The Whetstone Group, Inc. -- Our Approach To Growth

The Whetsone Group, Inc. takes a practical approach to growth that is effective for CPA and other consulting and professional service firms such as architecture firms and commercial banks. Our years of experience helping professional service firms with growth, our unique combination of client service and marketing expertise and our understanding of best practices in the industry have led to winning growth strategies. Take a look at our process:

Planning for Growth - At Whetstone, we believe growth starts with your overall business strategy. Rather than taking an agency approach and talking to you immediately about specific marketing activities like brochure development or ad placement, we start by identifying who your clients are, what you provide your clients and how you serve them. Defining this, and ensuring everyone in your firm is on the same page, is always the first step to developing a growth strategy. Only then can you move on to actual marketing and sales activities, with a budget and accountability for implementation.

Effective business development in a professional service firm looks like this:

Once we've worked with you to define and agree on the business strategy, we look at your strategic growth alternatives. Our belief is that your firm's growth will come from one of the four sources illustrated in the matrix below:

The key to successful growth planning is to understand where your growth opportunity is and to employ the appropriate growth strategy to achieve that growth. Whetstone will facilitate a planning session to help you understand what these alternatives mean for you, where your opportunity for growth is, and how to allocate your business development time, effort and budget among these different strategies to reach your growth goals.

Implementing for Growth - Planning for growth isn't enough. Without implementation, growth will never happen and your plans will be wasted. At Whetstone, we believe that for a successful implemenation, our clients need to understand the difference between marketing and sales. So many firms use these terms interchangeably - and there's a distinct difference.

The graph below shows how marketing and sales efforts work together to produce new business - first you have to engage in marketing activity to position yourself to ask for the order. After some time, as the marketing activity falls off, actual sales activity (or, asking for the order) must begin and continue through the sales cycle.

Many firms we've talked to do a lot of marketing activity and rarely make the transition into sales activity. For example, they do a lot of direct mail, but don't follow-up to set appointments and get face-to-face with prospects to begin the sales cycle. They aren't getting a good ROI on their marketing investment. Others try to jump right to sales activity without having done the marketing. They become frustrated because they don't get the results they want.

Whetstone will build activities into your growth plan that position you to ask for the order and transition you into implementing actual sales activities. Through our marketing implementation services, including direct marketing campaign development, copywriting and materials development, sales training, and marketing implementation outsourcing, we'll help you get the growth results you're looking for.

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