"Troy Waugh—'the rainmakers' rainmaker'—has provided a well-designed blueprint for selling professional services that skillfully draws upon his more than thirty years in the field. This practical, highly focused guide to the selling process can help our firms achieve sales successes measured not only by effort but also by bottom-line results." —Howard B. Allenberg, vice chairman and CIO, BDO Seidman, LLP Finally, peerless focus on how to break into all aspects of the selling process and the currents of relationship and buyer development. Learn how to build your personal and firm business more successfully. Covers the process of relationship and buyer development. Provides proven strategies from hundreds of the world's successful firms. Order your copy today!

Soft Skills for the Professional Services Industry Auditors, accountants, lawyers, consultants, and other highly educated and trained professionals frequently hold impressive credentials and offer clients specialized expertise in complex areas. At the same time, these professionals understandably focus on the analytical and technical components of their jobs, sometimes to the point of excluding or ignoring important soft skills critical to the success of their careers and practices. In Soft Skills for the Professional Services Industry: Principles, Tasks, and Tools for Success, veteran auditor and entrepreneur Andreas Creutzmann delivers an essential discussion of often overlooked professional competencies that can mean the difference between career, engagement, and business success or failure. In the book, you’ll find accessible guidance on critical soft skills that can make a difference between fulfilment and success and failure on a professional and personal level. You’ll learn to handle the blending of home and the home office, how to effectively manage staff, how to market yourself and your firm, practical strategies for client and colleague communication, and how to find happiness in your day-to-day work. Each chapter stands alone and can be read in any order. They provide professionals with invaluable skills for navigating the modern—and digital—reality of work, showing you how to combine your professional education with the latest research and common sense on everything from client management to firm marketing. Soft Skills for the Professional Services Industry uses the field of auditing as a template and guide, but it is highly relevant to all skilled professionals – including lawyers, consultants, medical professionals, and others. The book is a must-read for any knowledge worker trying to add to their toolbox of practical skills. Critical guidance for practicing professionals on how to build often overlooked soft skills Most highly educated and trained professionals aren’t lacking in analytical or technical skills. Lawyers know the law, accountants understand double entry bookkeeping, and doctors know anatomy. However, many of us are less familiar with often overlooked—and equally essential—soft skills: client management, communication, staff and employee management, and others. In Soft Skills for the Professional Services Industry, accomplished auditor, entrepreneur, and consultant Andreas Creutzmann walks you through how to build critical competencies, from self-marketing to balancing work and life when your office is in your house. The book is made up of numerous, self-contained chapters that can be read in any order, and it demonstrates how to navigate increasingly digital and insistent professional demands on your time, effectively manage client and colleague relationships, and sell new clients on the services your firm offers. An essential roadmap to achieving personal and career success, Soft Skills for the Professional Services Industry is an indispensable resource for lawyers, doctors, accountants, auditors, and any other extensively skilled professional. It offers practical tools in functional areas that are frequently neglected in formal professional training.

"This book explores areas such as strategy development, service contracts, human capital management, leadership, management, marketing, e-government, and e-commerce"--Provided by publisher.

The ultimate instructional guide to achieving success in the service sector Already responsible for employing the bulk of the U.S. workforce, service-providing industries continue to increase their economic dominance. Because of this fact, these companies are looking for talented new service systems engineers to take on strategic and operational challenges. This instructional guide supplies essential tools for career seekers in the service field, including techniques on how to apply scientific, engineering, and business management principles effectively to integrate technology into the workplace. This book provides: Broad-based concepts, skills, and capabilities in twelve categories, which form the "Three-Decker Leadership Architecture," including creative thinking and innovations in services, knowledge management, and globalization Materials supplemented and enhanced by a large number of case studies and examples Skills for successful service engineering and management to create strategic differentiation and operational excellence for service organizations Focused training on becoming a systems engineer, a critically needed position that, according to a 2009 Moneyline article on the best jobs in America, ranks at the top of the list Service Systems Management and Engineering is not only a valuable addition to a college classroom, but also an extremely handy reference for industry leaders looking to explore the possibilities presented by the expanding service economy, allowing them to better target strategies for greater achievement.

Engineering managers and professionals make a long and lasting impact in the industry by regularly developing technology-based projects, as related to new product development, new service innovation or efficiency-centered process improvement, or both—to create strategic differentiation and operational excellence for their employers. They need certain business fundamentals that enable them to make decisions, based on both technology and business perspectives, leading to new or improved product or service offerings, which are technically feasible, economically viable, marketplace acceptable, and customer enlightening. This book consists of three sets of business fundamentals. The chapter “Cost Accounting and Control” discusses service and product costing, activity-based costing to define overhead expenses, and risk analysis and cost estimation under uncertainty. The chapter “Financial Accounting and Analysis” delineates the key financial statements, financial analyses, balanced scorecard, ratio analysis, and capital asset valuation—including operations, opportunities, and acquisition and mergers. The chapter “Marketing Management” reviews marketing functions, marketing forecasting, marketing segmentation, customers, and other factors affecting marketing in making value-adding contributions. The new business vocabulary and useful analysis tools presented will enable engineering managers to become more effective when interacting with senior management, and to prepare themselves for assuming higher-level corporate responsibilities.

The real-world guide to selling your services and bringing in business How Clients Buy is the much-needed guide to selling your services. If you're one of the millions of people whose skills are the 'product,' you know that you cannot be successful unless you bring in clients. The problem is, you're trained to do your job—not sell it. No matter how great you may be at your actual role, you likely feel a bit lost, hesitant, or 'behind' when it comes to courting clients, an unfamiliar territory where you're never quite sure of the line between under- and over-selling. This book comes to the rescue with real, practical advice for selling what you do. You'll have to unlearn everything you know about sales, but then you'll learn new skills that will help you make connections, develop rapport, create interest, earn trust, and turn prospects into clients. Business development is critical to your personal success, and your skills in this area will dictate the course of your career. This invaluable guide gives you a set of real-world best practices that can help you become the rainmaker you want to be. Get the word out and make productive connections Drop the fear of self-promotion and advertise your accomplishments Earn potential clients' trust to build a lasting relationship Scrap the sales pitch in favor of honesty, positivity, and value Working in the consulting and professional services fields comes with difficulties not encountered by those who sell tangible products. Services are often under-valued, and become among the first things to go when budgets get tight. It is now harder than ever to sell professional services, so your game must be on-point if you hope to out-compete the field. How Clients Buy shows you how to level up and start winning the client list of your dreams.

The secret ingredient to any successful firm is great leadership. Fortunately, this new book demonstrates that great leadership skills can be nurtured and learned. Using the model of the pyramid to illustrate his concept, author Troy Waugh builds a case for ongoing leadership development, guiding you through the essential ideas and practices that are at the core of great leadership and great firms. Using this powerful framework, you can improve your personal leadership and build great leaders around you. Developed specifically for CPA firm leaders, it covers the full spectrum of leadership development, including: Leading Self Leading Staff Leading Strategy Leading Systems Leading Synergy Plus, you’ll hear from more than 40 of the profession’s top leaders. Recognizing the multitude of approaches to leadership, Waugh reached out to colleagues in some of the most well-led firms in the profession and asked them to share their leadership experience and philosophies.