More Things in More Places

post # 199 — September 26, 2006 — a General post

While most professional businesses, from banks to ad agencies to accounting firms, want to grow multidisciplinary relationships with key accounts, their attempts to create one-stop shopping strategies usually stumble, and even those firms implementing modern client relationship management (CRM) programs are still struggling to make them work.

This week’s free audio seminar, More Things in More Places, addresses what it takes to implement any multidisciplinary and/or geographic expansion strategy successfully.

The key ingredient:

Expansion is not what you do in order to achieve excellence – it’s what you are allowed to do after you have achieved it.

To explore why this common and much-desired strategy is so hard to pull off, I examine expansion strategies from the buyers’ perspective, including:

• Cross-selling vs. coordinated teams: the client-centric distinction
• What a client wants from a project coordinator
• How to tell when geographic expansion makes sense – and when it doesn’t

My Business Masterclass audio seminars are always downloadable at no cost. You can download More Things in More Places or sign up to receive new seminars automatically by subscribing to my Business Masterclass podcast series with iTunes or other podcast players. (Click here for step-by-step instructions on how to subscribe.)

This seminar was based on my 1997 book, True Professionalism, as well as the following resources available for free on this website:

• Geographic Expansion Strategies
• Making Multidisciplinary Practices Work
• Innovating by Standing Still

Again I want to know: if one-stop shopping and premature geographic expansion have just dismal track records (and they do, in industry after industry, profession after profession), why are so many firms, small and large, still eagerly pursuing this? I’m ready to admit they may be right and I’m wrong, but what am I missing?