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Practice Development

Gain a competitive edge and augment your revenue streams by getting timely, contextualised and actionable intelligence on key accounts, prospects, competitors and new business opportunities

Practice Development at a glance:

  • Adopt a targeted business development and sales strategy by understanding your client’s context and pain points
  • Establish a robust account planning program to enhance engagement with key client accounts
  • Stay abreast of your competitors’ strategies and benchmark your offerings and market positioning against them
  • Identify and evaluate addressable opportunities in new segments and markets
  • Devise (and revise) your go-to-market strategies for key client industries/sectors
  • Establish and augment your thought leadership program
  • Get proactive news and alerts on relevant developments in key geographies, service segments and markets served
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Get razor-sharp insights to drive your business forward

Professional services firms are challenged by increasing competition, evolving customer expectations, cost restraints, and volatile market dynamics.

To thrive in an extremely competitive market and gain the business edge, today’s professional services firms must be able to:

  • Glean relevant insights, especially as the issue is over-abundance of data rather than lack of it

  • Demonstrate a client-first approach, by better understanding their strategic business challenges and goals

  • Be an overall asset to the business by providing timely, actionable insights through a flexible and specialist-driven model

  • Stay ahead of the competition by understanding market position, and devising strategies to counter competition

  • Reduce operational costs and support internal initiatives to adopt lean practices

We do more than just provide industry and market data…

Every organisation has unique business and market intelligence requirements. So, we’ve designed a modular solution where you define what you need, based on your specifications. With Practice Development from The Smart Cube, you can select capabilities and insights from across five modular elements:

  • Account Intelligence
    Account Intelligence

    Our account intelligence programs help you identify opportunities in your target accounts by deciphering the strategic intent of client organisations.

  • Growth Opportunity Identification
    Growth Opportunity Identification

    Get a 3600 view of specific practice areas, client industries and key markets of interest to identify whitespaces, and devise a strategic plan to exploit the opportunities.

  • Market-Entry Strategy Support
    Market-Entry Strategy Support

    Assess addressable opportunity size and potential routes to entry as you look to expand into new practice areas, client segments and markets.

  • Competitor Monitoring
    Competitor Monitoring

    Get timely, custom insights on your key competitors to evaluate their growth strategies and expansion initiatives to prioritise your own initiatives and countermeasures.

  • Intellectual Capital Support
    Intellectual Capital Support

    We enhance your thought leadership journey by providing data-driven insights and modelling to support your point of view.

How your business benefits

With Practice Development from The Smart Cube, you can:

  • Free your talent from laborious manual research tasks and give skilled people more time to focus on strategic decision-making and client-facing activities.
  • Strengthen your team, your way and flexibly add whichever skills or capabilities you’re missing. We have your back to augment staffing for peak demand.
  • Uncover untapped opportunities that standard industry reports don’t surface, and gain a competitive edge with intelligence that highlights unexplored synergies, new opportunities and hidden risks.
  • Accelerate research projects with reusable assets and frameworks, and access to industry experts and network of linguists, which give a head start to your teams.
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Our working process

The Practice Development solution we deliver is built around you. Through close collaboration and a custom, modular approach, we create a bespoke intelligence solution, designed to support your specific goals and needs. Here’s how our process works:

Step 1

We work with you to collaboratively scope and define your requirements, unmet needs and goals.

Step 2

We then establish ongoing market, client or account intelligence programs and agree engagement and governance processes and frameworks for strategic, ad hoc intelligence projects.

Step 3

Our specialist team delivers a continuous stream of custom insights based on a variety of research sources, analytical models; consumption layer can be tailored according to your teams/practice groups.

Step 4

Your practice development solution is reviewed and revised to ensure it’s meeting the evolving needs and delivering the right ROI.

Why choose The Smart Cube?

When you choose Practice Development from The Smart Cube, you always get:

Deep industry and domain knowledge: Our specialists are exceptionally experienced in the different practice areas and industries they cover – combining a wealth of existing knowledge, research skills and advanced analytics, to uncover the intelligence you need.


A true extension of your team: When you work with The Smart Cube, our team becomes yours. We can fill specific skills gaps with relevant specialists, or manage your work streams entirely on an ongoing basis.


17 years of market research excellence: The Smart Cube has a 17-year track record in delivering solutions to management consulting, legal services, and other professional services firms – so we know what information you need, and how to help you gain maximum value from it.


Bespoke strategy support: Through actionable, contextual intelligence and analytics, we help you optimise your client, industry and competitive intelligence so you can build stronger, more complete strategies.


Access to diverse data sources and experts: Our world-class resource base – including a global network of 11,000+ subject matter experts, numerous subscribed databases and a huge volume of internal knowledge assets – drives our exceptional primary and secondary research.


Practice Development in action

Top law firm sought intelligence for Canadian expansion plans

  • THE CHALLENGE

    The client wanted to formulate an organic expansion strategy for the Canadian market and sought to identify the most lucrative practice areas, attractive industries, and growth opportunities given the current competitive environment.

  • OUR APPROACH

    We assessed a combination of macroeconomic activity, market structure, current and expected volume of work by industry and practice areas, and relative alignment with the US economic cycle, in order to determine the market opportunity. We also studied examples of other players that have successfully expanded in the market, to suggest an expansion strategy.

  • VALUE DELIVERED

    The Smart Cube’s targeted and actionable recommendations helped the client expand, by hiring select partners for the most lucrative practice areas and industry verticals in Canada.

The Smart Cube's insights helped global management consultant beat the competition

  • THE CHALLENGE

    The client was losing dominance as an established management consulting firm to specialist and agile competitors, and wanted to track strategic, marketing and digital initiatives of more than 40 competitors across multiple countries.

  • OUR APPROACH

    The Smart Cube created a web-based portal to integrate with the client’s Knowledge Management platform to deliver insights in near real-time leveraging our proprietary news monitoring algorithm. This, in combination with our cross-functional team of in-house experts, helped determine trends in activity and suggested action items that would give our client a competitive advantage.

  • VALUE DELIVERED

    Our insights enabled the client to pre-empt its competitors’ strategies and devise effective countermeasures. As an additional benefit, the client has also overhauled its content development framework, which is now providing a better return on investment.

Professional services firm accelerated growth through better intelligence on market opportunities

  • THE CHALLENGE

    The client wanted to gain specific intelligence on over 200 prospective and existing clients to help its business development team devise a customised Account Management/ Penetration Plan based on challenges and issues as well as strategic intent.

  • OUR APPROACH

    The Smart Cube categorised over 200 potential and existing accounts depending on their industry, buying point, growth, and location. We also provided ongoing insights into companies’ operations and their portfolio, team/org structure, financial position, key activities (acquisitions, lawsuits, partnerships, etc.), and important strategic initiatives via a web-based portal for easy monitoring. We also highlighted key opportunity areas for the client based on a detailed analysis of the company’s current positioning vis à vis its competitors.

  • VALUE DELIVERED

    The Smart Cube’s actionable intelligence helped the client customise its approach and disproportionately focus on higher growth accounts. This helped the client add new names to its client roster, and strengthen existing relationships.

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