Professional Services

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.

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.  

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

In Soft Skills for the Professional Services Industry: Principles, Tasks, and Tools for Success, renowned auditing professional, valuator, and author Andreas Creutzmann delivers an essential guide for professionals seeking to upgrade and refine their soft skills. From public speaking to problem solving, digital literacy, and intercultural fluency, the author discusses concrete strategies and practical techniques for professionally trained and credentialed experts to expand their skillset, augment their leadership abilities, and even find more fulfillment in their work.

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.

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.

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.  

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.

Leading for Organisational Change is an intelligent and practical guide to the human side of merger integration and other organizational change. Building a clear sense of common purpose and then reinforcing it through storytelling can underpin the success of an integration or significant change program. Pulling together the best thinking from neuroscience, psychology, business, and her rich personal experience in 20 years of leading change projects in professional services organizations and other people-centered businesses, author Jennifer Emery presents a framework for change.

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 Promises of Giants is an exploration of the practices and behaviours that define transformational leadership. It is a challenge, not only to those in named positions of power but to anyone who aspires to make a difference in their environment. A challenge to act decisively to influence the world in a positive way. From socio-political chaos and workplace disruption to the climate change crisis, we have never needed people with the skill and will to collaborate to create a better world more than now. 

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 traditional professional services firms are turning to "productization" as a strategy to grow, improve valuations, and to fend off new digital-first competitors. However, many of them will fail and waste a lot of money in the process. Productize first outlines the "Seven Deadly Productization Mistakes" made when pursuing a product strategy, then provides the blueprint for overcoming each of these missteps. It is designed to be a practical playbook for any leader of a professional services business who wants to successfully accelerate growth.

The Life in the UK Test is hard - there's no denying that. In fact, data shows that more than 30% of people fail on their first time. We understand your reasons for staying in the UK - it's a tremendous country offering incredible opportunities for families, workers, and business owners. But your next hurdle is passing the Life in the UK Test. So, what can you do to improve your chances? Our comprehensive guide was created to guide you through passing the exam as fast & as easily as possible.

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.

You’ve spent years training to be an expert in your field. Years hunched over books and articles, writing essays late into the night on the science and art of your chosen profession. Through hard work and determination, alongside lots of experience, you’ve now become pretty good at it. So good in fact, that you have been asked to stop doing it all the time. You’ve been asked to be a manager. 

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.