Growth strategies for measuring sales success

Ralph MacNamara leads Kaufman Rossin’s business development department, responsible for driving growth strategies for all service lines and industry teams. MacNamara, who also oversees the firm’s corporate social responsibility initiatives, has helped launch more than a dozen new service lines and co-founded the firm’s IT security and computer forensic practices.

Which metrics do you use to assess firm growth?

Most firms typically report lagging indicators, such as growth in net services, increases in collections, better productivity and improved collections compared to last year, at the end of the year. I come at it from a finance background, so a lot of what I do is forecast and track leading indicators.

What are you doing with those metrics?

We implemented a new client estimated revenue report based on service line, industry and partner in charge. Every time a new client is set up, we estimate revenue. We’re also doing that from a cross-selling perspective. Who is generating cross-sell opportunities in what service line, who is receiving those opportunities, what service line is benefitting and who from other teams is participating to help win the business? We also use metrics to track proposal win rates. We track volume in terms of quantity, revenue, what service lines and how much we are winning. Those metrics are very helpful in determining where the business is, where it’s going, where we need to align our efforts and what we need to do to grow revenue.

What surprised you the first time you saw these metrics?

We learned our most profitable clients were concentrated in seven different industries, which allowed us to focus our efforts on those industries where we had distinct expertise. That allowed us to go from trying to support 20 different industry initiatives to focusing on just seven, which now has an impact on over 80% of our firm revenue. When we started tracking the metrics, we realized we can get a lot more done more efficiently and more profitably by focusing on those seven industries and aligning service lines to them.

What is marketing’s role in this process?

Marketing can take on a key position in convincing management these metrics are important to track. They can also show leadership how they can leverage them to help manage the business and how different service lines are promoted.

How do you gain partner buy-in?

The manual report helped sell the idea of creating realtime reporting; we were seeing the data can be used in so many ways, even with manual Excel-based reports. I would encourage any firm going on this journey to start there and build on those [reports] by automating some of the processes throughout the month.

Can you imagine running the firm without these metrics?

We tell our clients they need reliable data to run their businesses, yet CPA firms often use lagging indicators to run theirs, such as “How many hours did we bill last month,” or “How many dollars did we collect last month,” as opposed to what’s coming down the pipe. It is so much more powerful to run the firm using these tools to demonstrate the value of marketing and business development. Any firm that hasn’t done it should strongly consider doing so, particularly firms trying to grow at a fast pace. I can’t see running the firm without these tools.

View the full interview here.