Beaton

Personal branding for professionals: why it matters and how to build yours

Kate Allman — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 06:54:18 +0000

In today’s professional world, it’s not enough to be good at what you do – you also need to show future clients that you’re someone worth engaging.

Personal branding is the story people tell about you when you’re not in the room. It’s the combination of your expertise, your values, and the way you show up online and offline.

For many professionals in accounting, law, engineering, and consulting, the idea of “marketing yourself” can feel uncomfortable or even awkward. But personal branding isn’t about bragging – it’s about sharing your knowledge, building credibility, and connecting with the people who matter most to your career. Because in professional services, people work with people, not just firms. A strong personal brand can make the difference between being noticed and being overlooked.

This article covers how you should be building your personal brand in professional services, and why it matters.

What is a personal brand?

Simply put, a personal brand is the image others form of you. It’s what people say about you when you leave the room. It’s how your expertise, values, and personality come across – both in person and online. A strong personal brand helps people understand who you are, what you stand for, and why they should trust you.

Tom Peters famously predicted in his widely-cited 1997 “Brand Called You” article, career-minded professionals would need to think and behave like brands to succeed. He argued a strong personal brand matters regardless of age, job title or industry. That prediction is no longer futuristic – it’s the reality today.

“A clear personal brand helps signal credibility, relevance and trustworthiness. It shows the market what you know, how you think, and the kinds of problems you help clients solve,” says Jon Huxley, Beaton partner and personal branding expert.

A clear personal brand helps signal credibility, relevance and trustworthiness. It shows the market what you know, how you think, and the kinds of problems you help clients solve.

Jon Huxley, Beaton partner

Why personal branding matters in professional services

Professional services are fundamentally a people business. Decisions about whom to trust and work with are often driven by emotional factors. In fact, research from Gallup shows 70 per cent of hiring or purchasing decisions are emotional, with only 30 per cent being rational. A strong personal brand helps clients connect with you emotionally before they even pick up the phone.

Why is this even more important in the modern, online and connected world? Digital natives now make up the largest proportion of buyers in the B2B space. The APAC B2B Buyer Journey Research Report 2025, published by Green Hat, reports that 72 per cent of buying teams are Millennials and Gen Z (born after 1980). They lean heavily into self-directed research and expect transparent, frictionless access to information online. Compared to buyers aged 51 and over, they also engage far less frequently with sellers.

These potential clients are increasingly discerning and, with all the information available online, prefer to learn plenty about you before they even speak with you or your firm. They’ll research your website, read your LinkedIn profile, and evaluate your thought leadership before making a decision. In this environment, a strong personal brand is essential for attracting and retaining clients.

“I regularly see clients and prospects looking me up before deciding whether to engage me, says Huxley.

“If my profile were bare, that would send a very different signal. In that sense, personal branding is really just making your professional reputation visible.”

A strong personal brand communicates your expertise, values, and personality to others – both in person and online

Overcoming the ‘self-promotion’ barrier

For professionals in Australia and New Zealand, talking about your own achievements can feel awkward or “icky.” Cultural norms tend to favour humility over self-promotion. But building a personal brand isn’t about bragging or constantly talking about yourself. At its best, it’s about demonstrating your expertise and sharing insights that help others. When approached this way, personal branding becomes less about self-promotion and more about contribution. Done thoughtfully, it positions you as a trusted advisor and builds credibility with potential clients, colleagues, and employers.

A helpful mindset shift is to focus on sharing knowledge rather than promoting yourself.

“The biggest misconception is that personal branding is self-promotion. In reality, the most effective professional brands are built by sharing useful insight, not talking about yourself,” says Huxley.

“That applies whether you’re speaking at an event, writing an article, giving an interview or posting on LinkedIn. The professionals who build the strongest reputations are usually those who share thoughtful perspectives on issues their clients care about.”

Beaton teaches professionals to share useful insights in practical ways via our “valuable conversations” skills workshops and business development training. For example, instead of posting about how successful a project was, you might share a short lesson learned from it: a regulatory change clients should be aware of, a common mistake businesses make, or a trend you’re seeing in your industry. This kind of content is valuable to your network and reminds them of your availability to help, while subtly reinforcing your expertise.

You can also engage with other people’s content, which is often the easiest place to start. Commenting thoughtfully on industry news, congratulating clients on milestones, or adding perspective to a peer’s post helps build visibility while contributing to the professional conversation.

“LinkedIn has been a genuine source of opportunity for me. I’ve received enquiries from prospective clients as a direct result of my LinkedIn activity, and some of those have turned into real work,” adds Huxley.

How to build a personal brand

Building your personal brand online is an intentional activity. Here’s where to start:

1. Thought leadership activities

Beaton’s 2025 Marketing, BD & CRM Effectiveness Report confirmed that thought leadership is one of the most valuable branding exercises. By “thought leadership” we mean published insights on topical ideas and whitepapers that are relevant to your clients’ industries. More than half of the 700 clients we surveyed said that this kind of thought leadership strongly influences their choice of firm.

Why does it work? Clients are hungry for information and insights to help them conduct their business. When they see you producing insightful, relevant content on the issues they care about, it sends a message that you know their world and you know how to help.

You don’t have to necessarily publish a 50-page whitepaper (this might be best left to your firm with its organisational resources and budget). As an individual, you could write a monthly column on topical issues, invite clients to subscribe to your short newsletter with industry updates, share videos on social media where you talk through a common problem clients face, or host a free webinar. In professional services, where the “product” is “expertise”, a compelling piece of thought leadership like this can establish your expertise before the first meeting.

2. Social media content, sharing, and engagement

Social media – particularly LinkedIn – appears to be an untapped goldmine for promoting your personal brand. Clients are already there: scrolling, researching, and yes, quietly forming opinions about the people and firms they may one day work with.

Our research found nearly two in three (65 per cent) of CEOs and business owners (i.e. decision makers in the business) told us they are happy to engage professionally with firms via social platforms. Yet most firms are squandering the opportunity: fewer than half the clients say the content they see on company pages is interesting or relevant.

This is where individual professionals have an advantage. People tend to trust and engage with individuals more readily than corporate accounts. A thoughtful post from a practitioner, sharing insights or commenting on industry developments, often carries far more weight than a polished piece of firm marketing.

“LinkedIn is a bit like a large networking event that’s always running,” says Huxley.

“You know there can be value in attending, and when you’re there it helps to engage with people. But just like a real networking event, you wouldn’t spend the whole time talking about yourself, your successes or your awards.”

Focus on meaningful participation: connect with clients and peers, comment thoughtfully on their posts, and occasionally share insights or perspectives relevant to their challenges. Sometimes the simplest interactions can have the greatest impact. A well-timed comment, or a message referencing a client’s recent post, can open a conversation far more effectively than a formal business development approach.

Beaton partner Jon Huxley explains that posting consistently on Linkedin with useful, informative content can lead to real business opportunities and growth for professionals.

3. Carry a few 'polished diamonds'

Jon Huxley advises having a few “polished diamonds” in your pocket – short, sharp ways of describing the work you do and the clients you help. These are refined, easy-to-deliver lines you can draw on naturally in different conversations, each one capturing your personal brand with clarity and confidence.

In professional services – where trust and credibility are everything – being able to explain your value quickly and clearly can leave a lasting impression on clients, colleagues, and potential referrers. Your “diamonds” should move beyond generic job titles and instead communicate the specific problems you solve and the outcomes you deliver.

Instead of introducing yourself with a job title, try to communicate the specific problems you solve and the outcomes you help clients achieve. Try to do this in one or two sentences and focus on three elements: who you help, what you help them do, and the benefit they gain.

For example:

“I help mid-sized law firms streamline compliance processes so they can focus on delivering client value.”
“I advise engineering firms on sustainable infrastructure projects that meet regulatory and environmental standards.”

Crafting your “diamonds” starts with thinking about your ideal clients and the challenges they face. Ask yourself: what problems do I consistently solve? What do clients value most about working with me? From there, refine a small set of go-to lines that feel natural to say and are easy for others to remember and repeat.

4. Content planning

Consistency is critical when building a personal brand online. Posting once every few months is unlikely to make an impact, but regularly sharing relevant insights can gradually position you as a credible and trusted voice in your field. A simple content plan can help ensure your activity remains purposeful rather than reactive.

Aim for a balanced mix of content. Thought leadership pieces – such as commentary on emerging trends, regulatory changes, or new research – demonstrate expertise and signal that you are actively thinking about the issues affecting your clients. Industry commentary, including reflections on news, events, or developments in your sector, helps show that you are engaged with the broader professional landscape. Just as importantly, engagement matters: commenting thoughtfully on posts from clients, peers, and industry leaders keeps you visible and part of the conversation.

“The key isn’t posting frequently. Like anything to do with reputation, trust and relationships, it’s about consistency over time,” says Huxley.

“A small number of thoughtful contributions sustained over several years can build a very strong professional reputation. The law of compounding applies.”

Over time, this steady and intentional activity builds familiarity and trust – two essential ingredients in establishing a strong personal brand.

5. Networking

While much of personal branding today happens online, traditional face-to-face networking remains just as important. Professional relationships are still built through conversations, introductions, and shared experiences. In professional services especially, trust is often established long before a formal business opportunity arises.

Industry events, conferences, alumni gatherings, and client functions all provide opportunities to meet prospects, collaborators, and referral partners. Your personal brand plays an important role here. When people clearly understand your expertise and the type of work you do best, they are far more likely to remember you (and recommend you) when relevant opportunities arise. (Have your elevator pitch at the ready!)

Good networking also involves building relationships and giving as much as you receive. Sharing insights, making introductions, or connecting people with useful resources helps position you as someone who contributes value to the professional community. Over time, these relationships can become one of the most powerful drivers of both your reputation and your career growth.

LinkedIn is a bit like a large networking event that’s always running. You know there can be value in attending, and when you’re there it helps to engage with people. But just like a real networking event, you wouldn’t spend the whole time talking about yourself, your successes or your awards.

Jon Huxley, Beaton partner

Why personal branding should matter to employers

A strong personal brand doesn’t just benefit you – it benefits your firm. Professionals with visible, credible personal brands attract clients, enhance firm reputation, and differentiate the business in a crowded market. Supporting employees in building their personal brands is therefore a strategic investment for firms to make in any industry.

If you’re a partner, CEO or other leader in a firm, encourage your employees to be active on LinkedIn and share parts of their professional lives. The more prospective clients start to see and trust your people via personal branding, the more likely they are to trust and hire your firm.

It is a good idea to have a social media policy in place that gently reminds employees of the need to always stay professional and respectful when directly or indirectly representing your company. Many industry associations have example policies (such as this from the Law Society of NSW) that can help guide yours. Try not to be too restrictive. Remember, most professionals are under-utilising the branding opportunities social media presents.

Conclusion

Personal branding is no longer optional for professionals in accounting, law, engineering, or consulting – it’s a strategic necessity.

In a world where clients research you online and form opinions long before the first meeting, a strong personal brand helps you stand out, build credibility, and establish trust. By combining thought leadership, social media engagement, consistent content planning, a clear elevator pitch, and genuine networking, you create a professional identity that communicates your expertise and the value you bring to clients. Over time, these efforts position you as a trusted advisor and make it easier for clients to choose you (and your firm) over the competition.

Visible, credible professionals enhance a firm’s reputation, attract clients, and differentiate the business in a crowded market. Supporting employees in developing their personal brands is a win-win: it grows their individual careers while reinforcing the firm’s credibility and reach.

Start building your personal brand today, and let your expertise, insight, and authentic voice do the talking.

Get insights and market trends delivered to your inbox

Share these insights with a colleague

The post Personal branding for professionals: why it matters and how to build yours appeared first on Beaton.

Is NPS worth measuring? A critical look at Net Promoter Score

Beaton Team — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is one of the most widely used client feedback metrics in the world. You’ve probably seen it: a question on a survey asking, “How likely are you to recommend us?” scored on a scale from 0 to 10.

But despite its popularity, especially among large organisations, there’s an ongoing debate: Is NPS worth measuring? Is NPS still relevant? Is NPS outdated in professional services?

Fred Reichheld, a Bain & Company Fellow and author, first introduced NPS in 2003. He claimed it was the one number you need to grow. Since then, both practitioners and researchers have questioned that claim – especially in industries such as professional services where loyalty and recommendation behaviours work differently to consumer goods.

In this article, we’ll explore the merits and limitations of the NPS formula for professional services firms. This should give you a clearer sense of whether NPS is worth your firm’s time, and how to use it most effectively.

Does the NPS formula add value over other measures of loyalty?

What is the NPS formula?

For a full explanation for how and why NPS is calculated, see Beaton’s NPS guide. In short, it’s a measure of client loyalty that splits respondents into three groups: promoters (9–10), neutrals (7–8), and detractors (0–6) based on a survey of how likely they are to recommend your services to others. The score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.

NPS is simple and easy to communicate: the higher the score, the better your referral rate and client loyalty. One headline number makes it easy for leadership and teams to track over time. It also relies on a single primary question via survey – so is easy for your clients to respond and contribute to your score.

“Reichheld’s arguments for the NPS formula are that it provides a simple and intuitive way to cluster clients,” explains Grant Hollings, Research Lead at Beaton.

“It enables firms to understand the relative size of the clients who are showing a suite of financially advantageous behaviours, such as higher rates of repurchase and referral.”

This simplicity is touted as the major benefit of NPS. But simplicity also has its limitations.

Key advantages of NPS

Simple and easy to communicate
Quick to implement, with single primary survey question
Supports trend tracking over time
Benchmarkable across firms and industries
Identifies detractors/potential threats to reputation
Widely recognised

NPS is simple and easy to communicate: the higher the score, the better your referral rate and client loyalty.

Is NPS better than a simple satisfaction score?

While popular, NPS is controversial in some B2B contexts. Critics ask: why do people hate NPS, and what are the flaws of NPS? Is it statistically valid, or is NPS oversimplified for complex professional services relationships? Can NPS be manipulated?

Some critics suggest that calculating promoters minus detractors adds little value over a mean satisfaction score. That is, collapsing data into the different groups isn’t inherently superior to simpler aggregation approaches like simply calculating the average score. Bob Hayes, a recognised expert in customer experience management (CXM) who has written extensively on the flaws of NPS, challenged assertions about it being the best metric. In his view, NPS’s popularity outpaced rigorous evidence about its performance, particularly when organisations treat it as a magic KPI rather than one input among many.

Research from Arizona State University’s Center for Services Leadership backed up Hayes’ theory. It found the difference between mean satisfaction and NPS in predicting customer retention was not statistically significant. The study emphasised that the most powerful insights come from combining multiple client loyalty metrics, rather than relying on a single indicator alone.

However, the study did not take into account the popularity and widespread use of NPS – particularly in professional services. Its widespread use makes it valuable for benchmarking and comparison between firms.

Key disadvantages of NPS

Simplifies complex client sentiment
Sensitive to small changes in scores
One of many methods to predict future customer loyalty
May not capture specific drivers of client loyalty in B2B firms

NPS is easy to calculate and provides a simple and intuitive way to cluster clients.

Is the ‘recommend’ question the best predictor of loyalty?

The simple “Would you recommend us?” question correlates strongly with loyalty in consumer contexts. In a B2B context, Reichheld’s thinking was that clients willing to recommend a firm are demonstrating “intense loyalty” – effectively putting their own reputation on the line. But in professional services, where contracts are long-term and trust is critical, it’s fair to say recommendation behaviour doesn’t always translate into revenue growth.

For firms like consultancies, law and accounting practices, recommendation behaviour can be shaped by a range of factors that differ from B2C purchases. These include brand and professional reputation, networks, and long‑term relationships with key personnel. Clients might recommend a firm based on personal relationships rather than service experience alone.

The ‘recommend’ question in consumer industries vs professional services

In consumer markets, recommending a product like a soft drink, streaming service, or clothing brand carries relatively low personal risk. If the recommendation turns out poorly, the consequences are minor. The cost is small. The reputational impact is limited. Therefore, it may be easier and more common for a consumer to score a product in the “promoter” range of NPS scores (9-10 out of 10).

But recommending an accounting firm, law firm, consulting firm, or engineering firm is very different.

“A person who recommends an accounting firm to another is putting a good deal more reputation on the line than a person who recommends a brand of soft drink,” says Hollings.

“This is because when recommending an accountant, there is more at stake for the person receiving the recommendation if it is a poor one. Which in turn can have more of an impact on the relationship between the two people involved.”

As you can see, the classification of NPS promoters, and the NPS, is not universal in what it represents in different industries.

Does NPS predict growth?

Reichheld’s early studies showed a correlation between higher NPS and revenue growth in certain industries. This positioned NPS as a powerful KPI and led many organisations to adopt it as a primary measure of customer loyalty.

The idea was simple: if clients are willing to recommend you, they are loyal. If they are loyal, they stay longer and bring in new business. Therefore, NPS predicts growth.

Reicheld’s logic is appealing, but growth in B2B professional services firms is often driven by multiple factors. These include the ability of the firm to maintain long-term contracts, relationship depth, cross-selling and retention. Growth can often depend more on expanding work with existing client relationships than on external referrals.

In these environments, recommendation behaviour does not always translate directly into measurable revenue growth. This means NPS in professional services should not be relied on as the standalone predictor of growth. It should be part of the broader growth dashboard combined with other metrics.

Limitations for predicting growth in law, accounting, and consulting firms

Clients may recommend your firm out of obligation, not enthusiasm
Repeat business often depends on relationship quality, not just recommendation
Reputation in niche markets can skew results

When comparing Net Promoter Score (NPS) to other client feedback metrics, it’s important to understand the differences.

NPS vs CSAT or CES

When comparing Net Promoter Score (NPS) to other client feedback metrics, it’s important to understand what each measure captures and how it is used.

What are CES and CSAT?

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) measures how happy a client is with a specific interaction or service experience. For example, a client might be asked, “How satisfied were you with the advice provided in this engagement?” Responses are typically rated on a numerical scale, and the average or top-box score provides a clear view of satisfaction.

CSAT measures satisfaction with a specific interaction

Customer Effort Score (CES), on the other hand, measures how easy it was for a client to achieve a desired outcome with your firm, such as completing a project, resolving an issue, or receiving advice. High CES scores are often strong predictors of client loyalty, particularly in B2B firms, because ease of doing business directly impacts whether clients continue to engage your services or recommend you to others.

CES measures ease of getting a task done – often a strong predictor of loyalty in B2B settings.

Why choose NPS over others?

NPS works best as part of a broader client feedback system. Benchmark your NPS scores against peer firms, via an industry-wide study like Beaton Benchmarks. Learning how to benchmark NPS can give context to raw scores and highlight opportunities for improvement. Add qualitative research with open-ended questions into your surveys that allow for more detailed feedback. Set up your key account management system to ensure regular check-ins with high-value clients and meet regularly with them to proactively seek ways to improve the relationship.

Together, these metrics give a 360-degree view of client experience, allowing professional services firms to pinpoint issues, improve loyalty, and make decisions that can influence revenue.

Best practices for implementing NPS successfully

Firms that are just beginning to use NPS should start with our Guide to Client Feedback Surveys. This can help you decide whether you are measuring transactional versus relationship NPS. Segment clients by service line, industry, or size to get meaningful insights. Ensure surveys are easy to complete, clearly explain why feedback matters, and are timed appropriately – for example, shortly after delivering advice or completing a project.

Integrating NPS into broader client feedback systems

Net Promoter Score (NPS) remains one of the most widely used client feedback metrics in the world – more popular in professional services than CSAT or CES. That popularity is a strength: because so many professional services firms, including law firms, accounting firms, consulting firms, and engineering firms, measure NPS, it can be benchmarked against industry averages and peer organisations. This makes it useful for tracking relative performance over time and spotting trends in client advocacy.

However, relying on a single metric – whether NPS, CSAT, or CES – is rarely sufficient to fully understand client experience or predict growth. A single number cannot capture the nuances of complex relationships, especially in B2B and professional services where trust, reputation, and high-stakes outcomes matter.

As Hollings says: “a single question/metric by itself can be misleading”.

“The NPS is sold by its creators as the ‘only’ number you need to know … In my view, it is the marketing surrounding the NPS that is what is wrong, not the NPS itself.”

For this reason, Beaton believes the most effective approach is to combine NPS with detailed and varied client feedback. This includes both qualitative insights from surveys and in-person feedback from key client interactions. Collecting feedback regularly allows firms to pinpoint specific issues, understand the drivers of satisfaction and loyalty, and act quickly to improve the client experience.

The NPS is sold by its creators as the ‘only’ number you need to know … In my view, it is the marketing surrounding the NPS that is what is wrong, not the NPS itself.

Grant Hollings, Research Lead at Beaton

How to improve NPS score

Increasing your NPS score requires acting on the feedback you receive. While NPS itself may not directly increase revenue, acting on NPS insights and feedback to improve client experience can have a measurable impact on retention, referrals, and long-term growth. By systematically acting on survey insights, firms can improve client experience and see tangible changes in NPS scores over time.

To improve your NPS score:

Address pain points identified in surveys: If multiple clients highlight the same issue (for example, delays in communication or unclear advice) take targeted action to resolve it.
Reward and replicate positive client experiences: Identify what drives high scores and ensure best practices are shared across the firm.
Train staff to focus on client outcomes, not just scores: Empower your team with skills to have client-centric conversations and mindset. Consider training like Beaton’s business development training.

How to act on NPS feedback strategically

A common question is “what to do with NPS results?” Simply reporting a number is not enough. To create positive change, you’ll need to overcome some of the common challenges firms face when implementing feedback recommendations. This article discusses how to do that on a practical level.

Strategically, you should be using NPS results to:

Turn insights into actionable plans for teams or service lines
Share feedback internally to create accountability and alignment
Track NPS at regular intervals to see improvements over time and evaluate the impact of initiatives.

When feedback is integrated into decision-making, NPS becomes a tool for continuous improvement, rather than a static KPI.

Conclusion: Is NPS worth measuring?

So, is NPS worth measuring? The short answer is yes – but with some important caveats.

NPS provides a high-level view of client loyalty and advocacy, and its widespread use in law firms, accounting firms, consulting firms, and engineering firms, makes it valuable for benchmarking and tracking trends over time. It can highlight potential risks from detractors and shine a light on overall client sentiment.

However, no single metric is enough to fully understand client experience or predict growth. Professional services firms should treat NPS as one input among many, integrating it with qualitative feedback, benchmarking, key account management and in-person client conversations.

The most successful firms are those that not only measure NPS but know how to act on NPS feedback, address pain points, replicate positive experiences, and embed these insights into decision-making and staff training. While NPS itself may not directly increase revenue, using it strategically can improve client retention, loyalty, and referrals, which drives long-term growth.

Achieving high NPS just became a whole lot easier

Use our platform, Beaton Debrief, to collect client feedback and act on it in real-time with our interactive dashboard. Sign up for a free trial today.

Try it yourself

The post Is NPS worth measuring? A critical look at Net Promoter Score appeared first on Beaton.

Overcoming the challenges of implementing a feedback program in professional services

Kate Allman — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 05:23:14 +0000

Launching a feedback program sounds simple enough: ask clients what they think, learn from the results, make improvements.

However, anyone who’s struggled with implementing feedback from inside a professional services firm knows it’s rarely that straightforward. Resistance to change pops up. Silos between partners, groups and departments slow things down. And without a clear picture of what “good” looks like, it’s easy for a new program to stall before it even starts.

This article breaks down the most common barriers firms face when rolling out a feedback program – and pairs each one with a practical way to overcome it.

Problem 1: Territorial partner culture

In many firms, partners and senior practitioners still guard their client relationships closely and prefer to be the only touchpoint in a firm. They often refuse to provide the BD or marketing team access to clients for feedback purposes. Their reasoning is usually something like: “I know my clients better than anyone and I’d know if they were unhappy”.

“In some firms, partners keep their clients close to their chests,” agrees Marc Ewen, Senior Associate and Debrief product manager at Beaton.

“Those traditional partner behaviours are pretty frustrating for firms – particularly the marketing and BD team who are keen to collect client feedback and just can’t because they can’t talk to the clients.”

This protective ownership model often comes from good intentions – wanting to safeguard relationships, manage risk, or maintain service consistency. However, it creates a structural barrier to any feedback program. If access to clients depends on individual partner permission, a firm can’t build a consistent, scalable, or reliable view of client experience. It also reinforces a single-partner dependency model that leaves the firm exposed when a partner is unavailable, moves on, or misjudges a client relationship.

Solution: Reset expectations and normalise shared client ownership

To change the mindset of partners trying to “protect their patch”, you can show them research that provides hard data on the positive impact of feedback programs. Research into client feedback that Beaton conducted in 2018 found clients received, on average, one request for online feedback each year – yet they’d be happy to receive 2-4 times as many requests. Additionally, Beaton Benchmarks research across the past decade shows firms who regularly survey their clients for feedback show 14 times greater improvement in client satisfaction than those who don’t.

“If you can demonstrate to partners they may be leaving money on the table, you might have better luck convincing them of the benefits of feedback,” says Ewen.

Processes around contacting clients also need to change, requiring clear standards and visible leadership backing. To shift the culture:

Make shared client access the default, not the exception
Introduce a firm-wide principle that clients belong to the firm, not an individual. This expectation should be stated explicitly in firm values, partner forums, governance documents, and performance frameworks.
Position feedback as risk management
Partners may be more receptive when they understand that structured feedback protects their relationships and income rather than threatens them. Emphasise that independent feedback reduces blind spots, prevents unpleasant surprises, and strengthens loyalty.
Define when and how BD/marketing can access clients
Create a simple, transparent process for inviting clients to participate in feedback. For example: quarterly pulse checks, annual relationship reviews, or post-matter surveys.
Recognise and reward partners who model the behaviour
Create KPIs linked to internal collaboration and cross-selling via different teams. Publicly highlight partners who participate fully, share client access, and act on feedback. When leaders consistently reinforce that client experience is a firm responsibility, territorial barriers start to dissolve.

If you can demonstrate to partners they may be leaving money on the table, you might have better luck convincing them of the benefits of feedback.

Mark Ewen, Senior Associate and Debrief Product Lead at Beaton

Problem 2: Organisational silos that block information flow

Expanding on the problem above, some firms struggle to establish effective feedback programs due to the silos creating barriers between departments. This causes teams or individuals to operate in isolation, limiting the flow of information. Silos in business limit a firm’s ability to collect feedback consistently, compare results across teams, or act on issues quickly. They also make it harder to build a unified view of the client experience.

Business silos show up in two ways:

Horizontal silos, where departments such as BD, Marketing, and service lines don’t coordinate.
Vertical silos, where insight gets stuck between senior leaders and delivery teams.

Organisational silos not only limit collaboration between teams. But they also have direct impact on your profitability – limiting your ability to cross-sell and improve the best client experience through collaboratively sharing and acting on feedback.

Solution: Break silos through cross-functional collaboration

Silos don’t dissolve on their own. Firms must intentionally build structures, habits, and systems that force collaboration around client insight. Here are practical ways to break down organisational silos:

Establish shared ownership of client feedback: Provide all client-facing teams access to the same platform or reporting dashboard, include feedback results in regular cross-functional meetings. Align KPIs to the shared goal of improving the client experience.
Use a survey platform that does everything: Choose survey software that not only sends your surveys and reminders, but also collects the data in an accessible, visual dashboard, and alerts and reminds you to action feedback with close-the-loop functionality.

“Having a survey platform that does everything is going to make that a lot easier. If you’ve just got a different technical silo for each part of the chain, then that’s when things are going to break down,” says Ewen. “Automating it means things flow to the next stage automatically and you’re more likely to follow feedback through and action it.”

Conduct regular, centralised feedback review meetings: Run regular “client insights forums” involving BD, marketing, practice leaders and delivery teams. Review red flags and opportunities together, then agree on owners for follow-up actions.
Educate teams on the commercial cost of silos: Use feedback data to demonstrate opportunities missed by failing to collaborate. For example: lost cross-selling opportunities because teams weren’t aligned, inconsistent client service due to fragmented communication, slower response to emerging client needs.

Cross-functional collaboration breaks down business silos and helps firms with implementing feedback.

Problem 3: Messy CRM systems and inaccurate client data

Many firms that want to run a feedback program often hit a frustrating operational barrier: their client data isn’t reliable. Contacts are duplicated, outdated, incomplete, or spread across multiple systems that don’t talk to each other. Partners may keep their own spreadsheets, BD teams maintain separate lists, and the central CRM is rarely trusted as a single source of truth.

This creates several challenges:

You can’t send surveys confidently if you don’t know which contacts are current.
Response rates drop when surveys go to the wrong person or to multiple people accidentally.
Reporting becomes unreliable when clients are categorised inconsistently across teams.
Staff lose confidence in the feedback program because the admin burden becomes too heavy.

As Ewen puts it: “Most firms want insight, but they don’t have the foundational data hygiene to deliver it.”

Solution: Clean, centralise and automate client data before launching feedback

Before launching a program, it’s essential to clean and consolidate your core client list. You’ll need to standardise names, merge duplicates, and remove outdated contacts, while also migrating all that data into a single source of truth for all contact information. Private partner lists or siloed spreadsheets create risk, not control, so establishing one authoritative database is a critical first step.

From there, firms need systems that keep data clean over time. Automated workflows should update contact details when new matters open, new stakeholders join, meetings occur, or clients change roles. Technology helps enormously: a platform like Beaton Debrief integrates structured client lists and automates survey delivery, reducing manual effort and eliminating errors. Clear ownership – typically within BD or marketing – ensures data hygiene becomes part of business-as-usual rather than an annual clean-up.

Most firms want insight, but they don’t have the foundational data hygiene to deliver it.

Mark Ewen, Senior Associate and Debrief Product Lead at Beaton

Problem 4: Poor survey response rates

Surveys across all industries are experiencing a downturn in response rates, for a variety of reasons. Professional services firms launching their first feedback program may discover their first response rate is lower than they would have liked.

Bear in mind the average response rate in any B2B industry can be modest, and achieving a statistically valid survey response requires thoughtful survey design and outreach. If your questions are unclear, surveys are too long, or email requests don’t get to the point and explain why the feedback matters, clients are less likely to complete them. This results in limited, inconsistent insights.

Solution: Improve survey design and communication

Good survey design and communication is critical to increasing client participation and achieving a statistically valid survey response. The Beaton guide to client feedback surveys shares expertise from Beaton’s research team and offers best-practice recommendations to maximise your response rates to feedback surveys. It is free to download here. These are recommendations we incorporate into Beaton’s own survey processes and can really help lift your response rates while ensuring the insights you draw are reliable.

Our guide to client feedback surveys teaches firms how to increase response rates by:

Asking the right questions
Keeping surveys concise and relevant
Framing email requests clearly, with personalisation
Choosing the right survey frequency (not too often, not too rare)

Download Beaton’s guide to client feedback surveys for tips to increase client participation and achieving a statistically valid survey response.

Problem 5: Prior failed attempts implementing feedback

Many firms have tried feedback programs before. Maybe they conducted ad-hoc surveys, once-a-year client listening, or tools that were never fully adopted. As Kim Trajer, Chief Operating Officer at McCullough Robertson told us, before implementing their client feedback survey system:

“We were receiving feedback from a range of different sources, including through formal and informal client listening discussions, ad hoc emails, and client issues raised with our credit team, but that information was not collated, or centralised and so not actioned consistently and not able to be measured for improvement.”

When previous attempts didn’t deliver clear value or action, people understandably became sceptical. Re-building confidence requires showing the firm how the new program differs, why it will work, and how it solves previous pain points in feedback implementation.

Solution: Show how the new program is different

You need to demonstrate how your new approach addresses past issues. Explain:

What will be done differently
How the new system supports action, not just measurement
How feedback loops will be closed
How teams will be supported

Rebuilding confidence is essential before asking people to engage again.

Problem 6: Resource constraints

Implementing and managing a feedback solution can feel resource-heavy. Firms often underestimate the workload of setting one up themselves. They may spend hours chasing surveys, calculating response rates, wrangling spreadsheets, and building reports from the responses you receive. This is especially challenging if your firm has limited expertise in survey design, data analysis, or interpreting feedback at scale. And let’s be honest – very few firms have teams of researchers available to conduct their feedback programs in-house.

Resource pressure often leads firms to delay or under-invest in feedback programs altogether. And the workload placed on partners can become a deterrent – especially when there is limited internal capacity.

Solution: Outsource the heavy lifting, and use technology to assist

The most practical way to overcome resource constraints is to outsource the survey design, distribution and interpretation to an external provider that specialises in feedback research. For example, Beaton’s specialist team can manage the entire cycle: designing effective surveys, increasing survey participation rates through best-practice techniques, interpreting results, and providing clear, actionable reports that the firm can use immediately. This approach not only improves the quality and consistency of the feedback collected but also frees internal teams to focus on acting on the insights rather than getting bogged down in operational tasks.

“The sheer time that’s involved in setting up a survey is enormous,” says Ewen.

“If you decide to outsource that, you’d have a workshop with our experts at the start to design the system according to your feedback requirements, and then the next step is sending out your first set of surveys because everything else has been built and tested for you.”

Beaton Debrief combines outsourced expertise with the hands-on accessibility of technology. Debrief automates survey distribution, consolidates the data, and provides real-time results on easy-to-read dashboards. Beaton’s team of research experts will help set up and design the surveys for you with your goals in mind – then hand over the reins for you to access the reporting dashboard to drive action and outcomes. This enables teams to focus on action rather than administration and improves long-term adoption.

Problem 7: Limited understanding of what ‘good’ looks like

Many leaders simply haven’t been part of a well-run feedback program operating at scale. Without a clear example to follow, it’s impossible to know where to start. Most professional services firms are not equipped with research teams to design effective surveys, who know what response rates to expect, how to interpret the data, or how to link feedback to commercial outcomes. As a result, programs stall. Not because people aren’t willing, but because they simply don’t have a reference point.

Solution: Educate your people and provide examples

The fastest way to lift confidence and adoption is to show your people what successful firms are already doing. The good news is there are plenty of examples of other firms already implementing feedback programs with great success – some of whom you may compete with for clients. Educating your team and providing examples to demonstrate the benefits is important when setting up yours.

A practical approach includes utilising:

Stories that link feedback to commercial outcomes: People buy into what they can see. Share examples of firms using client feedback programs to identify problematic issues, drive cross-selling, or improve retention. We have published several case studies of different client feedback programs in different industries – feel free to peruse them. Understanding the potential of feedback and sharing these success stories will help your teams see how feedback translates into measurable revenue impact (rather than a “soft” measure of client sentiment).
Industry benchmarks: Independent benchmarking can help by showing your team what other firms are achieving, and what to aim for. Beaton Benchmarks gathers client feedback on hundreds of firms to help shine light on how clients perceive your services – and participating enables you to view your client feedback scores in comparison to others. If the feedback scores show your firm is lagging in areas, this can provide necessary inspiration to your people to start getting serious about feedback implementation.
Training and support: Examples provide the inspiration but not the tools to change behaviour. External experts can help educate partners and teams on survey design, interpreting insights, closing the loop with clients, and embedding feedback into decision-making.

Making your feedback program stick

Implementing a thriving feedback program in a professional services firm requires input from people beyond your BD or marketing team. Success often requires a firmwide cultural shift. Firms that succeed are the ones that treat client feedback as part of their regular operating rhythm, rather than just an ad-hoc activity or a once-a-year survey.

Breaking down organisational silos, improving survey response rates, educating teams, and using the right feedback solution all contribute to a program that drives better client experience and commercial outcomes. Being prepared for difficulties and having solutions at hand when they crop up can help ensure your feedback program’s success.

It is not about working hard or spending more – but investing strategically in the right structure, design, and support to respond to challenges from the outset.

Download our free guide to client feedback surveys

Learn how leading firms turn client feedback into measurable growth. Download our guide to client feedback surveys with 12 best-practice recommendations for professional services firms.

Try it yourself

Share these insights with a colleague

The post Overcoming the challenges of implementing a feedback program in professional services appeared first on Beaton.

The price-value relationship: Insights from Beaton’s research

Beaton Team — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 22:36:15 +0000

Why understanding the price-value relationship matters

In professional services, price is never just a number. It’s a signal and often a shortcut for assessing value. Yet many firms are setting or defending their prices without fully understanding how their value is perceived by clients.

This disconnect can lead to under-pricing, over-discounting, or delivering services that don’t align with client expectations. All of this erodes profitability and trust.

At Beaton, we’ve spent decades researching how clients experience professional services and how their perception of value shapes their response to price. What we’ve consistently found is this: clients don’t evaluate price in a vacuum. They interpret it through the lens of their experience, and how well they feel understood, supported, and guided toward results.

In this article, we explore the psychology behind pricing, what drives perceived value, and how firms can build pricing strategies based on what clients truly care about – not just what they’re willing to pay.

The psychology of pricing in professional services

Professional services pricing is more than a financial transaction; it’s a psychological cue. Unlike product pricing, where customers can immediately evaluate what they’re getting, the value of professional services is often intangible and revealed over time. This makes pricing a powerful, and sometimes risky, lever affecting how clients perceive your firm.

Price as a heuristic for value

Beaton Benchmarks research over more than 20 years has shown clients interpret price as a signal of quality and value. That is – when clients see higher prices, they assume the service is better. This is particularly so when they lack other ways to judge service outcomes. In the absence of other tangible benchmarks, clients are already using price to assess your firm’s service quality.

Behavioural research has long shown the impact of price on perceived value in business-to-consumer industries. According to Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and economist Richard Thaler, people rely on heuristics – mental shortcuts – to make decisions under uncertainty. Price becomes one such shortcut: a higher fee suggests a higher-calibre provider. A lower price, on the other hand, may imply inexperience or lower quality, even if the actual service is strong.

This psychological phenomenon has been widely observed in studies of business-to-consumer (B2C) industries. We like to call it the “designer handbag effect” – where shoppers expect the most premium designer handbags to cost thousands, and a lower price may cause them to think they’re buying a cheaper and therefore lower quality substitute. Our research shows the same effect applies in B2B professional services, under the right circumstances (which we will outline below).

In professional services, a higher price can signal higher quality of service, greater expertise in the firm, or stronger outcomes. This is especially true when clients are engaging a firm for the first time, or when the service is complex or difficult to evaluate.

Ironically, discounting your fees to win work can have the opposite effect – reducing your perceived value and positioning your firm as less capable or less confident in its offering.

“There’s a psychology in how people connect price with perceived expertise. If you’re cheaper than other options, you can lose credibility,” explains Libby Maynard, partner at Beaton and professional services pricing expert.

“If a client sees high quality and confidence, they expect a higher price. Low price can signal lower quality or a misunderstanding of what’s required to deliver the desired outcome.”

The “designer handbag effect” describes the phenomenon where shoppers expect the most premium designer handbags to cost thousands. Meanwhile, a lower price may cause them to think they’re buying a cheaper and therefore lower quality substitute.

If a client sees high quality and confidence, they expect a higher price. Low price can signal lower quality or a misunderstanding of what’s required to deliver the desired outcome.

Libby Maynard, Beaton partner

Clients perceive prices are declining

Beaton’s data over the past two decades reveals that clients perceive average price levels have been declining across professional services. This means that while the actual dollar price may have increased over time, the perception among clients is they are paying less in relative terms for the same work. At the same time, their perceived value of that work has been rising. This is a telling reflection of the increased focus on lifting client service and competition in the increasingly crowded professional services market. Firms are competing more than ever to be more efficient and profitable against their competitors.

In practice, while firms face pricing pressures from such heated competition, discounting to compete can backfire because of the association between price and quality. Clients may start to question whether the service is high enough quality to be worth their investment. Conversely, setting prices too high – without a clearly communicated value proposition – risks alienating clients who don’t see the justification.

“If you don’t create some form of differentiation or some reason why a client should choose you over the competition, then they will just choose on price,” says Maynard.

Firms must aim for a “Goldilocks Zone” – an optimal price range that feels just right. It should be high enough to signal expertise, confidence, and quality service but not so high that it appears to be unfair or reduces trust.

The challenge of intangibility

Professional services pricing is also shaped by emotion and risk perception. High-stakes services (like complex legal advice or financial audits, or engineering feasibility reports) often carry significant consequences. In these situations, clients aren’t just evaluating fees – they’re assessing risk, reassurance, and potential outcomes. They’re paying for the confidence and trust that their projects will be handled expertly for them.

“Clients won’t actually be comparing apples with apples,” says Maynard.

“The scope may be the same, but there will be other things that are not always mentioned, such as: ‘Do I have confidence in this firm? Do I think that they’re honest? Do I think they’re trustworthy? Do they make my life easy?”

A high price can reinforce confidence if it aligns with a compelling value narrative. A low price may signal uncertainty or lack of capability. The emotional context of a purchase – such as reducing risk or protecting reputation – can outweigh purely rational price comparisons.

To complicate things, professional services are, by nature, intangible. Clients often don’t experience the full impact of your work until long after delivery. Frequently, firms direct clients away from costly risks, yet because the negative outcome never materialises, the value of this advice can go unrecognised.

This delayed or unrecognised value makes price perception more emotionally charged and susceptible to psychological dynamics. Maynard recommends overcoming this obstacle by demonstrating understanding of the client’s business, proactively showing them how you might resolve issues and providing options.

“This often favours an incumbent, but there are ways of building credibility even if you don’t have a history of working with the client,” says Maynard.

“It’s important to remember that client experience doesn’t just start when the engagement starts, it starts well before the engagement. So – what experience has the client had with this firm before they even started using them? Being curious about their business, asking great questions and sharing valuable ideas is a great way to position as a credible and valuable service provider.”

It’s important to remember that client experience doesn't just start when the engagement starts, it starts well before the engagement ... Being curious about their business, asking great questions and sharing valuable ideas is a great way to position as a credible and valuable service provider.

Libby Maynard, Beaton partner

What drives perceived value?

It’s tempting to assume your clients’ perceived value is judged on outcomes alone. And while results do matter, Beaton’s research shows that perceived value is built long before results are delivered. It’s shaped by how clients feel about their experience, how well they understand the service, and how confident they are in their provider.

Our research surveys thousands of clients every year across all professional services industries, offering rare clarity on this topic. Across more than two decades of benchmarking, our analysis reveals that perceived value isn’t random or mysterious – it can be explained and influenced.

The 11 attributes we study in firms through Beaton Benchmarks explain around 70 per cent of the variation in how clients perceive value. These are illustrated in the chart below.

These insights give firms a clear roadmap for shaping stronger value propositions and supporting value-based pricing strategies.

The top drivers of perceived value

From the chart you’ll notice five key attributes drive are consistently high across the professions. The surprise? None of them are expertise in clients’ area of need.

The top five drivers are:

Commerciality of advice
Ease of doing business
Reliability
Caring about the client and their outcomes
Effective communication

Interestingly, cost consciousness varies depending on the firm’s industry. It is the single top driver for clients of accounting and advisory firms while near the bottom for built and natural environment consulting firms.

Technical expertise is a given

It may surprise some leaders to learn that expertise in clients’ area of need ranks near the bottom in terms of value drivers in our research. Why? Because technical skill is assumed. In the client’s mind, it’s the bare minimum required to be in the running for their work. It’s not what sets one firm apart from another, and it doesn’t carry much weight in justifying a premium.

“Expertise in your area of need is not enough – it’s just the ticket to play. Clients assume you’ve got it,” says Maynard.

“The thing that firms often think of as their strength – technical skill – is actually not a differentiator. It’s a minimum expectation.”

Value is in the eye of the client

Perceived value is subjective at its core. It’s not just about what you deliver, it’s about what the client believes they’ve gained in return for what they’ve paid. That belief is influenced by multiple factors that act as drivers of perceived value.

From the above research we can distil several common themes across industries about what clients value from their providers:

Clear communication – Clients value clarity on process, scope, and progress
Responsiveness – The speed and tone of communication builds trust
Tailored advice – Generic recommendations erode value perception; bespoke guidance enhances it
Commercial understanding – Clients want to feel that you “get” their business and their goals
Consistency and team cohesion – Value is diluted when service feels disjointed or staff turnover is high

These aren’t just “soft skills”, they’re central to the way clients assign worth to a service. Clients often assess these before they evaluate technical accuracy or final outcomes.

“A practitioner who can connect with their client, who really listens, who makes them feel understood and more importantly, can manage their expectations as to scope budget and outcomes – that’s the person they’ll go back to, even if someone else is technically just as good,” says Maynard.

“Because the technical skills can be hard to measure, the non-technical experience is absolutely what makes the difference between ‘okay’ and ‘exceptional’ in the eyes of the client.”

These non-technical factors reflect what clients really care about in day-to-day interactions: great project management, seamless collaboration, strategic understanding, and feeling like their advisor is genuinely invested in their success.

This has big implications for pricing strategies. These drivers give firms levers to influence perceived value, which in turn supports price-setting discretion – the ability to set and defend fees confidently, based on differentiated client experience.

Value is in the eye of the client – so communicating your firm’s value well is crucial to establishing and justifying higher prices.

The big mistakes made in professional services pricing

Understanding the price-value relationship has real consequences for profitability, client loyalty, and market positioning. In professional services pricing, there are two common mistakes we see.

Mistake 1: Competing on lowest price

The most common mistake is a firm undervaluing its service – often out of fear of losing business. In this scenario, firms default to competitive pricing tactics or excessive discounting because they believe that lower prices will attract or retain clients.

But Beaton’s research shows these tactics can have the opposite effect. Perceived value and price are deeply intertwined – and when prices are too low, clients may question the quality or strategic importance of the service. Rather than seeing it as a “good deal,” they may perceive it as low-value or commoditised.

Mistake 2: Failing to articulate value

If the client doesn’t understand how a service has or will help them achieve their goals, they’re more likely to challenge invoices, dispute variations or express dissatisfaction, even if the technical work was flawless. They’ll assume they are being overcharged because they aren’t certain of how their money was spent or their expectations weren’t managed.

Without clear communication (early, often, pre- and post-delivery) even premium services can appear overpriced.

So, what should you do instead? The value you provide must be clearly articulated to the client. And not just in the final deliverable, but in how you engage, explain, and reinforce the work you are doing throughout the project. Communicating and demonstrating cost consciousness aren’t simply nice-to-haves; they are central to the perceived value of your service and the sustainability of your pricing strategy.

We explain how via the six-step process below.

Because the technical skills can be hard to measure, the non-technical experience is absolutely what makes the difference between ‘okay’ and ‘exceptional’ in the eyes of the client.

Libby Maynard, Beaton partner

Building a value-based pricing strategy (with steps on how)

The best pricing strategy in professional services switches your clients’ focus away from dollar figures so you are no longer competing in a “race to the bottom”. Ideally, you will position your firm as “one of one”: a unique provider offering such valuable service that clients cannot compare yours to other firms based on price alone.

Value-based pricing in this way empowers firms to move away from reactive discounting and toward pricing with confidence. It demands a clear understanding of your clients, your value proposition, and the market offering compared to your own.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to building a value-based pricing strategy that reflects your worth – and helps clients see it, too.

1. Understand what clients truly value in client service

You’ll need to start with evidence, not assumptions. Use client feedback surveys, NPS, or depth interviews to identify what clients want and value most from your firm. Beaton Benchmarks measures the drivers of perceived value in professional services firms annually and provides a robust standard to compare your own firm to.

Look for patterns in what clients are highlighting as most valuable. Is it responsiveness? Industry understanding? Clarity of advice? Our research shows clients value the experience they have when they engage with a firm far more than technical expertise which is a given, and less of a differentiator.

Focus your approach on measuring and improving these drivers, not just your work inputs or costs.

2. Design pricing around outcomes, not hours

Further to the point above, it can be useful to detach your prices from effort or time. While time-based billing is still a common way to charge for professional services, clients tend to be more receptive when a price reflects the value of the solution provided. To them, the mechanics of how it’s delivered is less relevant.

For example:

Link the value to a business outcome such as reducing a business cost, reducing or removing a business risk, growing client revenue and profit or building or protecting the client’s brand.
Where possible, quote for fixed-fee packages tied to specific deliverables
Offer tiered pricing based on levels of strategic impact
Consider success-based pricing for advisory or transformation projects
Offer pricing options – so that the client chooses between one of your options rather than your option and a competitor option

This shifts the conversation from “how long will it take?” to “what is it worth?”

3. Communicate value early and often

A value-based price won’t stick unless the client clearly understands what they’re getting. Throughout your proposal, onboarding, and delivery stages, reinforce the connection between your service and the value delivered by reference to the client’s goals.

Use language that connects with outcomes, risk reduction, and strategic alignment. Avoid jargon that makes your work harder to understand. Your job is to make the value behind the price unmistakably clear. Quantify the business outcome in dollar terms if you can.

4. Enable your people to have confident pricing conversations

A pricing strategy is only as strong as the people delivering it. Equip your partners, account managers, consultants or lawyers with tools and messaging to explain pricing confidently and handle objections or discounting with empathy and clarity, not panic.

Confidence, combined with clarity, is one of the most effective ways to reduce unnecessary discounting.

5. Review, test and refine

Pricing is not a “set and forget” process. Continuously review what’s working, where pushback is occurring, and whether certain client segments respond better to different pricing models. Track client sentiment and monitor the market to understand how your prices compare to similar firms. Use automated client feedback surveys at various points throughout a project to understand how clients feel about everything – including your price.

Stay responsive, but not reactive.

Final thought

Value-based pricing isn’t about charging more for the same thing. It’s about delivering a service that clients genuinely value – and making sure they understand, experience, and are willing to pay for that value.

Get insights and market trends delivered to your inbox

The post The price-value relationship: Insights from Beaton’s research appeared first on Beaton.

Insights from 22 years of professional services research

Kate Allman — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 01:33:51 +0000

For more than 20 years, the Client Choice Awards have provided a voice for clients of professional services firms.

While other awards programs exist, these are the only professional services awards in the world that use client feedback to determine winners rather than industry experts or judging panels.

The client ratings that determine winners of the awards serve a dual purpose. The same data is analysed in our annual Beaton Benchmarks study, which began two years earlier in 2003 and compares professional services firms of a similar size and industry across a range of metrics. It is the only comprehensive dataset of independent client insights, benchmarking and tracking available on the market.

As Beaton approaches the 2026 edition of the Client Choice Awards, this article covers some key history and insights from more than two decades of data.

Why a Client Choice Awards? A short history

A focus group of lawyers and their clients first sparked the idea for this research in the 1990s. The group was exploring what price and value meant in legal services. It led to Dr Margaret Beaton’s trailblazing thesis at Melbourne Business School, which found perceived value contributed more to clients’ choice of firms and loyalty than structural factors like switching costs.

The model of client buyer behaviour first developed in this thesis was used as the basis of the first-ever Beaton Benchmarks study in 2003. Thirteen of Australia’s fifteen largest corporate law firms participated in the inaugural survey.

Feedback from firms who participated proved there was an appetite for using client voice and evidence to inform firms’ go-to-market strategies.

We concluded that a client-decided awards program may prove more valuable and have more material impact on firms than other judge-determined programs.

And so, in 2005, the Client Choice Awards were born.

These first awards expanded the study from just law firms to include accounting and consulting firms and consulting engineering firms. Over 40 firms signed up – many of whom still participate in the awards and its underlying research to this day.

The 2003 cover of BRW magazine announcing winners of the very first Client Choice Awards.

Fairfax’s BRW magazine published news of the first awards on the front cover (pictured above). More than 200,000 sold out on newsstands the morning after the gala dinner, making history for Fairfax.

The awards entered the New Zealand market in 2008, and in 2018, we started measuring the clients of IP specialist and patent attorney firms.

In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic struck, and the annual awards gala dinner had to be cancelled. For the first time, the awards went fully virtual. This resulted in an unexpected “democratisation” of the process: more firms in places other than Sydney or Melbourne and smaller firms were able to participate. For this reason, Beaton has continued to host virtual awards and offer them to firms of all sizes across Australia and New Zealand ever since.

In the two decades of the Client Choice Awards’ existence, 765 firms have entered, and clients have provided more than 400,000 individual firm ratings. The Client Choice Awards judging process has continued to inform Beaton Benchmarks annually. Every year, dozens of professional services firms subscribe to this research and use the data to guide their client strategies and BD activity.

What two decades of research is telling us

1. Value has increased while fees have not

Our Beaton Benchmarks research derived from 20 years of Client Choice Awards has highlighted some key trends in professional services.

One major trend we have uncovered and continue to witness is that clients of professional services firms believe they are receiving more value than ever. Interestingly, they do not perceive the prices have materially increased at the same time.

In fact, clients’ perceptions of fees have been steady or falling since 2011, as the below graph shows. The grey line illustrates how law firm clients rated fees for expensiveness (6.8 out of 10) back in 2011, and every year to 2023 (6.6 in 2023). At the same time, average client scores for firm performance are steadily on the rise (rising from 7.1 to 8.1 out of 10 in a decade).

Clients want (and are receiving) more for less. The value of professional services is increasing but prices are not.

Fees vs performance ratings of Australian legal and related services firms

2. Price is not the major reason clients leave

As the professional services market grows increasingly competitive, many firms are cautious about increasing their fees. They are concerned about the impact higher prices might have on their clients’ perceptions of value and their share of clients’ wallets. However, Beaton Benchmarks data over the past 20 years has highlighted that price is not the primary driving factor for clients choosing to use a particular firm.

In fact, clients are often willing to pay a premium for an excellent client experience. They are also prepared to pay higher fees for complex work, requiring unique expertise and experience that other firms may not have.

It is when clients feel they are not receiving value for money that they may decide to shop around. Our research shows some of the top value “markers” for a client include effective communication, cost consciousness, the commerciality of your advice, reliability and how easy your firm is to do business with.

Communicating value and how you offer it should be a critical part of every pricing strategy.

Beaton Benchmarks data over the past 20 years has highlighted that price is not the primary driving factor for clients choosing to use a particular firm.

3. Higher fees can increase clients’ perceptions of value

Related to the above point, if you are offering relatively high value and communicating it well, your firm should be able to charge a higher price and maintain customers.

It sounds counterintuitive, but 20 years of data has confirmed higher fees correlate with higher perceptions of value for clients. In the same way a hefty price tag on a designer handbag signals high quality in a customer’s mind, high fees from professional services firms may high signal quality to clients.

For firms that are cost conscious (careful and diligent with clients’ money and passing on costs), higher fees reap rewards. Clients are more likely to trust your firm, and that trust permits the firm to charge higher fees, which signals higher quality. It is an ongoing virtuous cycle.

The one exception to this rule is if a firm performs poorly and is not cost conscious. For non-cost-conscious firms, charging a premium fee will only add insult to injury.

4. Loyal clients are prepared to pay more

Clients who are receiving value, cost consciousness and quality service are likely to be more loyal to a firm. As many as 86 per cent of clients who believe they are receiving high value from their firm say they are likely to continue using the same firm in two years’ time. Contrastingly, only three per cent of clients who believe they are receiving low value from a firm say they will continue using the firm in two years’ time.

The crucial part of this insight is we have discovered clients who are loyal are prepared to pay more than they currently do. The below graph shows the totals of respondents willing to pay more.

As the below chart shows, at least half of clients who believe they are receiving high value are prepared to pay more. It applies to all types of clients, with no material differences among the accounting, built and natural environment consulting and law professions.

Value perception and willingness to pay more among legal/related services clients

Beaton Benchmarks is the most extensive, globally unique database of client feedback on professional services firms, which draws on two decades of large-scale research through the Client Choice Awards. We use this benchmarking data to help analyse your firm’s market position and track changes in client expectations, then help your team to meet and exceed those expectations.

Please visit our Competitor benchmarking page for more information or contact us to discuss options with a Beaton partner.

Regular client feedback at your fingertips

Use our platform, Beaton Debrief, to collect client feedback and act on it in real-time with our interactive dashboard. Sign up for a free trial today.

Try it yourself

Share these insights with a colleague

The post Insights from 22 years of professional services research appeared first on Beaton.

Integrating feedback into business strategy: turning insights into action

Kate Allman — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 07:54:19 +0000

When you receive feedback from your clients – be honest – what do you do with it? Even firms with the best intentions struggle to turn insights into action. Many make grand plans for change, struggle to gain traction, file those plans away and eventually move on.

However, the most successful companies do something different: they integrate feedback into every corner of their strategy, from marketing to service development, pricing to performance management.

A well-structured feedback strategy doesn’t just collect opinions – it fuels smarter decision-making and directly influences the business action plan. Feedback is a clear guide to improving client experience (CX) and making your business more efficient and productive; while ensuring you are capitalising on the investment that collecting feedback requires. Your firm will be set up for long-term success when you genuinely understand and prioritise what clients value most.

In this article, we’ll explore how to put feedback integration at the heart of your business. Understand how to put effective feedback strategies into action and discover practical ways to use feedback to grow your business, improve performance, and keep clients coming back.

Client feedback enhances our decision making, shapes our culture, and drives client satisfaction and success.”

- Alice DeBoos, Managing Partner, Kingston Reid

Why feedback matters for your business strategy

Gathering client feedback tends to be one of the first things that falls below other priorities when professional services firms get busy. But a solid feedback strategy should be fundamental to how your business operates. Think of feedback like a GPS for your decisions: without it, you’re guessing. With it, you know exactly where to go and how to get there.

We’ve discussed previously how client feedback benchmarking can help guide business growth. In short, feedback fuels growth by helping you define and build a competitive advantage that sets your firm apart from others. In the contemporary, highly crowded, market of professional services it is useful – if not, imperative – to establish a point of difference from the rest.

Why gathering strategic and targeted feedback matters

Gathering strategic and targeted feedback:

Informs business decisions with real-world insights.
Highlights gaps in your services or practices before they impact your bottom line.
Improves performance through corrective feedback strategies and targeted performance improvement plans.
Strengthens client relationships because people notice when their feedback actually makes a difference.

As Luke Cudmore, Legal Practice Direct at Cudmore Legal explains:

“Responding to client feedback impacts decision‑making by informing strategic choices and operational improvements. It fosters a client‑centric culture that values continuous learning, adaptation, and the pursuit of excellence in client service.”

Luke Cudmore of Cudmore Legal, winner of Best Family & Relationships Firm(<$30m revenue) in the 2023 Client Choice Awards.

Integrating feedback into your overall business strategy

Putting feedback at the core of your business strategy requires intentionality. Many businesses already collect feedback – but to truly leverage that feedback requires going beyond reading the feedback and turning those client insights into action. Here are the key steps you need to take for effective integration.

1. Build a feedback framework that aligns with your goals

Start by connecting your feedback strategy to your broader business objectives. Ask: what decisions will this feedback inform? Perhaps you will use the feedback to refine service delivery, shape your marketing plans, or improve client relationships. Whatever your goals, a clearly defined strategic outcome will inform the very basics of your feedback collection. That includes the type of questions you need to ask of clients, and the type of feedback that will be most useful for your goals.

Determine how you will benefit from quantitative and/or qualitative data. It can be valuable to utilise both to answer different types of questions.

Quantitative feedback: number-based metrics from satisfaction scores, NPS, or online customer reviews.
Qualitative feedback: open-ended or verbatim client comments, interviews, or focus groups that reveal why people feel a certain way, and why you may receive the scores you did in quantitative feedback.

You should consider whether you’d like to gather relationship or transactional data (or both). The differences and benefits are explained in this article. Combining a mix of data types can provide richer insights that can drive confident decision-making.

Before setting up your own feedback surveys, we encourage you to read Beaton’s best-practice tips for conducting client feedback surveys in this free downloadable guide.

2. Involve leadership from the start

Every change initiative needs leadership support – and becoming more intentional with how you integrate feedback into business strategy often requires change. Without visible leadership support, even the best feedback strategies can lose momentum. Leadership sets the tone for how seriously feedback is taken across the business and how well the insights will be integrated into concrete change.

To get leaders on board:

Engage early. Involve senior leaders when designing the feedback strategy so they can shape priorities and champion its purpose.
Link feedback to KPIs. Tie performance review KPIs and leadership objectives to feedback outcomes – for example, client satisfaction or responsiveness scores.
Lead by example. Encourage leaders to share how they’ve acted on feedback from clients or teams. When leaders model this behaviour, others follow.

Strong leadership commitment signals that feedback isn’t just a side project – it’s part of the organisation’s DNA.

Without leadership support, it is hard for any feedback program to take off.

3. Integrate feedback into regular planning cycles

Once your leadership team is on board, integrating feedback into regular planning should be easier.

Regular is the operative word here. Don’t let feedback live in a spreadsheet that’s only opened once a year. The best-performing firms integrate feedback into their quarterly or annual business planning cycles.

Have regular meetings to review trends in client satisfaction and feedback data alongside financial results and growth goals.
Use these insights to inform priorities, budgets, and action plans with your leadership team, involving all areas of the business.
Identify which parts of your strategy should change based on what your clients or teams are telling you.

This creates a live feedback integration loop and builds learning and improvement into your regular rhythm of decision-making.

4. Prioritise themes, not one-off comments

It’s tempting to react to every individual piece of feedback, but strategy requires pattern recognition. Group similar insights together to identify recurring themes. Are clients asking for faster communication? More transparency on pricing? Simpler reporting? This is where methods involving quantitative feedback, such as NPS tracking tools, can be valuable. They will deliver a broader picture of client sentiment and how this may have changed over time.

Translate these themes into strategic priorities with measurable outcomes – such as updating service delivery models, improving onboarding processes, or enhancing communication protocols.

5. Turn insights into a clear action plan

Once you’ve identified the key themes, the real work begins: converting those insights into meaningful action. This is where many organisations stall – not because they don’t care, but because they don’t translate feedback into a structured improvement plan.

A business action plan or SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) action plan gives feedback integration a repeatable, accountable framework. Each action should have:

A specific objective – what exactly will be improved, fixed, or enhanced.
An owner – who is responsible for delivering the improvement.
A timeframe – when this action will be completed.
A success measure – how you’ll know the change worked.

For firms with major or strategic clients, these plans should be part of your key account management strategy. Clear action plans turn feedback from “good to know” into “here’s what we’re doing next.” The goal is to remove ambiguity, create urgency, and ensure no insight is wasted.

6. Close the loop and communicate back

Clients want to know their feedback matters. Always close the loop by communicating what you’ve changed or plan to change. Not only does this build trust, but it also encourages more honest feedback in the future – a hallmark of effective feedback strategies.

By integrating these steps into your business rhythm, feedback becomes more than a report. It becomes the engine behind every smart decision you make.

Turning feedback into action – examples by department

Actioning feedback in marketing and BD

As this Chief Client Officer told us recently, marketing in professional services firms can sometimes feel like a “dark art”. Teams often struggle with making evidence-based decisions and proving the return on the investment of those decisions. It’s why feedback is so valuable for marketing teams – it provides guidance from your clients to make better decisions and, later on, proof that those decisions are having a positive impact.

You might choose to start by informing yourself with client feedback research that already exists. Our Marketing, BD and CRM Effectiveness report offers insights from 2025 research into what works best (and what doesn’t) in marketing to professional services firms, capturing first-hand feedback from clients of firms across Australia and New Zealand.

One straightforward example of actioning feedback in marketing would be rewriting your website copy using the exact terms clients use to describe their challenges in feedback. Use the same language clients use, highlight the pain points they mention that using your firm has resolved, and carry those themes through your content for improved search performance.

Don’t overlook the value of public feedback through customer reviews. They help your search engine optimisation (SEO), build trust, and reinforce your credibility. Even negative reviews are a chance to demonstrate corrective feedback strategies by responding constructively and making visible improvements. It’s important to respond quickly and publicly. This article offers good guidance and examples of responses to Google reviews.

Look for opportunities to use great open-ended verbatims in your materials. Consider using them as testimonials on your website, tenders or proposals. Make sure you always seek permission from the respondent before you use them!

Using feedback in service line development

Using feedback to inform your service line development can be one of the most effective ways to evolve your firm’s offering in line with real client needs. Start by analysing the feedback to identify gaps in the market or gaps within your current service lines. Use the data to spot opportunities instead of relying on internal assumptions.

Identify comments that talk about how their expectations were not met, not necessarily from a quality perspective, but from elements of work that were missing from what they expected. For instance, a client may have asked for a compliance review, but were surprised you didn’t proactively raise emerging market and or legislative risks that may need future-proofing against.

Once you make changes, communicate them. Clients want to know you listened. Sharing improvements or additional services – whether through newsletters, client briefings, or marketing – helps clients feel heard and valued. It also reinforces your commitment to using assessment and feedback strategies to guide service evolution.

As Matthew Garling, Founder and CEO of Garling and Co Lawyers explains:

“Where feedback provides opportunities for improvement, we will address them and implement any additional services required to ensure our clients are always fully supported.”

The final step is monitoring whether the changes work. Use follow-up surveys or customer reviews to measure satisfaction over time. This closes the loop and helps you refine your approach further.

Where feedback provides opportunities for improvement, we will address them and implement any additional services required to ensure our clients are always fully supported.

- Troy Andrew & Fiona Wong, Partners, Gilton Valeo Lawyers

Using feedback to inform your pricing strategy

Pricing is an area where clients are often vocal – making it the perfect place to integrate feedback. Client feedback benchmarking can help you identify where clients feel pricing is too high or too low when compared to similar firms in the market.

At Beaton we conduct a client feedback benchmarking study every year, known as Beaton Benchmarks, which asks thousands of clients to give views on the pricing value of hundreds of professional services firms. The results are available to firms who participate – and they may surprise you.

Feedback can also reveal how clients perceive the complexity or value of your services. If clients consistently say a particular service feels “simple,” they may be unwilling to pay much for it. This is a signal that your firm needs to better communicate cost consciousness, as well as the complexity of your work. We often find lawyers, accountants, engineers and other professional services people are too humble, to their own detriment – and thus poor at communicating the full extent of work they are doing for clients.

Most of the time, negative feedback about price can be corrected through better communication and by improving the perceived value clients receive – as discussed in this article. We strongly advise this approach over and ahead of lowering prices.

Using feedback in key account management planning

Key account management (KAM) is the structured process of nurturing and growing your most valuable client relationships through strategic planning, insight, and tailored service. Feedback is the lifeblood of effective KAM, because it tells you – directly from clients – what’s working, what needs improvement, and where you can strengthen the relationship.

Use feedback to help your client-facing teams set clear objectives for improving account relationships. These objectives can be built into a business action plan or employee action plan that outlines the steps needed to deliver a better experience. You can also tie account team KPIs to feedback metrics. For example, “improve responsiveness ratings from company ABC” could be a KPI.

Leverage feedback to personalise your business development conversations and any insights you send to key clients. Ask what topics they find most valuable, then personalise tailored recommendations to them, to illustrate you’re listening and providing meaningful value.

Finally, share “you said, we did” updates after you have actioned feedback. This reinforces the feedback loop and demonstrates your responsiveness.

We conduct quarterly catch ups with key accounts where processes and legal issues can be identified and strategically addressed.”

- Troy Andrew & Fiona Wong, Partners, Gilton Valeo Lawyers

Firms turning feedback into action – example case studies

Harrison Grierson – feedback loop technology

Harrison Grierson is a New Zealand-based engineering and consulting firm providing civil, structural, and infrastructure services. In 2019, the firm adopted Beaton Debrief as the core of its client feedback programme – moving from a manual, inconsistent feedback system to a standardised, firm-wide process.

This firm actioned feedback collected through Debrief’s online dashboard, segmenting by service line and location. This helped to isolate pain points specific to certain service lines rather than treating feedback as generic. Once those pain points were identified, project teams became accountable for addressing them.

Responsiveness scores improved by 24 per cent, and as pain points were addressed, client satisfaction increased.

The firm’s reported positive results show the feedback-driven changes were effective. The overall culture shifted: consultants and project managers became more aware and proactive about client experience, reframing feedback as a driver of ongoing improvement rather than occasional check-ins.

Read the full case study here

McCullough Robertson – using feedback to drive business development

McCullough Robertson is a commercial law firm based in Australia, serving businesses, government, and not-for-profit clients. Using Beaton Debrief, the firm established a regular feedback cadence to touch base with clients. In essence, it transformed feedback from a sporadic admin burden into a core driver of innovation and business development.

The firm now actions feedback data proactively – not just using it to fix problems, but also to drive service innovation and inform future client pitches. Feedback has become a source of client intelligence that shapes the firm’s business development.

Results have been tangible: McCullough Robertson’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) improved by 14 points, “excellent client care” scores rose by about 30 per cent, and client ratings for perceived value increased by about 25 per cent.

Read the full case study here

Conclusion: Putting feedback at the centre of a smarter, stronger business

Ultimately, client feedback only becomes valuable when you turn it into action – otherwise it’s just time-consuming noise. When firms use feedback to prioritise work, evolve their services, and deliver more value, they become more efficient and more profitable.

Commit to embedding feedback into the way your firm operates and you can build a culture where improvement is inevitable. It should be the compass for every business action plan and SMART goal you set, and the momentum behind every improvement your teams make. That’s how top professional services firms thrive – not by assuming what clients want, but by listening, acting, and continually adapting.

Our biggest observation from more than 30 years studying top professional services is this: the firms that grow year after year aren’t the ones collecting the most data. They’re the ones using it best.

Download our free guide to client feedback surveys

Learn how leading firms turn client feedback into measurable growth. Download our guide to client feedback surveys with 12 best-practice recommendations for professional services firms.

Try it yourself

Share these insights with a colleague

The post Integrating feedback into business strategy: turning insights into action appeared first on Beaton.

Your firm says it’s ‘client-centric’. Clients might say otherwise

Kate Allman — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 07:27:28 +0000

Every professional services firm claims to be “client-centric”. But here’s the reality that stings: putting it on your website doesn’t make it so.

At Beaton, we’ve been researching client preferences in professional services for more than 20 years. And when we ask clients what truly defines a client-centric firm, their answers often reveal a gap between perception and reality. For many firms, their website slogan of being customer-centric doesn’t translate into consistent behaviour.

To move from “we believe we put clients first” to “our clients say we put clients first,” you have to go straight to the source – ask those clients. True customer-centricity starts with asking directly for feedback, actioning that feedback, and measuring your progress through feedback over time.

The kind of shift that is required to become genuinely client-centric often demands an organisational culture change. In this article we discuss how to make the transition and become known as a firm that embeds client insights into strategy, performance measurement, and daily decision-making.

What is a customer-centric culture?

A genuinely client-centric culture sees the world through clients’ eyes. A customer-centric culture means working according to values, behaviours, and metrics that put clients (rather than your firm’s internal lens) at the centre of every decision. For professional services firms, becoming truly customer-centric demands concrete systems, open feedback loops, and metrics aligned with client outcomes.

When professional services firms shift their thinking from “what’s easiest for us” to “what’s most valuable for them,” they create a customer-centric culture.

“Being client-centric is about really understanding what the client values, what keeps them up at night, and then shaping your approach around that rather than just pushing your own agenda,” says Beaton partner Paul Hugh-Jones.

Being client-centric is about really understanding what the client values, what keeps them up at night, and then shaping your approach around that rather than just pushing your own agenda.

Paul Hugh-Jones, Beaton partner

The role of trust in customer-centricity

Client-centricity plays a critical role in building trust, and trust is a powerful differentiator in professional services firm. Amid recent news about declining trust in the Big Four firms, trust is becoming more valuable to your firm than ever before.

Our research finds firms that score high on trust attributes consistently outperform other firms in loyalty, referrals, and charging a fee premium. Trust reduces friction, makes clients more forgiving of occasional mistakes, and increases likelihood of repeat business, upsell, and positive word-of-mouth. A client-centric culture that embeds measurable and authentic trust between clients and the firm delivers both stronger client satisfaction and stronger commercial returns.

In this article we explore in more detail how to build trust with your clients using measurable and actionable levers.

Common roadblocks to client-centricity

Most professional services firms would say they will do whatever it takes to become more client centric. However, good intentions often collide with ingrained habits, systems and incentives. True customer-centricity requires a big organisational culture change. It demands re-engineering how your firm makes decisions, measures success and collaborates across teams.

Becoming a customer-centric professional services firm often requires large-scale organisational change.

1. Busyness

When teams are overloaded with day-to-day work, becoming client-centric can fall down the priority list. This is especially in professional services firms, where billable hour targets still drive work patterns.

“One of the biggest challenges firms face is simply being too busy. Everyone’s heads are down delivering work,” says Hugh-Jones.

“It’s not that firms don’t want to be client-centric, it’s that the day-to-day busyness, particularly around billable work, makes it hard to actually focus on the things that will improve client relationships.”

2. Entrenched partner-centric cultures

Being truly client-centric challenges the traditional partnership model in professional services firms. The ownership mentality of “this is my client” rather than “this is our client” is ingrained for many partners. But it can create a big barrier for clients, who usually benefit from having access to multiple different experts at the same firm. This outdated mindset creates siloed operations, where teams work in isolation rather than aligning around shared client outcomes that benefit the client most.

3. Siloed service delivery

Related to the above point: when different teams within a firm work in isolation, clients receive disjointed communication, inconsistent service, and potentially duplicated effort. This creates frustration for clients while also missing a valuable opportunity: Beaton research has found clients are happier when they can use the same firm for multiple different service lines. In fact, clients report increasingly better outcomes from firms with every additional practice group they utilise. True client-centricity means offering cross-selling opportunities that benefit the client.

“Clients don’t care about internal structures – they just want seamless service. When teams are siloed, you miss opportunities to understand the full picture and to respond proactively,” says Hugh-Jones.

4. Change fatigue

Research shows that 70 per cent of transformation efforts fail due to resistance to change, not the strategy itself. In professional services firms, where billable pressure and client demands are already high, introducing a new client-centric culture can be met with quiet resistance or burnout. Overcoming this requires leadership to set the tone, pace transformation thoughtfully and communicate the “why” behind new client-centric strategies. It helps if those leaders can show tangible evidence that these changes make work smarter, not harder.

5. Lack of meaningful insights

Many firms still rely on anecdotal feedback or informal conversations rather than structured client feedback programs. Others struggle with gathering regular feedback and actioning it systematically. In this firm, for example, client listening became sporadic and resource-intensive before setting up Beaton Debrief to organise and manage surveying clients.

Many firms fail to track metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) or regularly make benchmarking comparisons to similar competitor firms. Without data-driven decision making, they struggle to offer the kind of experience that clients truly value, and fail to improve where they may fall short.

6. Short-term KPIs

We get it – every professional services firm is incredibly busy, operating in an environment that is more competitive than ever before. It can be hard to dedicate time or resources to building long-term loyalty, when most KPIs reward billable hours and revenue targets in the short-term. One way to get around this is shifting to client-centric KPIs such as feedback satisfaction scores, NPS, retention rates, and referrals. This encourages behaviours that build trust and deliver longer-term value. It will also help build a culture that doesn’t just claim to be client-centric, but actually proves it through consistent client experience.

Risks of not being client-centric

Failing to prioritise clients can carry significant consequences for a professional services firm. As Paul Hugh-Jones notes, “If you’re not putting clients at the centre of your thinking, you can deliver technically perfect work but still fall short of what they actually need.”

“You might be leaving revenue on the table because you’re not seeing where clients want more support.”

When firms aren’t truly client-centric, they often miss opportunities to expand relationships or offer services that clients value, directly impacting growth. It can mean walking past chances for cross-selling or upselling, and can even risk losing clients who don’t feel understood or supported.

It’s not just about satisfaction. Trust is crucial, and Paul emphasises that “clients will give you their business again only if they trust you understand and anticipate their priorities.” Growth depends on this understanding, and firms that overlook it risk missing out on both stronger relationships and tangible business results.

Mindset shifts required to become client-centric

To overcome the roadblocks and move towards real customer-centric strategies, people in your firm must start thinking differently. Developing a customer-first mindset means anticipating what clients truly need (often before they articulate it) and aligning your expertise to meet those needs.

Paul Hugh-Jones emphasises the importance of shifting thinking from reactive to proactive care.

“Proactive care is about anticipating client needs rather than just reacting to requests. The best firms are always one step ahead, thinking about what clients might need before they even ask,” he says.

“If you wait for a problem to come to you, you’re already behind. A client-centric approach requires continuous engagement and foresight.”

Your firm also needs to start seeing clients as partners, and projects as partnerships. Research shows customers want relationships with providers and salespeople, not just easy experiences. Developing a partnership where you work together for a common goal strengthens long-term client relationships and drives higher loyalty and retention. Clients will want to work with their “partner” time and again.

Finally, this requires a shift to prioritise lifetime value over the immediate transactions on offer. A client-centric strategy flips the focus from billable hours to lifetime value. Embedding client-centric KPIs such as satisfaction scores, NPS, client experience (CX) and retention rates helps teams measure success through the client’s eyes. In improving the client experience, customer-centricity provides financial benefits that may even outscore traditional metrics. Our research shows better CX drives faster growth, higher repeat business and greater fee growth.

To recap, here are some shifts to focus on internally:

“What can we sell?” → “What does the client need (now, later, next)?”
Projects → partnerships
Billable hours → lifetime value and client retention strategies
Internal success metrics → client outcomes, satisfaction, loyalty

These mindset shifts have to be loud, visible, rewarded – or they won’t stick.

The importance of leadership in customer-centric culture

We’ve discussed previously how leadership support is integral for any change initiative to succeed. Beaton’s research into client experience in professional services demonstrates the importance of CX leadership in building a client-centric culture. Similarly, in firms building client-centric cultures, every employee should understand and embrace the importance of putting clients first. Everyone is empowered to think and operate for the benefit of clients.

Leaders are instrumental in forging a path for the broader client-centric transformation. One way of doing this is communicating progress and highlighting success stories. Whether it’s a story about a cross-departmental collaboration that solved a client’s challenge or feedback showing improved satisfaction after process changes, these examples build belief and reinforce positive behaviour. They help teams see how their work contributes to the broader client-centric transformation.

Leaders are instrumental in forging a path for the broader client-centric transformation in a professional services firm.

Practical strategies to become more customer-centric

Making the changes we’ve discussed above might seem overwhelming at first. Here are some practical strategies you can put in place to start building client-centricity in your firm.

1. Embed client feedback into everyday operations

Integrating client feedback into daily workflows ensures continuous improvement and responsiveness. Automated survey tools with real-time alerts like Beaton Debrief can manage the survey process for you and collect feedback from clients regularly, reducing the time cost and resources required from your firm internally. Our research over two decades has consistently shown firms who actively gather and act on client feedback enjoy greater client retention and loyalty than those who don’t.

2. Establish cross-functional client teams

Establishing cross-departmental collaboration to service clients promotes a holistic approach to client needs. Break down the siloes between members from business development, marketing, and client services – your firm’s internal collaboration ensures consistent messaging and a unified client experience. This is essential for delivering seamless service and enhancing client satisfaction via cross-selling opportunities.

“Client-centricity isn’t just about your immediate contact. It’s about establishing relationships across multiple teams and service lines so the client feels understood and supported at every level,” adds Hugh-Jones.

3. Key account management to personalise service delivery

Develop a key account management (KAM) strategy to hone your client-centric approach and tailor services to the unique needs of your most important clients. Assign dedicated account managers who deeply understand that client’s business, preferences and challenges, and regularly keep track of their value. Managers should also provide the client with access and touchpoints to multiple experts they may need within the firm (per the above point).

Client-centricity isn’t just about your immediate contact. It’s about establishing relationships across multiple teams and service lines so the client feels understood and supported at every level.

Paul Hugh-Jones, Beaton partner

4. Train your team for client-centric business development

Clients of professional services firms today are reporting between 30 to 50 per cent fewer proactive outreach efforts by firms in their industry. When firms do reach out, too often they use “salesy” and generic approaches that focus on selling rather than understanding and assisting clients. Investing in proper BD training that utilises valuable conversation techniques with a client-centric approach, designed to benefit the client first and sell second, can be far more effective.

5. Invest in technology to support client understanding

Implementing advanced technologies like customer relationship management (CRM) systems, NPS tracking and feedback tools enables firms to gather and analyse client data efficiently. These tools facilitate more personalised interactions and proactive service delivery. They also provide a real-time monitoring system for firms to quickly change and adapt when problems arise, enhancing the overall client experience.

Measuring your progress with client-centric KPIs

Tracking progress is critical to reinforcing a client-centric approach and ensuring your changes are delivering tangible results. In a true customer-centric transformation, what gets measured gets managed. Firms that systematically monitor and act on client feedback outperform their peers in retention and profitability. Moreover, this customer-centricity creates a top-tier client experience (CX), which can be the most powerful competitive advantage your firm has.

Our research has found customer-centric firms have leverage to charge higher fees without impacting client perceptions. In fact, clients of firms with the strongest focus on CX are willing to pay more for your work – up to 40 per cent of clients surveyed in our report on The State of Client Experience in Professional Services reported this. This should provide enough incentive to invest in tracking the progress of your customer-centric shift – there are clear financial returns for firms that do.

Start by building a measurement framework that provides insights on how clients feel their interactions with your firm have gone. KPIs should reflect client satisfaction rather than traditional sales metrics or financial benchmarks.

Your new client-centric KPIs could include:

Client satisfaction scores through regularly surveying your own client base.
Verbatim feedback opportunities in those surveys to capture immediate experiences and emotional responses.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure advocacy and referral potential, a leading metric of client-centric success programs.
Client retention rates via B2B lifetime value, a crucial indicator of loyalty and the strength of long-term client relationships.
KAM success metrics, analysing retention and repeat engagements from valued clients across multiple services.
Market benchmarking comparison to understand how your client-centricity measures up against competitor firms (in clients’ eyes).

Celebrating wins publicly and linking them to measurable improvements ensures customer-centricity is a priority for everyone in the firm. As many as 93 per cent of top-performing firms report celebrating the success of team members who deliver excellent CX. Over time, this continuous measurement, feedback, and recognition cycle helps firms sustain focus on what matters most: creating value that clients can see, feel, and measure for themselves.

How Beaton can help your customer-centric transformation

With over 35 years of experience and a vast database encompassing more than 550,000 brand ratings and 220,000 pieces of client feedback, we are uniquely positioned to drive a client-centric transformation for your firm.

Beaton’s suite of client feedback tools, research and training enable you to gather, analyse, and act upon client insights effectively. Some you may choose to leverage include:

Beaton Debrief is an intuitive online platform that simplifies the process of collecting real-time client feedback, allowing firms to monitor satisfaction levels and identify areas for improvement without the need for extensive resources.
Beaton Benchmarks is the largest and most comprehensive client sentiment benchmarking study in professional services, providing firms with a comparative analysis of their performance against industry peers. This benchmarking study covers various aspects of client experience, including responsiveness, understanding of client business, and ease of interaction, offering firms actionable insights to enhance their service delivery.
Bespoke market research that is targets your key strategic objectives and is tailored to your needs can help inform the most important questions your firm is asking. See this case study as an example.
Business development training tailored to professional services and offered by our partners with a uniquely client-centric approach. Every recommendation we provide is grounded in research into client preferences, plus our partners’ 75+ years of combined experience working in-house in firms just like yours.
Consulting services that help firms to embed the changes required and establish an ongoing client-centric culture.

Our approach centres on science: using research data, client feedback and market analysis to drive the improvement. We have experience working in and with professional services firms across all industries and can help you to align internal processes and behaviours with client needs.

Conclusion: client-centricity is a journey, not a destination

Becoming truly client-centric has no endpoint. The most successful professional services firms know their customer-centric transformation is ongoing. It requires consistent measurement, honest feedback, and a willingness to change based on what clients tell you.

The rewards are clear. Firms that invest in data-driven decision making, open client feedback programs, and cross-departmental collaboration outperform their peers on both loyalty and profitability. Beaton’s research has shown that firms with the strongest focus on client experience (CX) achieve higher client retention, stronger referral rates, and even greater fee growth. Client-centric strategies strengthen trust and long-term commercial value.

The firms that thrive in the next decade won’t just say they’re client-centric – they’ll prove it. They’ll measure it, celebrate it, and continuously improve it. Because when you build a culture that listens, learns, and acts for the client’s success, your own success inevitably follows.

Download our free guide to client feedback surveys

Learn how leading firms turn client feedback into measurable growth. Download our guide to client feedback surveys with 12 best-practice recommendations for professional services firms.

Try it yourself

Share these insights with a colleague

The post Your firm says it’s ‘client-centric’. Clients might say otherwise appeared first on Beaton.

Hidden costs of mismatched pricing and CX

Beaton Team — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 05:08:53 +0000

In professional services, pricing power and the way clients experience your firm are deeply connected.

Great client experience (CX) is fundamental to your pricing power, but many firms treat the two things separately. Pricing is often a spreadsheet exercise – plug in costs, factor in a margin, and land on a number – while the value of CX treated as something less tangible. But client perception shapes your firm’s price and value relationship in concrete ways, more than most realise.

Today’s clients expect transparency, personal attention, and consistently exceptional service – and they have no shortage of alternatives if they don’t get it. In this environment, delivering an outstanding experience isn’t just a differentiator; it’s central to pricing alignment, stronger margins, and sustainable success.

This article explores how aligning CX and pricing decisions — strengthening the CX and pricing connection — can protect revenue, reinforce relationships, and elevate your market positioning.

Clients expect you to be commercial, to be efficient, and to be cost-conscious – they’re not looking for surprises.

Libby Maynard, Beaton partner

The influence of client experience on pricing power

Think about the last time you paid more for something simply because the experience felt effortless and considered, maybe even enjoyable. Perhaps you chose a more expensive internet provider after experiencing their brilliant customer service when something went wrong.

Clients, like customers, are often very happy to pay more if they have a great experience with your firm. When service feels seamless, they see your firm as a partner rather than a cost line. The result? A higher fee becomes no problem.

Our report on The State of Client Experience in Professional Services, which you can download here, examines how CX boosts profitability in practical ways. In short, our research shows that when you consistently deliver great CX, you elevate client perceptions of your expertise, service quality and reliability. Strong CX gives clients greater confidence in your firm, strengthening your pricing power and your position on what Beaton research describes as the fair value line (more on this below). In this scenario, clients are also far more open to price justification because the fee makes sense in the context of the experience.

Beaton Benchmarks data we have collected over more than 20 years backs this up: firms known for exceptional service build greater trust and loyalty, and their clients are more accepting of premium service pricing. Strong CX becomes a reputational engine – one that elevates your market positioning while supporting commercial decisions.

“If you are aligned with what your client wants and you are delivering, they are much more likely to accept your fees as fair value,” says Maynard.

How better service quality shapes CX and pricing alignment

Service quality is the foundation of strong CX. High service quality – characterised by things like your responsiveness, expertise and reliability – creates a smooth, consistent, and positive experience that clients notice and remember. It drives client satisfaction, loyalty, and supports your pricing power and market positioning.

When service is consistently strong, firms experience:

- - - Greater pricing power
    - Stronger pricing alignment
    - More successful pricing strategies
    - Greater acceptance of price justification
    - More pricing flexibility in commercial conversations

As Maynard puts it, “If you’re giving clients certainty, clarity and confidence, the fee conversation becomes much easier.”

A clear connection between the service delivered, experience received and the price charged is crucial. This makes it far easier to maintain trust, justify fees, and reinforce your firm’s position as a leader among competitors.

Avoiding the commodity trap in professional services

By contrast, when service feels slow, unclear, or transactional, pricing misalignment follows. In this situation the fees no longer match the service quality or experience clients believe they are receiving, leading to resistance, dissatisfaction, or lost work. Even relatively competitive fees can feel excessive to a client if the experience doesn’t measure up. That mismatch puts pressure on margins and pushes firms closer to what’s called the “commodity trap”.
The commodity trap is a situation where a firm’s service becomes relatively similar to that of competitors – resulting in competition based solely on price. It’s not a situation any professional services firm wants to be in, because the only way to win clients in that situation is by lowering pricing. Firms become trapped a cycle of price wars and are forced to operate in continually reducing margins.

The ‘Fair Value Line’ and the impact of misaligned pricing

The fair value line, drawn from Beaton Benchmarks research, visually represents how service quality and pricing interact. Firms in the top right offer premium service and charge premium fees – and clients often consider these fees fair because the CX and expertise align.

This model – shown in the chart below – is a practical way to understand how client perceptions impact pricing power in professional services firms.

Fair value firms:

Firms situated on the ‘fair value line’ are seen as providing a balanced proposition of either high service quality with high pricing, or poor client service and low pricing. This balance is perceived as fair.

For example

Firm A (bottom left) has the poorest client service rating and also the lowest price. It sits on the fair value line indicating appropriate fees for the level of service. Clients see this firm as “cheap and cheerful”.
Firm B (top right) also sits on the fair value line with the 2nd highest client service rating and 2nd highest price. Clients see this firm as a “top service for a premium price”.

In each profession there are firms that consistently occupy the top right position. When properly resourced, these firms generate large profits. Clients commenting on the value delivered by these firms typically say, “They are expensive but worth it”.

High-value firms vs low-value firms

The chart and discussion above illustrates the major differences between what clients see as high-value or low-value firms.

High-value firms are those that consistently deliver exceptional service while keeping fees competitive. They enjoy real pricing flexibility.

Take Firm C from our chart above: because clients see strong service quality at a reasonable fee, the firm earns the right to raise prices without triggering backlash. The firm has found the sweet spot – clients feel they are receiving fair value even when the price increases. In this position, firms can use their pricing alignment as a competitive advantage. They can keep fees slightly lower to capture more market share, or confidently increase them to reflect the strength of the service, knowing loyalty won’t waver.

Low-value firms have more at risk. These are firms that deliver below-average service compared to their fees, creating pricing misalignment.

For example, Firm D in our research combined one of the lowest service ratings with one of the highest price points, which is a recipe for client dissatisfaction. In this situation, if clients don’t understand the price justification, they quickly start exploring alternatives. The disconnect between cost and service quality fuels pricing pressures, damages market positioning, and erodes loyalty.

When clients genuinely feel you’re on their side and invested in their success, they don’t begrudge paying for it.

Libby Maynard, Beaton partner

The risks of misalignment between pricing and CX

Many firms unintentionally disconnect their CX efforts from their pricing strategies. This misalignment can manifest in two ways:

Overpricing with subpar service: Some firms charge high fees but fail to meet client expectations. Clients will likely seek alternatives if the service does not justify the price.
Under-pricing for exceptional service: Less commonly discussed but equally damaging. When firms deliver outstanding service but charge too little, they miss opportunities to maximise margin and growth.

Over time, persistent misalignment damages reputation, reduces referrals, weakens loyalty, and erodes pricing power. Once clients begin questioning whether they’re receiving fair value, rebuilding trust becomes difficult.

“It’s very hard to rebuild once clients start questioning whether they’re really getting value for money,” says Maynard.

Early warning signs of pricing misalignment

Even the best firms can fall into pricing misalignment, when clients perceive your fees no longer reflect the service quality or CX being delivered. Recognising the mismatch early is critical.

There are a few telltale signs when clients feel your fees don’t align:

Frequent client pushback or objections on fees
Requests for write-offs and post-project discounts
A need to utilise more discounting strategies to win or retain work
Clients questioning the fairness of fees
Declining client satisfaction or NPS
Delays in client approvals or slow decision-making due to fee concern
Client comparisons with competitors
Fewer repeat engagements

If misalignment persists, you slide towards commodity trap. Once clients view your services as interchangeable, it becomes nearly impossible to maintain premium service pricing or strong market positioning.

As Maynard warns, “Once a client starts to see you as interchangeable, you’re on a slippery slope – price becomes the only differentiator.”

Competing on CX, not price, generates value for firms and their clients.

How to strengthen CX to maximise pricing potential

As we have established, pricing power is built from the way clients experience your firm. Strengthening CX should therefore sit at the core of your firm’s pricing strategies. The goal is simple (though not easy): deliver such excellent service quality and CX that clients feel every fee is reasonable and aligned to their expectations.

Here’s how firms can achieve it:

1. Map the CX journey

Identify where frustrations or gaps occur in your client interactions. Even small pain points can create pricing misalignment if clients feel the service doesn’t match the fee. Use an NPS tracking tool or consistently ask for client feedback via a survey system like Beaton Debrief to gain a better picture of where improvements can be made.

2. Invest in service quality

Consistently delivering high-quality CX is the foundation for pricing alignment. This requires a deep understanding of client needs and expectations, regular service evaluations, and feedback loops. Consider monitoring the market via competitor benchmarking to understand what competitors may be doing well and how you can better the experience of your own clients.

3. Communicate your value clearly

Don’t assume clients will connect the dots. Clear and transparent communication is essential for justifying higher fees. Show your clients where you saved them money, or how you helped them close a valuable deal, articulate your cost-consciousness. This article has tips on how to improve your communication to justify better prices.

4. Continuous improvement in CX

An effective CX strategy isn’t static, it requires continuous adaptation based on client feedback. By embracing a culture of continuous improvement, firms can stay ahead of evolving client expectations and market changes. This ongoing refinement helps to maintain high service standards while justifying periodic price increases.

5. Leverage real-time feedback

The ability to gather and act on real-time feedback during client engagements allows firms to adjust and refine service delivery on the fly. This responsiveness improves the CX and pricing connection, strengthens trust, and reinforces your firm’s pricing strategies.

Conclusion

Creating an exceptional client experience isn’t just a nice-to-have for your clients. It is a competitive tool that allows professional services firms to justify higher fees and foster sustained growth. When CX is strong and service quality is consistent, your firm benefits from greater pricing power, more stable work and stronger relationships.

In short: a strong CX and pricing connection empowers clients to see your fees as fair, consistent and aligned with their experience. When this connection is strong, clients don’t just pay your fees; they return, refer, and help your business grow.

Download 'The state of CX in professional services' report

Take a look into the client experience (CX) strategies of professional services firms across Asia Pacific.

Download the CX report

The post Hidden costs of mismatched pricing and CX appeared first on Beaton.

How manual feedback processes are costing your firm

Kate Allman — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 22:30:49 +0000

Even in the most innovative professional services firms, many of the ways we gather feedback are often surprisingly old-fashioned. Conversations over coffee, follow-up calls, and personal emails are all examples of manual feedback processes that play a vital role in relationship-building and client listening.

These moments create trust, show care, and can reveal valuable qualitative insights.

But when manual feedback is the only approach, it becomes difficult to maintain consistency and scale. These manual feedback processes are often time-consuming, prone to human error, and difficult to analyse in a structured way. Over time, this creates client feedback inefficiencies that slow decision-making and leave valuable insights untapped.

That’s why leading firms are blending the personal connection of manual feedback with feedback automation for professional services. Automated systems and structured surveys complement, rather than replace, human conversations. They capture consistent, data-driven insights across clients, projects, and offices. This balance allows firms to strengthen relationships while improving efficiency, accuracy, and their ability to act on what clients really think.

When to use manual feedback

Before we go further, it’s important to understand the use of manual vs automated feedback isn’t an either/or choice. Even as automation becomes essential for efficiency, consistency and scale, catching up with clients in person or over the phone still plays a critical role – particularly for key clients or high-value projects. Direct conversations provide depth, context, and nuance that structured surveys alone can’t capture, making them a vital part of a modern, data-informed feedback strategy.

As Beaton partner Paul Hugh-Jones points out, these high-touch interactions signal care and attention, help strengthen relationships, and allow you to pick up on subtle issues before they escalate.

“We encourage firms to be having regular feedback conversations with important clients,” says Hugh-Jones.

“The more important a client, the more they will expect you to take time to have a conversation and say do you want to talk about the relationship and what’s happening? Ideally you do this face-to-face and, if not, virtual. It’s a high service point that signals you really care about their business, and it’s where an email or survey on its own wouldn’t cut it.”

The key is knowing when to invest in these conversations, rather than relying on them as your default feedback method. Use them when the client is strategically important and you want to strengthen the relationship rather than just collect data. In this case, the feedback opportunity doubles as a touchpoint.

Asking your key clients for feedback individually sends a strong message you care and enables you to notice challenges before they escalate.

The costs of manual feedback processes

When we first talk to firms about client feedback, a familiar pattern emerges. Many believe that their quick chat over the phone or a follow-up email provides enough insight into client satisfaction. While these manual feedback processes can build rapport and uncover valuable qualitative detail, they often fall short when it comes to capturing data that’s consistent, comparable, and actionable.

Recent research underscores this challenge. This 2025 report found that 87 per cent of customer experience (CX) leaders still rely on manual analysis of open-text feedback. The typical workflow involves sending surveys one by one, downloading responses, and manually tagging comments in Excel. By the time this manual feedback is compiled into a report, the opportunity to respond, or turn insight into action, has often passed.

We’ve seen the risks of inefficient client feedback systems play out in other sectors, too. A national review into the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) revealed how reliance on manual note-taking led to missing client information, inconsistent documentation, and feedback that couldn’t be acted on. The underlying issues – heavy workloads, outdated systems, and disconnected processes – created a perfect storm of client feedback inefficiencies that wasted time and resources. Professional services firms face many of the same risks when feedback relies on memory, spreadsheets, and goodwill rather than structure.

As Hugh-Jones explains, the problem often isn’t a lack of feedback – it’s a lack of consistency.

“In many firms, feedback is collected in an ad-hoc manner, with different people using different methods and tools. This lack of standardisation can lead to inconsistent data and make it difficult to draw meaningful conclusions,” he says.

Firms that continue to depend solely on manual approaches risk missing the full picture. The goal isn’t to abandon personal conversations, but to complement them with systems that make client listening more reliable, efficient, and evidence-based.

Accuracy problems with manual feedback

Exclusively using manual feedback isn’t just costly – it builds a lopsided picture and a skewed reflection of your service. Experiences from one or two clients rarely give a full or accurate picture. For example, notes from a client lunch might capture one person’s perspective but would not account for every individual’s feelings across a project or an office.

The subjective nature of manual feedback processes can introduce biases. Factors such as the feedback provider’s relationship with the client, the setting of the conversation, and the manner in which questions are posed can all influence the responses. These biases can distort the true picture of client sentiments and needs.

“If the person gathering the feedback has a close relationship with the client, the client might be less candid, or they might tailor their responses to what they think the provider wants to hear,” says Hugh-Jones.

The way questions are framed during feedback sessions can also guide clients toward certain types of responses. Leading or suggestive questions can result in feedback that doesn’t accurately reflect the client’s true feelings or experiences. It might help you to avoid complaints, but as this article describes, avoiding complaints might be the worst thing a professional services firm can do. You may also be acting on data that misrepresents client needs and satisfaction levels.

The accuracy problems with manual feedback stem from:

Inconsistencies in delivery and analysis: Without standardised questions or formats, it’s impossible to compare insights across clients, projects, or offices. What one partner hears in a conversation might be very different from what another hears, even about the same engagement.
Human error and bias: As humans, we naturally filter feedback through our own experiences and assumptions. That means important signals can get lost, while minor complaints loom larger than they should.

Automated feedback processes can obtain broader insights across many clients or projects, using metrics like Net Promoter Score.

Manual vs automated feedback solutions

Automated feedback refers to a structured, technology-enabled process for collecting, analysing, and reporting client feedback. Unlike manual feedback processes, which rely on informal or ad hoc methods, automated feedback uses digital tools to deliver surveys, capture responses in real time, and generate actionable insights through dashboards or reports.

Automated feedback may draw shallower insights – as it can be hard to empathetically tease out the full picture of a client’s feelings or frustrations through a screen in the same way you may would though face-to-face conversations. However, the insights will apply to a broader audience of clients and may more accurately reflect the zeitgeist in your client pool (rather than the feelings of one or two).

A key benefit of automation is greater consistency through using carefully designed, repeatable questions that cover the key aspects of service quality, value, and satisfaction. It enables feedback analysis automation, reducing the time spent compiling data and allowing your team to focus on action. It also supports comparing feedback collection methods more effectively, showing which approaches yield the most meaningful insights.

Automation also reduces human bias by removing interpersonal pressure. There’s a lot that may influence the tone of a conversation or expectations in a face-to-face interview. The neutrality of automated surveys encourages clients to feel more comfortable being frank and honest.

Finally, the ease and speed of follow-up is a big differentiator for automated feedback. These systems trigger reminders and track completion – ensuring action without requiring repeated outreach by busy staff.

In summary, use automated feedback surveys when:

You need broad, consistent insights across many clients or projects.
You want actionable metrics that are easy to compare and benchmark over time.
Time or resources make one-on-one conversations impractical.
You’re seeking quick, real-time feedback to inform operational decisions.

Use manual feedback conversations when:

The client is strategically important or high-value. A direct discussion shows you care and builds trust.
You need nuanced, qualitative insights that surveys can’t capture – tone, emotion, context, or subtle concerns.
There’s a complex issue or project that requires deeper understanding, clarification, or problem-solving.
You want to strengthen relationships rather than just collect data – the feedback opportunity doubles as a touchpoint.

In short: surveys are for scale and measurement, conversations are for depth and relationship-building. The best feedback programs effectively use both.

Outsourced feedback solutions

While automated feedback gives firms consistency and scale, some choose to go a step further by evaluating whether to build or buy a feedback solution. Partnering with an external provider to manage the entire process – from survey design and distribution to analysis and reporting – is often the more effective route.

Outsourced client feedback solutions can be especially valuable for firms that want high-quality insights without burdening internal teams. Unlike manual or even internally managed systems, internal vs outsourced feedback models show that external programs provide independence and credibility. Clients are often more candid with neutral third parties, improving reliability.

“Providing feedback to a third party removes the pressure of an immediate response and encourages more honesty,” says Paul Hugh-Jones.

“The more candid the responses, the more useful the insights become, which allows firms to make meaningful changes rather than relying on assumptions.”

Key advantages of outsourcing feedback include:

- Reduced internal disruption: Staff aren’t diverted from client work or bogged down in admin tasks like sending reminders, compiling responses, or coding comments.
- Expert survey design: Outsourced providers bring expertise in crafting questions that are clear, unbiased, and tailored to capture actionable information. This ensures you’re using the best feedback methods for firms rather than guessing what will be useful.
- Consistent comparison: External providers can help compare your results across time, offices, or even the broader industry, helping you identify trends and set targets.
- Deep insights: With professional analysis, feedback is not just collected – it’s interpreted, highlighting key risks, opportunities, and priorities for action. This is especially important when you’re looking to act on feedback and make decisions informed by robust data.
- Scalability across clients and service lines: Outsourced programs can handle large volumes of feedback across multiple projects or offices, something that is difficult with manual or automated feedback alone.

Real-world examples by industry

Law

McCullough Robertson, a leading Australian law firm, faced challenges with their manual feedback processes, which were inconsistent and inefficient. The firm relied on ad-hoc methods to gather client feedback, leading to a lack of structured insights.

The firm implemented an automated client survey tool, Beaton Debrief, to collect and organise client feedback via online surveys with responses collected in an intelligent dashboard. This system outsourced the survey design and setup to research experts, taking the admin work out, while keeping feedback easily accessible and actionable.

The firm improved its Net Promoter Score (NPS) by 14 points and grew client care scores by 30 per cent.

Read the full case study here.

Engineering and design consultancy

Harrison Grierson, a New Zealand-based engineering and design consultancy, also faced challenges with their manual feedback processes, which were haphazard and lacked coordination. The firm previously used multiple tools, leading to fragmented feedback collection and low response rates.

After implementing Beaton Debrief, an automated survey tool that outsources survey design and administrative setup, the firm noted remarkable improvements on a range of metrics. It increased its NPS by 15 points, client satisfaction scores improved by 18 per cent, and responsiveness scores from clients rose by 24 per cent. The firm has also reported an enhanced culture of client-centricity, in which all team members feel empowered to make impact.

Read the full case study here.

Beaton Debrief is an automated, outsourced feedback solution that is built and tailored for your needs by research experts.

Addressing common objections

Even when firms understand the value of client feedback, several common objections often slow down adoption. While these concerns are understandable, they often overlook the hidden costs and missed opportunities of relying on manual processes or inconsistent methods. In most cases, thoughtfully designed surveys, automated systems, or outsourced programs can overcome these barriers – improving response rates, revealing hidden insights, and freeing your team to focus on high-value client work.

Here are some common objections we hear when client experience teams try to implement feedback solutions – and suggestions for how to address them.

1. Our clients are too busy to respond.

Many clients are happy to provide feedback if you communicate the reasons and timing of the survey. Tell them you will use it to improve services for them and their feedback is valued. Additionally, good survey design and timing significantly increase response rates.

“A lot of partners say, ‘Our clients are too busy to give feedback.’ But the reality is, most clients aren’t being asked regularly – and when they are, they’re usually happy to share because it shows you care,” says Hugh-Jones.

2. We already know what our clients think.

Anecdotal knowledge often overestimates relationship strength. Structured feedback reveals hidden dissatisfaction and unmet needs.

“People assume they already know how their clients feel because they speak to them often, but that’s dangerous. You might only be hearing from one person or one perspective – and it’s often the positive one,” says Hugh-Jones.

3. We can’t afford a feedback solution right now.

In reality, the cost of inefficiency, wasted staff time, and missed opportunities usually exceeds the investment in automation or outsourcing.

“If you lose even one major client because you didn’t pick up on an issue early enough, that’s far more expensive than investing in a proper feedback program,” says Hugh-Jones.

4. We’ll handle it internally.

Manual internal processes are resource-intensive, prone to inconsistency, bias, and disruption to client-facing teams, limiting value.

“It can be powerful to handle the feedback process internally, but that might involve 20 hours of conversations and days of travel. Whereas the client feedback can be run by professionals who focus on it – that’s all they do. It’s going to be more efficient, you’re more likely to get structured answers,” says Hugh-Jones.

What to look for in a feedback survey solution or partner

Choosing the right feedback survey system or partner can make the difference between a process that feels like admin and one that truly drives improvement. When assessing your options look for features that enhance both efficiency and insight.

When choosing a system, prioritise:

Survey design expertise – Look for providers who understand professional services and can craft clear, unbiased questions that produce actionable insights. Strong design underpins the best feedback methods for firms, ensuring results you can trust.
Customisation options – Every firm and client base is unique. Your system should allow flexibility to tailor surveys by service line, client segment, or project type, avoiding one-size-fits-all inefficient client feedback.
Data privacy and client confidentiality – Ensure your provider meets strict privacy and ethical standards so clients feel confident sharing honest feedback.
Feedback analysis automation – Automated reporting and dashboards save time, reduce errors, and allow teams to act on insights faster, removing common client feedback inefficiencies.
Support for internal action planning – Insights only matter when they lead to change. The right partner will help your teams interpret results, plan improvements, and embed learnings into daily practice.

Try our feedback solution: Beaton Debrief

For firms looking to overcome client feedback inefficiencies, we built Beaton Debrief as a unique end-to-end solution. It offers the best of both worlds in both automated and outsourced feedback solutions, allowing professional services firms to spend less time on admin and more time acting on the data received. With options to customise surveys for your clients and send them at various points in the project lifecycle, and surveys designed by our expert researchers, it supports your success by maximising the return on your investment.

Explore how Beaton Debrief can transform your feedback process and deliver consistent, actionable insights for your firm: Beaton Debrief.

A screenshot of the Beaton Debrief dashboard.

Conclusion

Client feedback has become one of the most valuable sources of intelligence in professional services. But when firms depend solely on manual feedback processes, they often pay for it in inefficiency, missed opportunities, and inconsistent insights. Conversations and relationships will always matter – they are the foundation of trust and understanding – but they can’t stand alone as a feedback strategy.

By combining manual listening with feedback automation for professional services or outsourced client feedback solutions, firms can achieve the best of both worlds: human connection backed by structured, data-driven insight. This balance leads to faster analysis, deeper understanding, and more confident decision-making – all while freeing up valuable time and resources.

Download our free guide to client feedback surveys

Learn how leading firms turn client feedback into measurable growth. Download our guide to client feedback surveys with 12 best-practice recommendations for professional services firms.

Try it yourself

Share these insights with a colleague

The post How manual feedback processes are costing your firm appeared first on Beaton.

Who’s prospecting your clients? The key to winning and keeping clients

Kate Allman — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 07:07:34 +0000

Practical client growth tactics for professional services firms to win new clients, expand client relationships, and drive long-term client growth.

Finding and winning new clients has become a critical priority for professional services firms focused on client acquisition and growth. Gone are the days when prospective clients had just a handful of law firms, accounting practices, management consultancies, architects, or engineers to choose from. Today, clients are spoilt for choice. Firms must actively focus on growing their client base and attracting high-value clients in an increasingly competitve market.

The number of firms has multiplied, competition is fierce, and the power lies firmly in the hands of buyers. Beaton has tracked this shift for more than two decades, noting the rise of client expectations and the abundance of choice in professional services. In our research, professional services clients now report five to 10 viable firms competing for their work, compared with just two or three in the early 2000s. This shift has made new client growth and acquiring clients in professional services more complex – and more important – than ever.

In this environment, firms must not only focus on client retention but also winning new ones. A strong prospecting strategy for both new and existing clients is essential for survival.

What is prospecting and why it matters for client acquisition strategies

Prospecting new clients is the process of seeking out, identifying, and engaging potential clients with the aim of generating new business opportunities. The goal eventually is to move these targets (i.e. prospects) through a business development process until they become revenue-generating clients. With some effort, these clients can become long-term and highly valuable to your firm. In practice, prospecting is one of the most effective client acquisition strategies for winning new clients while also retaining and expanding your client base over time.

In professional services, prospecting extends beyond acquiring new business. It also involves protecting accounts and expanding client relationships to drive increasing client revenue.

Research by DemandSage and FinancesOnline has found customer churn averages 10–25 per cent per year across all industries. Even if we apply the lower end of this standard to professional services, firms might need to renew at least one in ten clients annually simply to stand still on current earnings. Without an active prospecting program, the revenue pipelines erode quickly. On the other hand, with a clear strategic plan to prospect for new clients and manage key accounts, top firms can protect and even grow their client base.

“Too many professional services firms accept that they’re going to lose a chunk of clients every year, as if it’s inevitable. It isn’t,” says Paul Hugh-Jones, partner at Beaton.

“If you invest in feedback, in handling complaints, in bringing new ideas – you can keep far more of them.”

Furthermore, firms that prospect consistently report stronger year-on-year growth than those that rely solely on repeat business. In short: prospecting underpins both growth and sustainability. Firms that excel in professional services client growth combine new client growth with strategies for building long-term client relationships and maximising value from existing clients.

Turning leads into loyal customers starts with prospecting clients effectively.

Prospecting for business development has real rewards

A 2022 survey by DCM Insights involving nearly 1,800 partners across professional and financial services identified five archetypes of business development behaviour: Expert, Confidant, Activator, Debater, and Realist. “Activators” were defined as those who proactively build and engage their networks to grow business and generate new leads. The research found Activators achieve up to 32 per cent higher revenue generation compared to other archetypes.

This data underscores a critical point: in professional services, technical expertise and trusted relationships are not enough on their own. You could be the best in the world at your technical capability – but without regular prospecting, you will be falling behind competitors. Firms that cultivate “Activator behaviours” by systematically prospecting new clients, expanding work with existing ones, and leveraging networks see measurably stronger growth.

Prospecting trends in professional services

Worryingly, prospecting activity is in decline. Beaton’s longitudinal research reveals that in 2013, 17 per cent of clients of built and natural environment consulting firms saw their advisors proactively prospecting. By 2024, that figure had dropped to just 9 per cent.

“Feedback from managing partners is that there has been a loss of BD skills and confidence since COVID, plus a concern that clients are too busy and don’t have time … so we shouldn’t bother them,” says Hugh-Jones.

Meanwhile, savvy competitors could be quietly seizing opportunities.

Client growth tactics: prospecting best practices for winning new clients

Standing out in a crowded market

Winning new business requires more than just visibility. Firms focused on attracting high-value clients must differentiate clearly while executing targeted client acquisition strategies. With professional services firms fragmenting and becoming increasingly multi-disciplinary, prospective clients have more choices than ever.

“Clients are bombarded with people saying the same things. The way you stand out is by showing them something that is tailored just for them and adds a fresh insight to address their issue ,” explains Hugh-Jones.

“Don’t prospect with a sales pitch. Clients don’t want to be ‘sold’ to. Prospect by bringing the client a valuable idea that is hyper-relevant to their business and could help them. That says, ‘I’ve thought about your business, and here’s something that is worth considering.’ That’s what gets attention, shows you care and starts a real conversation.”

Firms that excel at prospecting new clients do so by demonstrating unique value and proactively offering insights and solutions tailored to client needs. Market research plays a crucial role in this process. Knowing what potential clients are looking for, and how competitors are positioning themselves, gives firms the upper hand in crafting compelling prospecting strategies.

However you approach clients, it is crucial that your firm is regularly prospecting for new or repeat work. As the chart below shows, prospecting has a close relationship with consideration – that is, whether a client is considering using your firm. The more prospecting a firm does, the more clients will consider using its services.

How to prospect without becoming annoying

It’s often the first question Beaton partner Paul Hugh-Jones is asked: “How often can I approach clients with valuable ideas without becoming annoying?”

“Whatever frequency you think is going to annoy clients, they’d like to hear more often than that,” is his first response.

Contrary to what these professionals may assume, it is unusual that you would prospect so much as to become annoying to a client. So long as your prospecting involves sharing a valuable idea, which can help the client be successful. The acid test is whether the client will find that half hour conversation was a valuable use of their time. If yes, they will be happy to repeat. If not, you may not get another meeting. However, to avoid risking the relationship your approach should be genuinely helpful and respectful of their time.

Effective client growth tactics are not just about outreach requency – they are about delivering consistent value that supports building long-term client relationships and expanding client relationships over time.

Hugh-Jones has these tips for starting valuable conversations with clients:

Be front of mind: Stay visible to clients so they think of you first, but don’t overwhelm them.
Share valuable ideas, not empty contact: Reach out with insights or suggestions relevant to the client’s business or needs. The content of the interaction is what makes it worthwhile. Asking for a coffee or catch up without sharing a valuable idea is not a valuable use of their time.
Timing and frequency: A good rule of thumb is to reach out roughly every six weeks – enough to remain relevant but not so often it feels pushy.
Use existing relationships: Start with clients or contacts where there’s already a connection, whether personal, professional, or through introductions.
Frame the outreach properly: Instead of just asking for coffee, position it as: “I’ve been thinking about your strategy / issue / project and have an idea that might help. Can we discuss it over coffee or a short meeting?” This communicates value and respect for their time.
Think long-term: Prospecting isn’t about immediate wins. It may take months or years of regular valuable conversations before you turn outreach into a work opportunity. The long game is about nurturing relationships, sharing insights, and building trust that may eventually lead to work.

Getting in front of a client so that you can share a conversation face-to-face is also invaluable for winning new work.

By talking to clients, you start understanding their priorities, challenges, and where you can add value – that’s the essence of prospecting. Even if you don’t win a client from prospecting, you gain insights from the conversations that help shape future opportunities.

Paul Hugh-Jones, Beaton partner

Who is prospecting your clients? Competitor prospecting in action

One of the most overlooked threats to professional services firms is competitor prospecting. It’s a major risk for firms failing to prioritise acquiring new clients and protecting their existing base.

While many firms are scaling back their prospecting activity, some are using the opportunity to actively target your clients. Beaton Benchmarks has found as many as 28 per cent of clients reported being approached by another firm while still working with their current advisor.

The sectors most affected were:

Law: 31% of corporate clients reported competitor approaches.
Accounting: 25% of clients were actively targeted by rival firms.
Built and natural environment consulting: 29% of clients said they had been “courted” by competitors in the last 12 months.

These figures demonstrate that while many firms reduce their outbound business development, others are doubling down. In short, your best clients may already be on a rival’s prospect list. If you are not keeping current clients happy and engaged, you may be leaving the door wide open for competitors to step in. The danger is clear: if your firm isn’t prospecting, someone else is.

The key question every leader should ask is: who is prospecting my clients – and how am I defending against it?

The role of market research in prospecting clients

Market research and competitor intelligence are crucial to informing your prospecting strategy.

Firms that monitor their competitors and understand what other firms are offering can offer a unique point of difference to win clients. These insights are critical for firms aiming at increasing client revenue and retaining and expanding clients in a competitive environment. They “cut through” the noise of other firms’ marketing and enjoy greater engagement with prospects.

Competitor monitoring helps prospecting in several ways, including:

Identifying market trends: Competitor insights can help you stay updated with market trends and shifts in client preferences. Monitoring what your competitors are doing can reveal emerging opportunities and threats.
Value proposition refinement: Knowing your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses helps you refine your firm’s value proposition. You can highlight what sets you apart and identify unique competitive advantages that make your pitch more compelling to new clients.
Staying ahead of innovations: Competitors often introduce new services, or technologies. Keeping an eye on these innovations ensures that you are not left behind and can incorporate similar or better solutions into your offerings.
Improving client retention: Understand why clients might choose competitors. By addressing gaps in your service or product offerings, you can enhance client satisfaction and loyalty.
Negotiate better deals: Knowledge of how competitors’ clients perceive competitors’ value can be a powerful tool during negotiations. Being aware of what competitors are offering can help you negotiate better deals and offer more competitive pricing or added value.
Defensive strategies: Identifying who is prospecting your clients enables proactive action. Firms that implement “ring-fencing” account strategies a reduction in client churn

Jon Huxley, Beaton partner, explains what prospecting is, what is isn’t and why it’s important.

Building a client acquisition strategy for sustainable client growth

A strong client acquisition strategy includes goals for new client growth, expanding client relationships, and retaining and expanding clients to drive long-term success. This balances three imperatives:

Prospecting new clients – essential for growth, given rising client churn.
Prospecting existing clients – the most cost-effective way to expand revenue.
Defending against competitor prospecting – protecting key accounts under attack.

The data is unambiguous: firms that actively prospect across these three fronts outperform their peers. Beaton’s analysis of top-performing firms shows that those with structured prospecting strategies grow faster than the industry average.

Market intelligence for effective prospecting

Beaton Benchmarks is the biggest competitor analysis research in professional services across Australia and New Zealand. It collects client feedback on hundreds of firms from tens of thousands of clients every year. We collect this feedback across a range of metrics including brand, price, service, the likelihood prospects would consider using your firm, and so on.

This research offers firms the intelligence they need to optimise their prospecting efforts. It helps to accelerate professional services client growth by informing data-driven client acquisition strategies. Our benchmarking helps professional services firms:

Measure competitor prospecting activity: Learn how often competitors are approaching your clients.
Identify gaps in client engagement: Understand if your firm is doing enough to maintain client relationships.
Enhance prospecting efforts: Use insights to improve both new and existing client outreach.
Benchmark performance: Compare how your firm stacks up against industry peers.

This market intelligence transforms prospecting from guesswork into a measurable, strategic advantage. By leveraging Beaton’s data, firms can refine their strategies, protect their most valuable clients, and gain a competitive advantage in winning new business.

Don’t prospect with a sales pitch. Clients don’t want to be 'sold' to. Prospect by bringing the client a valuable idea that is hyper-relevant to their business and could help them.

Paul Hugh-Jones, Beaton partner

Upskilling your team in valuable conversations

To make prospecting a true competitive advantage for your firm, Beaton offers valuable ideas business development workshops designed to transform how professionals approach client engagement. These hands-on, action-oriented sessions work on real client opportunities, guide teams away from passive relationship management and into proactive, client-focused business conversations. Drawing on our 20-plus years of research, participants learn how to deliver fresh, relevant ideas that spark meaningful conversations with both clients and prospects. We help teams improve client growth tactics and confidently contribute to winning new clients.

What sets this training apart is its focus on what clients actually want. Too often, business development fails because professionals lack confidence or fear appearing pushy. Beaton tackles this challenge head-on, providing a practical, insight-driven framework grounded in real client feedback and scenario-based exercises. By the end of the workshop, teams leave with greater confidence, sharper prospecting skills, and a clear approach to engaging clients around their business needs – not just the firm’s services. Each attendee develops a valuable idea to share with their client, and commits to meet with their client to discuss it.

“Prospecting is where most firms look the same. The ones that win are the ones who can differentiate through insight, not just credentials,” advises Hugh-Jones.

“You’re showing effort, showing expertise and experience relevant to their needs, and expecting that you’re going to have several of these conversations. Eventually, it is likely to lead to some work.”

Conclusion

Firms that thrive in today’s hyper-competitive professional services market are those that make prospecting a core part of their business development strategy. They prioritise client acquisition strategies, focus on growing their client base and consistently invest in winning new clients.

By leveraging research, client feedback, and competitor intelligence, professional services firms can ensure they are not only winning new clients but also retaining and deepening relationships with existing ones.

If you find yourself asking, “Who is prospecting my clients?” the answer will undoubtedly include your competitors. The only way to stay ahead of those competitors is to be strategic and proactive in your approaches to clients. By doing so, your firm can differentiate itself, protect key accounts, and achieve sustainable growth in a crowded professional services landscape.

See how clients view your firm and where you stand against competitors

Participate for free in the largest, most comprehensive client sentiment industry benchmarking study in professional services.

Share these insights with a colleague

The post Who’s prospecting your clients? The key to winning and keeping clients appeared first on Beaton.