COMMERCIAL CAPABILITY FOR PROFESSIONAL SERVICE FIRMS
The system for the people
who were never taught to sell.
For law, accountancy, architecture, engineering, wealth and property
practices where the people who do the work are also expected to win it.
Practitioner led
Built on real pipeline
4 formats
Measured by what is won
01
THE PROBLEM
Brilliant professionals. No system for winning work.
In every law firm, accountancy practice, architecture studio and engineering consultancy the same thing happens. The people who deliver the work are expected to win it, and nobody ever showed them how.
Partners are promoted on technical merit and handed a business development target with no method, no structure and no support. What follows is predictable: a pipeline that depends on personality, cross-selling that happens by accident, and no clear view of where the next instruction is coming from.
Most firms respond by booking a day of sales training. Someone stands at the front of a hotel room for 6 hours and everyone goes back to doing exactly what they did before. This is not that.
02
THE SYSTEM
Not a course. A system.
A set of rules for how a professional service firm wins work, put in place by a practitioner who has spent 35 years doing it. No slides, no role plays, no borrowed frameworks. Every engagement is built on the firm’s own pipeline, its own prospects and its own people.
A lead becomes a prospect only when it engages. That reply is the line. The ladder is the firm’s shared language: a partner and an associate can look at the same opportunity and agree where it is and what happens next.
Nothing is marked lost. It is only early.
THE LEAD LADDER
Long-term client nurture
Onboarding nurture
Close
Negotiate
Questions, re-qualify
Quote
Qualify
Nurture
Prospect, warm or cold
THE LINE. A REPLY.
Lead, warm or cold
Cross-sell and referral loop back to the top.
03
THE NUMBER
16%
In our experience, across clients we have advised and our own practice, a professional who handles objections with confidence lifts booked sales on the existing pipeline by around 16%.
No new leads. No new marketing. No additional spend. The same enquiries, the same conversations, the same pitches, won more often, because the person in the room now has a system for the moment the client says“we need to think about it”.
For a firm billing £2m, that is the difference between a good year and the best year it has had, without a single new client walking through the door.
04
THE FORMATS
Four formats. One discipline.
Some firms need a short, sharp intervention. Others want the discipline to hold for a year. Each format begins with Week Zero, a commercial diagnostic of the firm as it really is, and each is built around the firm rather than around a curriculum.
6 WEEKS
The Sprint
A focused intervention for firms that need commercial momentum quickly.
12 WEEKS
The Programme
Every stage of the ladder, with time for skills to embed and habits to form.
2 DAYS ON SITE
The Intensive
For partner groups who can clear 2 full days, followed by a 30-day review. By invitation.
3 OR 6 MONTHS
Retained Advisory
For firms that want the discipline to hold after a programme ends.
THE BOOK
The Dirty Word.
Why good people freeze when it’s time to ask for money.
For anyone who has to bring the money in and hates it. You will not be
asked to become a salesman.
THE PRACTITIONER
Built by a practitioner, not a trainer.
Sales for non sales was created by Glenn Dobson, its owner and CEO, after 35 years of building, growing and exiting companies and more than 60 transactions advised across 22 countries.
We have no social media accounts and run no advertising. Our own clients come from letters, conversations and referrals. We think that is the best evidence there is that the system works.
Every engagement begins with Week Zero.
A sales CRM built on the same system is in development.
To arrange a conversation, email us. We reply to every one.
Sales for non sales
Sales For Non Sales Ltd · Registered in England and Wales No. 17474478 · 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9JQ