Whitespace analysis for professional services firms

Search for whitespace analysis and almost everything you find was written for a software company. Products down one axis, accounts across, cells shaded where a licence has been sold. The unsold cells are the whitespace, and the sales team works them.

That model transfers badly to a firm, for a reason worth being precise about: a software company's product list is finite, defined and identical for every customer. A firm's is not. What your firm can do is not a catalogue, it is a claim, and the claim is only as good as the delivery behind it.

Everything that makes whitespace harder in professional services follows from that.

The number worth knowing

Before the criticism, the case for doing this at all. Accounts managed with genuine whitespace-driven account planning are reported to grow around 9% a year, against 5 to 6% for accounts managed traditionally.

Treat that as indicative, since it comes from vendors in the account planning category. Even discounted, on a large account the difference compounds into a meaningful number over a partnership's planning horizon, and it is available from clients you already have and already serve well.

The three kinds of gap

Service whitespace is what everyone means by the term. It is not the largest.

Service whitespace is a capability match. Do they buy something we do, elsewhere. It is the easiest to describe and the hardest to evidence, because it requires knowing both what they need and what you can prove you do.

Stakeholder whitespace is usually larger and almost never measured. A firm with a decade-long relationship might be single-threaded through a finance function, with no relationship at all in operations, technology or regulatory affairs, each of which holds its own budget and its own problems. Every one of those is an account you already have access to and have never approached.

Geographic whitespace is the most mechanical. Multi-site organisations procure locally when the incumbent has no presence, and the incumbent frequently does not know it is happening.

Why the twice-yearly workshop cannot find them

The standard mechanism is an account planning session. Get the team in a room, work through the client, list the opportunities, assign owners.

The output of that session is bounded by what eight people can remember in ninety minutes. It is a poll of memory, run twice a year, in a firm whose memory is decaying at the rate of its turnover. The account planning literature says this about itself, and bluntly: whitespace analysis is usually done badly or not at all, sellers eyeball an account and remember a few opportunities, and leaders get anecdotes where they wanted data.

Three specific failures follow.

It finds gaps that are top of mind, not gaps that are large. Recall favours the recent and the vivid.

It cannot see capability the room does not know about. The firm's strongest credential in a service may sit in a practice group with nobody present.

It happens twice a year. Procurement decisions do not. By the time a tender is published, the specification has usually been shaped by whoever was in the room while it was being written.

Whitespace found at a planning day is whitespace found six months late.

What proving a gap requires

A gap is an assertion about two things at once, and both halves need evidence.

That the client needs it. Not that they might, on the general theory that all utilities need this. Evidence from their own material: a stated priority, a regulatory obligation, a programme they have described to you in writing, a problem they have raised.

That you can do it. Not that the capability statement lists it. Evidence of delivery: named engagements, for named clients, with the documents.

A gap with both halves evidenced is a conversation with an attachment. A gap with neither is a guess, and firms that pitch on guesses train their clients to stop taking the meetings.

This is why the underlying record has to hold capability as something evidenced rather than claimed. A capability matrix with no zeroes in it, which is what most firms have, cannot support this analysis at all, because it asserts that the firm does everything and therefore that every unsold service is whitespace.

Making absence visible

The structural problem is that every system a firm owns records what happened. The CRM holds opportunities created, the finance system holds work billed, the document store holds deliverables produced. None of them can represent a service you never sold, because there is no row for it.

That is why OrgAtlas draws capabilities the client's material shows they need, and for which the firm has no delivery evidence, as hollow rather than omitting them. The gap is in the record, marked as having nothing behind it, and visible next to the capabilities that do.

It is a small design decision with a large consequence. A gap you can see is an opportunity. A gap that was left out of the data is something you find out about when the client buys it from someone else.

Running it on one account

If you want to test this before changing anything, take your largest client and answer three questions from systems rather than from memory.

1. Which services that this firm delivers has this client never bought? Not which we think they do not need. Which we have never sold them.
2. Which people in the client organisation hold budget, and which of them has nobody here ever engaged?
3. For each gap, what evidence do we have that they need it, and what evidence do we have that we can do it?

Most firms find they cannot answer any of the three without convening people, and the exercise of discovering that is usually more persuasive than the analysis it produces.

Frequency is the real variable

One closing point, because it is the one most likely to change outcomes.

The value of whitespace analysis is not in its depth, it is in its currency. A shallow view refreshed weekly beats a thorough one refreshed twice a year, because opportunities are formed continuously and the window in which a firm can influence a requirement closes long before the procurement notice appears.

That is the argument for a brief that arrives rather than an analysis you go and run. A gap nobody opens a system to check is functionally the same as a gap nobody can see.

Next: the weekly account brief, and what belongs in one