Frances Pratt identifies five friction points that stall growth in professional services: unclear value propositions, over-reliance on one rainmaker, confusing buying experiences, jargon that obscures client outcomes, and trust gaps. She offers specific fixes for each, from before-and-after storytelling to distributing relationship work across teams.
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Hello and welcome. In this video, I'm gonna walk you through each of the 5 friction areas, not the theory, but what I'm actually seeing showing up right now. Same patterns keep coming up. So I recorded this to help each of you better understand which of the frictions is costing you growth and some actions that you might be able to take to shift this. So let's get into it. 1. Value friction. Clients don't understand the value quickly enough. So what happens is they stall. They have to think about it after what you think is a good conversation. And why this is happening is you're explaining about what you do and not the changes for them. So what I'd like you to do is just think about one great story that you have that embodies that before and after. for your client. What did they feel like before? What happened after working with you? And use that in your conversations. The second one is relationship friction, and this is when growth depends on that one person or 2 people, usually you. You're delivering the pipe— and the pipeline's there. When you're not delivering, It's stuck. So in this, you are stuck. You are stuck because when you're delivering or doing the work, the pipeline dries up. And so we get this feast and famine going on. And here's why this happens, because relationships, they live in your head and not in a system. Often the founder or the person who is the rainmaker has learnt this not in a book or from a course, but through the school of hard knocks. So it's not easy for them to teach. So the fix for this is having a deliberate rhythm, a way that distributes the relational work beyond that one person, an ability to hand that over and to skill up and use the skills of the team to deliver better clients. The third friction is journey friction. Buying and onboarding feel harder than they really should. And this is kind of related to the previous one. So you have prospects, you have clients, but they go cold. They don't really get what you're talking about in their experience. And so once they've signed, you really lose momentum with them. And so we get this post-purchase dissonance going on. So a simple fix for this is just having a what happens next, having some clear handover documents and handover people that continue that relationship. The 4th element is translation friction. So this is when your expertise, you're awesome at what you do, but it just isn't converting into the commercial language of your client. So it really is a translation problem. And here's what I see. These are the symptoms that happen. Your proposal talks about you. They might have an about you thing right at the front and all the people you've worked with and all the things that you do, but it doesn't actually help your client understand. Have you heard them? Do you understand who they are, and can you fix their problem? And so I work a lot with expert practitioners, and they love to explain how and what they're doing, but not the changes and how this works for their client. And that's the simple shift. So I want you to look at the areas of your business where you're integrating that with your clients and think about how you have a client-centric view of that and translate that into their outcomes. Number 5 is trust friction. So this is where you're losing people either through the, through the people inside the business that don't establish trust or maintain trust with your clients. Or in this world of AI, everything is moving way faster than your confidence and your value positioning. This is particularly important for professional services firms where clients are actually asking right now, can't AI just do these things for me? So understanding how you differentiate yourself from an AI bot is really, really important. And that comes down to what I call the AI moat, which is absolutely about relationships and people. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to internally think through how you are working with AI right now, because I know that you are, or your team definitely is. And think about a positioning statement so that people inside the firm and therefore outside the firm, because you can explain it, are clear about that, that AI moat, the relationships and the things that you can do that go beyond the mere mechanics. Thanks so much for watching this. I know that you've got a report. So what I'd love you to do is have a look at the 2 things or the 2 friction areas that are hurting you the most right now. Have a look at the suggestions that I've put in there for you. And if going deeper and getting more information on this is something that you would like to do, I would love to talk to you. So you my email. Please connect.
