Leave Your Audience Feeling Inspired and Motivated
Keynote Speaking
How We Help
Tackling Growth, Expansion & Planning
Are you looking to use your next offsite or partner meeting to energize your team’s outlook around growth? A PIE keynote speaker will electrify and galvanize your meeting.
Tom McMakin and Jacob Parks have been inspiring professional services audiences for more than a decade. The individuals at PIE are thought-leaders in the world of professional services business development, having authored two best-selling, definitive books on how professional service teams build trust and credibility when engaging new clients, how they earn the right to win work, and creating effective cross-selling strategies for scaling within existing clients.
Why a PIE Leader Should be Your Next Keynote Speaker
With over 50,000 conversations, we’ve learned a thing or two
Benefits
- Listen to best practices and advice garnered from hosting over 50,000 conversations including conversations from PIE’s partnerships with the Big4, MBB, AmLaw 100 consultants, Big IT, Big Engineering, and more.
- Deconstruct the growth puzzle and leave your audience with a concrete framework for understanding how best-in-class firms break out of their brand boundaries and grow.
- All PIE speakers interview at least five key stakeholders in your firm before we craft our address to make sure we hit the mark.
- Programs can include copies of How Clients Buy or Never Say Sell for continued reference.
- Keynote presentations can include additional breakout sessions for specific learnings amongst teams or to break through silos and improve cross-functional collaboration.
Outcomes
- Informed and inspired audiences.
- A relevant professional services presentation from a speaker who understands your audiences is busy and hungry-for-knowledge.
- An address with actionable takeaways that drive revenue.
Talks
While we will create a bespoke address for our audience, below are some common keynote topics for professional service firms:
- Grinder, Minder, Finder: Transition from being excellent at delivery to becoming a firm rainmaker; an ideal program for new partner groups.
- How Clients Buy: The ABC’s of how practices define their niches and build a bridge from their expertise to potential clients, highlighting learnings from How Clients Buy.
- Never Say Sell: 80% of new revenues year-over-year come from existing clients. Learn how to land and expand and scale the diamond of opportunity as taught in Never Say Sell.
- The Rainmaker’s Recession Playbook: Best practices from leading firms on how to expand market share and margin during recessionary times.
- Account Planning Basics: Design a go-to-market action plan for key accounts that drive a firm’s organic growth.
What Our Clients say
“We have some big growth goals in front of us which require improved collaboration amongst our team. After reading Never Say Sell, there were some specific learnings that I knew my team could benefit from, specifically on how to introduce additional capabilities to clients. I was thoroughly impressed with the PIE process which was unlike any other speaker program that I have encountered. They were able to create a bespoke experience that delivered what I wanted my account team to take away, but also incorporated areas that the team had expressed interest in learning as well. It was an experience that our team is still benefiting from months after the event, and we look forward to working with PIE again in the very near future.”
Michelle Johnson
Chief Revenue Officer, Stout
What Our Clients say
“Stephanie is such an inspiration. We had her speak before our partnership about what works and what doesn’t in the world of business development and to a person, our leadership complimented me on my choice of a speaker. She knew our industry and she spoke from experience about best practices. I had a practice lead come up to me a month later and said one tip Stephanie had shared had helped him double the amount of work he had with a key client. Also, we had had did a lunch for the women in our partnership.
Stephanie spoke a second time, telling the story of how she built PIE into a values-driven firm, turning it into a B-Corp and employee-owned, a talent magnate and women-powered. I couldn’t believe that 72% of the professionals at PIE are women.”
Chief Client Officer
Big 4
What Our Clients say
“Our firm was largely regionalized. We wanted to stand up a handful of national practices, starting with tax and advisory for the building industry. Jacob came and spoke with us, and we left with a blueprint for building out the practice. Today the construction practice is a key pillar of our firm’s profitability. A week doesn’t go by when someone doesn’t quote something Jacob said. It is fair to say, he was the architect of how we think about tackling national markets.”
Practice Lead
Top 20 Accounting Firm
Experience
Speaker Bios
Jacob Parks
President of Strategy for PIE, Jacob Parks is the author of Never Say Sell, a guide to how professional firms expand their business with key clients. His expertise includes partner remuneration and incentive plans, account planning, trigger of engagement, and how to expand a brand to include new service offerings, new industries, or new geographies. He has led client teams for McKinsey, Accenture, and KPMG among others. He leads The PIE Professional Services CMO network and is a graduate of Gonzaga’s MBA program, having previously taught undergraduate business students.
Tom McMakin
As PIE’s CEO, Tom has been the firm’s architect of its growth over the past twelve years. He is the author of three books, Bread and Butter, How Clients Buy, and Never Say Sell. He is an expert in how professional services firms drive growth using strategy, talent, and smart execution. He has had a long career in business, having served as the COO of Great Harvest Bread Co., founded Orchard Holdings, a private equity firm, and sat on more than a dozen profit and non-profit boards. He has appeared on the pages of Fast Company, Inc Magazine, Newsweek, Industry Week, Business Week, and The Wall Street Journal, among others. Recently, he was named as the top CEO in Montana by the state’s newspapers. He is a graduate of Oberlin College, completed executive education at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and is a Goldman Sachs Scholar.
