industry was more traditional of a corporate marketing team versus a professional services just because we were the growth team versus working with partners who were doing business development activity, which that was actually a big change for me transitioning. But I realized later, OK, this what we did was not traditional of most law firms, right. And how CPA firms operate is more traditional of a law firm. So when I actually transitioned into the CPA space, I was like, where are your business developers and why your marketing team?

Like why are they not generating leads? And what do you mean see partners are selling and do you even know how to sell it just blew my mind.

Neil Barrow: So in that transition, like what were they looking for? Have they had a marketing person, people, team before you joined?

Stacy Dreher: They did, they had a marketing manager and a marketing coordinator when I joined the firm and I think it was, it was the marketing team was preparing proposals and preparing presentations and coordinating events and helping guide industry team meetings and whatnot. So they had, they had a growth program in place. They had a strong growth mindset. They did have some marketing professionals who were helping them.

What they didn't have was a marketing growth team that was directly contributing to growth. And they also didn't have the business development support, coaching, training, and they didn't have business developers when I joined the firm.

Neil Barrow: Very interesting. So like that's, that's not like that's pretty common, right? When I, when I work with firms, like when you look at the foundation of a firm, most firms are driven by partners growth ultimately. And then we add some marketing folks to help with the administration of some of the things that we want done, like proposals like events coordination, like industry group administration.

And so when you look at where you joined, they were kind of it seemed like maybe they were at that inflection point that I see is like that's the second phase. And then there's a third phase where now we have like the leader and then we're kind of creating this stand alone group to drive revenue, right? And then that's where it kind of evolves into and it seemed like you maybe joined at that kind of evolution from that phase two. We just need help administering some marketing type stuff to like actually like.

How can we build a thing that can drive revenue for a firm? Right.

Stacy Dreher: Well, I don't even think they were at that point because when I joined, they, there was a lot of resistance to investing in marketing because they had the mindset of, well, people don't buy CPA services online And how would it, how would a business developer work? And you know, like they weren't quite there yet. So it took me a period, it took me a number of years of I call it internal politicking around. This is what marketing can do for you.

Give me give me some investment and I can show you an ROI. And I was really, I really wanted to hire a business developer when I first went there. And it was our managing partner at the time was like, no, we are not ready for that week. You can't do that.

And I was actually like really upset. I'm like, we really need this. But looking back at that, it was actually very wise because she was right. I think the firm really wasn't ready.

And had I brought in a business developer right away, I think it would have failed. So I think firms have to get to a point where they want it, they need it, they understand it and they can see how it can fit into their into the growth cycle, right. So it took a while to get there and to build all of that.

Neil Barrow: And it always does. It always takes twice as long. It's like a hiring a contractor to redo your bathroom takes twice as long and it's twice as expensive. And so like just understanding that's what we're headed into.

But like it's those phases of.

Stacy Dreher: Evolution and that's why it's really important to understand where your firm is at culturally, leadership alignment wise. Because really the biggest gap that I see is like the leadership team doesn't necessarily have the frame of reference nor the words to describe exactly what they want and what they need at the firm.

Neil Barrow: And so having someone that kind of understands marketing and business development to help them get see the next level or see that little baby step or half step that can get them to the to the things that we can then evolve from. But we've got to start right? And that's and that's typically challenging. And so tell me a little bit.

OK, So how long have you been at your James Moore?

Stacy Dreher: I've been here since 2014, so just shy of 12 years. That's.

Neil Barrow: Awesome. That's a long time. That's that's really awesome. And so now you've moved up to CGO where you're leading the entire marketing and business development team and now you have BD members, right.

And so I want to talk about two things quickly. And then I want to talk a little bit about, you know, some of the themes that we had talked about the beginning in the combo meal. But one is how did you, how did you hire for BD? What did you determine that they were going to be spending their time on?

Because that's those are two main challenges for people that are hiring BD for the first time at firms. So tell me a little bit about how you were thinking through that.

Stacy Dreher: Yeah. First of all, I didn't want it to fail. So I'm like this first BD hire has to be a success because if it isn't, what my firm is going to say is see it business development doesn't work. So I actually waited until we had a strong inbound marketing function to where I could bring in a BD and they could be more focused heavily on inbound because that was going to work, right.

We had the leads coming in. So I just needed somebody inbound to work the leads and manage that sales cycle. So it didn't take long. The 1st BD I hired worked for any inbound marketing lead.

She worked with the partners and she spent, she was in every single meeting and helped close. So what that did for our partners is see how great it was to have a business developer because they were closing more business because they had somebody who knew how to sell in the meeting and that person was doing all the follow up and scheduling all the meetings. So all the all the partner had to do is show up to the meeting and provide subject matter expertise. So it quickly became very valuable.

And then from there when they would get referrals, they would start pulling her in because they wanted that BD support to help them and they wanted the extra help. So that's how it started. And then we go to market by industry. So once I could prove success with that model, I had one industry team that was really prime for BD.

So I'm looking for a team that has that wants to grow, has energy at the partner level. We have directors who are trying to get to the partner level. We have good channels of distribution where I can plug in a BD and they're going to be successful because I know exactly where they can go, what they should be doing, who they should be working with, and it just like can't fail, right? Unless you have a bad hire.

So I plugged, I moved her from an inbound to an outbound business developer role and plugged her in with one of the teams. And so then she transitioned as truly an outbound. But I think as long as I think having a strong marketing function helps support a business developer getting started because they're going to have some inbound opportunities to help with their numbers. And then if you have a good strategy in place, then they can really build upon that outbound, the outbound lead generation piece.

Neil Barrow: Yeah, No, I and I think how you've done it is how I recommend firm start is like it's really it's, you know, when we look at business development, it's origination and enablement, right, Whether you hire Neil to go originate new opportunities or you hire Neil to enable our people to go right and get more opportunities. So like the enablement pieces where most firms need to start before they thinking about somebody going outbound, how you described it and what you're just what you've built and allowed them to do is get used to working with BD because that's the biggest other factor is what we're thinking about. OK, well what is our BD person going to do? We don't necessarily think about, well, how are the partners going to work with this BD like we haven't trained them to work with a BD person.

And so when we think about the inbound I love that. And that's probably also LED into helping you build out your qualification process, which is one of your menu items at the beginning. So tell me, could you tell me a little bit how you were thinking about like the questions or the checklist or the prompts that you wanted to ask as you qualified thinking about qualification because I think it's really important to share.

Stacy Dreher: Sure. On the qualification piece, it goes back to what's our ICP, what's our ideal client profile and that varies for us by industry. So I spent a lot of time with each of our industry leaders usually once a year realigning on what's our ICP, who do you want as a client, what's their size, what's their geography? Is it number of employees, is it revenue, is it niche, is it sub niche?

So really aligning that and then building out a list of qualification questions aligned with the ICP. So for real estate that looks a lot different. So if I we have a real estate prospect, we're asking about the size of their portfolio and what types of properties do they own and versus it's not like you don't ask a real estate investor how much revenue does your business make and how many employees do you have, right? We're in our manufacturing niche.

It's, it is more, tell me more, what's your revenue? Tell me more about, do you have a CFO like how are you handling your accounting? How many employees do you have? Tell me more about what you need help with.

So we have a pretty robust sales qualification questions for each of our each of our industry niches and some of our service lines as well.

Neil Barrow: Yeah. And I think that's that's a missing piece to a lot of firms is what do we need to know to better serve or make recommendations to and we're really focused on the deliverable aspect instead of like the overall health of what that potential client could look like. And so making sure that we're stepping back and that's where a business developer can really help, right, is being able to ask those questions, step back as part of the meeting, the team that's meeting or in a one-on-one scenario if we're getting inbound opportunities before we bring a partner or.

Stacy Dreher: Manager into. That conversation.

Neil Barrow: And so I love the qualification thing. And so tell me a little bit about sales training and then I'm going to ask you like what are the two or three things that you're working on this year that you're really excited about and we'll and then we'll wrap up our conversation.

Stacy Dreher: Sure. We are, I think our firm was finally ready for sales training when we started about two or three years ago. And Neil, I will tell you sales used to be a four letter word at our firm. Like you said before you mentioned sales is more business development.

I old school like let's just call it what it is, you know, and we did a one day sales training at our firm a number of years ago and we asked the sales trainer to remove all aspects of the word sales because we couldn't call it sales training. So that's where we were probably 7-8 years ago. So like we were definitely not ready for sales training, but we got to a point where we had evolved from a marketing and a growth perspective where people were ready for it. Like they wanted more new business, they wanted to do better.

So we brought in a sales, I brought in a sales training program, Sandler. We're a Sandler sales shop and our sales training program is like 2 years. It's not, it's not a one day. It's if you volunteer for this, you're in it and you're in it for two years.

Neil Barrow: Wow. It's a big commitment. Yeah, that's a big commitment. And you're talking about like, and that's that was going to be my question was how are you making it stick internally?

Right. And it seems to me that most firms like when I come in and do training for firms, I always make sure that like, hey, if we're going to do training, I need to make sure that y'all already have some sort of system or structure already in place to create some of that accountability. Because I feel like that training just in a vacuum is very much like professional development under the professional development guys. So I, I really like how you identified when you're ready when people were starting to ask for it, because we're asking them to do more or they're seeing a lot of positive feedback from what we're already doing and now they're ready for it.

So the sales training aspect and so give me give me one or two things again that you're excited about for this year that you're working on, that you and the team are working on.

Stacy Dreher: Yeah. So I've, I've spent a lot of time on the outbound business development aspect with hiring BDs and I've spent a lot of time on the sales training. So now in addition to continuing to build out my business development team, sales training is ongoing. I'm working on a cross selling program internally as well, so focusing on top clients.

We're going through a client ranking process and aligning marketing into the cross selling and our partners. We just need to do a better job with meeting with our clients more regularly, learning more about their business, right, uncovering what they might need help with and how our solutions might align to that. So that's one of the big things I'm working on.

Neil Barrow: No. And I love that. And I think that's getting back to basics, right. I think we avoid some of the foundational elements of BD as a firm in our pursuit of new and all of all of our stuff is wrapped up into the relationships that we already have at our large firm.

And so we.

Stacy Dreher: Do Yeah, it's low-hanging fruit.

Neil Barrow: Yes, it is and it's I love that y'all are kind of getting back to that and like saying hey, how can we better support our clients and our ecosystem that we already have today. I love that Stacy and so on that we'll leave it. This was a such a great conversation and I loved how we talked about when your firm was ready for a sales training, how to better qualify. And like thinking about it, if you don't have that at your firm, like what could that look like?

I loved you sharing about when your firm was ready for BD and what they're doing, what they started out doing and what they're doing now. And then kind of comes back to those fundamentals of behavior, right attitude and technique, and those three like buckets of things that we can help as leaders at our firm, we can help our people with. And so again, thank you for joining Stacy. It was really fun.

Stacy Dreher: This was fun Neil, thanks for having me on the show.

Neil Barrow: Absolutely. And so that's our episode of. I Hope This Email Finds You Well. Thanks for joining and see us next time.

Bye.