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Darren Spevick, Managing Director Russell Strategy Partners (RSP) helps pharma service and professional services firms turn business development into a strategic, organisation-wide capability that generates a sustainable pipeline of opportunities. Focused on the art and science of business development, the firm equips clients with the systems, strategies and operational foundations required to grow existing accounts and consistently win new ones. Rather than treating growth as a one-off activity, RSP embeds business development into everyday operations, making opportunity creation simple, structured, repeatable and measurable.
BD Upskilling takes over from there, equipping professionals with the right mindset, skillset and toolset required to build confidence and apply business development effectively.
Darren Spevick, Managing DirectorHow does Russell Strategy Partners transform business development into a repeatable, organisation-wide growth capability?
Differentiating RSP is its personal approach. The firm immerses itself in each organization, understanding the people, markets and the nuances of client relationships. Through close collaboration and tailored advice, RSP guides strategic refinements, big or small, that drive meaningful impact.
“We put the systems, processes, skills and structure in place to create a reliable pipeline of opportunities,” says Darren Spevick, managing director.
Building Business Development Capability at Every Level
What core services does Russell Strategy Partners use to embed business development across organisations?
RSP structures its work around three core services: BD Sprints, BD Outsourcing and BD Upskilling.
It believes that business development is an organisational capability, not the responsibility of a small group. The firm works with leadership teams to identify how different people can contribute according to their strengths. The strategic work involves improving awareness of service areas, helping teams recognize opportunity signals in client conversations and clarifying what questions to ask and what actions should follow.
How does Russell Strategy Partners diagnose and prioritise business development performance gaps?
The company’s proprietary BD HealthCheck plays a big role in this strategy. It’s a diagnostic survey that captures perspectives from across the organisation, including fee earners, delivery teams, finance, marketing and legal. Built around ten business development cornerstones with forty questions, it measures how well the organisation is performing in specific activities, identifies perception gaps by role, practice and geography and informs actionable recommendations. The survey, which takes only ten minutes to complete, highlights areas where RSP can support subsequent interventions.
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We help put the systems, processes, skills and structure in place to create a reliable pipeline of opportunities and drive growth.
BD Upskilling takes over from there, equipping professionals with the right mindset, skillset and toolset required to build confidence and apply business development effectively.
RSP works with professionals who have built careers as doers. As they did not start out intending to sell, many of them lack early training. RSP helps these individuals through its workshops, webinars, mentoring and BD Academy. It reframes business development as an ongoing process rooted in listening, understanding client needs and creating value. The firm addresses fears, misconceptions, and confidence gaps, showing that business development is not selling, but enabling clients to buy more. Participants learn how to recognize cues during conversations, ask more effective questions and engage more proactively. They are also supported through practical guidance on outreach emails, LinkedIn messages, follow-ups and the use of CRM systems to manage opportunities.
Why does Russell Strategy Partners prioritise long-term behaviour change over short-term sales interventions?
RSP’s real focus is on sustained behavior change, which takes time to embed. It achieves this via one-to-one mentoring over six to twelve months.
BD Outsourcing provides hands-on support for organisations lacking time, bandwidth, or resources. Working as an extension of the client’s team, RSP delivers market mapping, business development intelligence, competitor analysis, system implementation and client planning support.
Turning Missed Opportunities into Measurable Growth
RSP’s tangible impact is evident across its client engagements. In one case, it collaborated with a boutique consultancy that lacked focus and structure. The team helped define a target-focused strategy, implemented a CRM, and improved marketing consistency. Within two years, the consultancy increased turnover by 300 percent, grew from fewer than ten people to over thirty, and established a platform for ongoing growth.
RSP’s message to pharma service and professional services firms is clear: invest in people and remove the barriers that limit relationship building. Russell Strategy Partners embeds business development at the heart of the organisation, delivering a structured pipeline of opportunities that translate to growth.
A disciplined approach to business development
Across the UK professional services landscape, business development remains one of the most persistent sources of friction for leadership teams. Growth expectations continue to rise, yet many firms still rely on informal habits, individual instincts or a narrow group of senior partners to sustain pipelines. Expertise is rarely the issue. Time, consistency and confidence usually are. In this environment, executives evaluating external business development support tend to look beyond generic sales advice and toward partners that treat growth as a firm-wide discipline rather than a personality-driven activity.
Effective business development support in this market tends to share a few defining traits. It is deeply contextual, grounded in how professional services firms actually win work through trust, relevance and timing rather than persuasion. It acknowledges the reality of the seller-doer model, where senior practitioners are valued for their technical judgment, yet often lack structured exposure to business development earlier in their careers. It also recognises that sustainable growth depends on repeatable behaviours supported by systems, data and reinforcement, not one-off interventions.
Another distinguishing factor lies in how insight is generated. Many firms believe they understand why opportunities convert, yet internal perceptions often differ widely across partners, delivery teams and support functions. Diagnostic approaches that capture these differences can surface gaps between leadership assumptions and day-to-day experience, creating a more accurate picture of where attention is required. When insight is drawn from across the organisation rather than a single viewpoint, development activity becomes more targeted and easier to prioritise.
Behaviour change is another area where outcomes tend to diverge. Workshops and short programmes can raise awareness, but without reinforcement, they rarely alter habits for long. Firms that achieve momentum typically combine structured learning with ongoing individual support, allowing professionals to apply ideas directly to live situations over time. This gradual, personalised progression helps reduce anxiety around client conversations and reframes business development as an extension of client service rather than a separate activity.
Within this context, Russell Strategy Partners reflects many of the attributes executives tend to value in business development support. It positions its work around the practical realities of winning and retaining clients rather than traditional sales instruction. Its approach emphasises close collaboration, taking time to understand each client’s market, structure and internal dynamics before recommending change. That often includes a mix of small adjustments and more substantial interventions, supported through direct involvement rather than detached advice.
The firm’s use of structured diagnostics to gather input across roles and locations provides a basis for informed decision-making, while its emphasis on individual mentoring helps translate strategy into sustained behaviour.
For UK professional services firms seeking a more disciplined and embedded approach to business development, Russell Strategy Partners stands out as a compelling choice. Its work aligns closely with how growth actually occurs in this sector, blending insight, practical support and long-term partnership into a coherent offering that supports leadership teams intent on building lasting capability rather than short-term activity.
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