Target the highest-margin services and segments
When it may fit: Effort is spread thin.
Evidence needed: Margin by service and client type.
Trade-off: May ignore opportunities.
Professional Services Intelligence Brief
How to Build a Data-Informed Business Development Strategy
Business development works best when it targets the clients and services the firm earns the most from, and when it tracks what each effort produces.
1. The business problem
Where should we spend our business development effort?
Business development tends to run on relationships and instinct. That works until effort is spread across too many targets, or goes to work that is not very profitable.
A data-informed approach starts from where the firm earns the most, tracks the pipeline, and measures what each activity produces.
2. What the evidence can reveal
A data-informed strategy rests on four inputs:
- Calculated Profitability by service, to decide what to sell.
- Calculated Capacity: where the firm can deliver more without strain.
- Calculated Pipeline measures: leads, proposals, win rate and cycle time.
- Information gap Market information: which clients and segments need the services, and who the competitors are.
The most important number is the return on each hour of business development, which needs the pipeline data.
3. Investigate the problem
In the synthetic firm, Calculated the services differ in what an extra sale is worth. Tax & Compliance and Outsourced Accounting earn 41.0% and 36.4% and have held margin; Litigation Support earns 65.2% but is capacity-constrained; Advisory and Technology Consulting have seen margins fall.
Calculated The scale of the prize is visible in the scenario. A 1% gain in billable hours adds about $196K a year, so winning new work equal to 3% of current hours would add about $590,000, before any extra costs of capacity. A 1% gain in realized rate adds about $264K, which is worth considering when choosing between chasing volume and raising rates.
Hypothesis A data-informed plan here would focus on recurring, high-margin lines first, and avoid pushing lines whose margins are falling. Information gap The demo has no pipeline data. A simple pipeline report, with stages, values, win rates and time in stage, turns business development from an art into a process that can be managed and improved.
4. Explore the interactive experience
Investigate it yourself.
Firm Economics Dashboard: a service-line dashboard with utilization and realization, a scenario simulator for hours, rate and cost, evidence-linked answers from APIS, and a sample brief, all on synthetic data.
The experience below is built on a synthetic firm, “Demo Advisory Partners,” analyzed by service line. It has no client-level, pipeline or business development records, so service lines are used to show the method. Nothing in it is real.
- In the Scenario tab, the preset adds 3% to billable hours. Note the profit effect.
- Reset and add 3% to realized rate instead. Which would you rather win?
- Ask APIS how sensitive profit is to hours and pricing.
5. Evaluate possible solutions
Better business development is built in small, measurable steps.
6. What leadership should do next
Questions to answer
- Which services do we most want to sell?
- What does our pipeline look like?
- What is our win rate?
- Can we deliver the work?
Data to gather
- Profitability by service
- Pipeline and win history
- Capacity plan
- Market information
Steps to take
- Pick target services and segments.
- Set up pipeline tracking.
- Review monthly.
- Shift effort to what works.
7. Engage Two Pillars
Understand Your Firm’s Economics and Growth Opportunities
Two Pillars can help professional services firms investigate client profitability, engagement operations, capacity and strategic growth using your own data. A good first step is a business development plan built on service profitability, capacity and a simple pipeline tracker.
Sources and data notes
- The organization, its figures, and every number in this article and its interactive experience are synthetic and illustrative. They are not real data, a benchmark, or a forecast.
- Reviewed October 2026. This article describes an approach to investigation. It does not replace review by qualified professionals.