In this live, I sat down with Dr. Jody Peleo-Lazar to discuss a piece we co-wrote, “Nobody Taught Me How to Sell”. It looks at a familiar tension in professional services: people early in their careers are expected to contribute to business development long before anyone explains what that means in practice.
We start with a moment that many people will recognise — being told to “get exposure” or “chat to people about what we do” at an event — and unpack why this kind of indirect signalling causes hesitation. When instructions are too vague, people fall back on stereotypes of selling (like a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesperson from an old film) that don’t really match what things look like in professional services.
We also discuss why a model in which a handful of senior partners hold all the client relationships doesn’t scale well and is structurally fragile. Everyone in the company needs to contribute to growing the business, but expectations should look different depending on seniority. A junior is not going to be the person closing deals; their contribution can look like noticing patterns across conversations, asking thoughtful questions, surfacing a need that has been mentioned in passing, or supporting a proposal as part of a team.
Along the way, there’s a brief detour into How I Met Your Mother and Barney’s “have you met Ted?” routine as an example of exactly how not to throw colleagues into client conversations.
Drawing on Jody’s background in adult learning, we look at why the hesitation of junior colleagues tends to be a predictable learning response, shaped by cognitive overload and the social stakes of representing the firm externally before they have had a chance to develop a clear mental model. We then walk through five practical approaches that help make progress: narrating the thinking behind polished outcomes, starting with small and specific behaviours, treating everyday client work as a practice ground, doing business development as a team, and building in short reflections after interactions.
The thread running through all of it is that capability in business development accumulates slowly. The firms that design genuine support around that tend to produce consultants who, a few years in, have developed real instinct for these conversations.
The full article is free to read on The Art of Asking Questions, and Jody’s writing is well worth following at Adult Learning at Work!
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