There’s a moment in most professional services firms when someone in marketing or business development is asked to justify their existence with a slide full of event counts and proposal volumes. If that still sounds familiar, something has gone wrong with how the firm has positioned them.
The conversation is shifting, and faster than many firms realise.
At Meridian West, we’ve spent the last few months in rooms with BD and marketing leaders across legal, accountancy, and consultancy. The firms pulling ahead aren’t simply those with the best technical talent. They’re the ones that have recognised their MBD function as a genuine growth engine, and reorganised accordingly.
From Support to Strategy
The Association of Accounting Marketing recently renamed itself the Association of Accounting Growth. That’s not a cosmetic change. It reflects a real structural shift happening across the sector: Chief Revenue Officers, Chief Growth Officers, Revenue Enablement leads. The titles are new; the expectation is clear. Marketing and BD are no longer being asked how many events they ran. They’re being asked what growth they generated.
This matters because it changes the resources, the seat at the table, and the mandate. Cross-selling, key account management, client retention: these have always been priorities in theory. They’re now priorities in practice, with the accountability to match.
A mandate without the right infrastructure is just pressure. Which brings us to the second shift.
Data Is the Differentiator, If You Use It
There’s no shortage of technology in professional services. The challenge, as we hear it, is turning data into reliable insight, and then turning that insight into commercial action.
The firms doing this well have built a genuine 360 view of the client relationship. They’re combining internal activity data with external market intelligence, feeding it into strategic decisions about which segments to target, where to invest BD time, and where cross-selling opportunities actually exist. MBD teams are well-placed to own this. No one else in the firm has the same broad view of client activity, market signals, and relationship health at the same time.
This connects directly to the profitability pressures hitting accountancy and consultancy hard right now. When teams are smaller and AI is absorbing more of the technical delivery, where human effort goes becomes a sharper question. Data-driven targeting is how firms avoid spending limited BD capacity on the wrong conversations.
Client Experience Is a Growth Strategy
Our CLIMB research benchmarks client listening and experience maturity across more than 200 professional services firms globally, and it keeps surfacing the same finding: firms know client experience matters, but most aren’t closing the loop.
Managing partners are listening, and that figure has improved. Fewer than 20% of firms, though, say client listening is having meaningful impact beyond the immediate stakeholders who commissioned it. While 36% describe it as a strategic priority, only 11% are confident their firm is doing enough.
Clients rarely leave because of poor technical expertise. They leave because they don’t feel heard, valued, or well-served. Technical capability is table stakes in most markets. The experience wrapped around it is what differentiates.
The opportunity is to turn the insights from client listening into visible, firm-wide change. That’s a growth strategy, and MBD teams are the natural owners of it.
The AI Question Firms Are Getting Wrong
AI is a fixture in these conversations, and for good reason. The framing, though, is often too narrow.
Most of the investment we see is focused on efficiency: automating processes, surfacing data faster, reducing time on low-value tasks. That’s necessary. It’s also only the beginning.
The more important question is what firms do with the time and capacity they free up. If AI handles the administrative, the templated, the routine, what does that create space for? In professional services, the answer has to be the things clients will pay a premium for: creativity, judgement, relationship depth, complex problem-solving. That’s what clients expect, and it’s increasingly what separates the firms that are growing from those that are standing still.
There’s a talent dimension too. Younger professionals entering firms today know that the technical core of their role is becoming more automated. They want to develop the skills that will sustain their value over a career: client management, commercial instincts, relationship development. The firms investing in those capabilities early are seeing it pay back in engagement and retention.
Value Has to Be Demonstrated
The thread running through all of this is value. Value as the client defines it, for their business and for the individual they’re dealing with.
In a price-sensitive market where clients know AI is changing delivery economics, the expectation is that firms will be clear about what clients are actually getting. Conversations that stay at the level of price leave money on the table. Value-led conversations require the insight to back them up.
This is where the CLIMB data is most concerning. Firms are investing in client listening and capturing feedback. The insights still aren’t reaching the fee earners, partners, and client teams who need them to have better conversations. The gap between insight and action is where most firms are losing ground.
MBD’s role here goes beyond collecting feedback. It’s about coaching fee earners to use what they know about clients, to deepen relationships, identify opportunities, and approach commercial conversations with more confidence.
What This Means in Practice
The firms making real progress on this agenda are doing it through a consistent set of moves: repositioning MBD as central to growth strategy, building the data infrastructure to support smart targeting, treating client listening as a commercial tool, and investing in both AI capability and the human skills that make it valuable.
The competitive divide in professional services is no longer driven solely by technical talent. Operational sophistication and the quality of client relationships are what separate the leaders from the rest. That’s precisely the territory where MBD functions should be operating.
The question is whether your firm has given them the room to do it.
Meridian West works with professional services firms on client listening, growth strategy, and BD capability development. If you’d like to explore how your firm compares on client experience and revenue alignment, we’d be glad to talk.