Advising upwards workshop
Bring us the valuable BD initiative your partners ignored and the one you’re about to put to them.
Your team leaves with both initiatives repitched, the tool that rewrote them and the research it worked from.
Your team stops getting a no, a ‘not now’ or polite silence from partners, and starts getting decisions. We researched why partners say no to BD. This workshop puts that research to work on your team’s own initiatives.
How it works
- Before the session: send us two initiatives
Your team sends us two BD initiatives. One is an initiative your partners ignored. The other is one you’re about to put to them. We test both against what the Client Proxies in our research said a partner needs to see before acting.
We also agree with you what counts as a result, such as which partners take the next step your team put to them.
- The session: half a day with your BD team
Steven Lewis of Taleist wrote the research and runs every session himself. He has trained and run workshops for firms including A&O Shearman, Clayton Utz, Hall & Wilcox and MinterEllison.
In the session, we show your team what the research says about its two initiatives and why the first one stalled. Then your team repitches both, live, with an AI tool built on the research.
The session runs for half a day, in person in Sydney or as two sessions of two hours on Zoom. Only your BD team attends. With no partners there, your team can be honest about what hasn’t worked.
- The tool: yours to keep, inside your firm
Your team keeps the tool, and it lives inside your firm. We build the tool in the AI your firm already uses, whether that’s Copilot, ChatGPT Enterprise, Harvey or another AI your firm has approved.
Inside your firm, under your firm’s rules
- The tool runs inside the AI your firm has already approved and judged secure, under the same security and confidentiality settings as everything else your firm does with it.
- Your team builds the tool in your firm’s own AI during the session, from files we send your IT and risk team beforehand.
- Nobody from Taleist needs access to your systems.
- There’s no new app, no outside website and no new login.
- Your firm has a permanent licence to use the tool. The research and prompts inside it stay Taleist’s.
- A named person in your BD team owns the tool from the day of the session. The tool is a set of instructions over the research files, so it keeps working for as long as your firm has AI.
- A month later: the review
We review a campaign your team built with the tool and sent to partners. Then we fine-tune the tool and the pitches on how your partners responded. A tool can write the pitch, but only partners can say yes. So the review measures what partners did against the result we agreed, and shows your team which pitches they acted on and why, so the next campaign starts from what worked.
What your team will learn
The webinar and the research briefing each had room for part of what the research found. Your team doesn’t need to have seen either. The session covers it all, drawn from the reasons the Client Proxies in our research gave for saying yes and no to BD:
- The objection partners keep to themselves until you ask a second time, and why it’s the one BD can fix
- What a partner means by ‘I’m flat out’, and what to send instead of a follow-up
- Why the partner you’re asking may not be the partner you need to win over first
- The detail to add when you bring partners a tender, which makes some of them turn it down (and that’s sometimes what you want)
- The three conditions a partner sets before introducing a colleague to their client
- Why partners who need BD’s help won’t ask for it, and how to offer help partners will take
- The question about a partner’s plans that tells you what their CRM records are worth
- Why the pitches partners lose were often lost before the tender arrived
- The job BD keeps giving partners that almost all of them want made easier or taken away
Your team uses each point on your own initiatives in the same session.
Who it’s for
The workshop is for BD and marketing teams in law, accounting and advisory firms whose good suggestions get a nod from a partner (or maybe not even that) and then nothing. It’s for firms already using Copilot or other AI the firm has approved, because the tool runs inside it.
If you want someone to motivate your partners, this isn’t it. We think motivating partners is the most expensive way to get nothing done. The workshop doesn’t ask partners to change. It changes what BD sends them.
The investment
AUD$4,950 plus GST for a team of up to 15
- The work on your two initiatives before the session
- The half-day session
- The tool your team keeps
- The review a month later
What happens to what you send us?
Send your two initiatives, and the campaign for the review, with client and partner names taken out. Where a detail would point to a client, we’ll help you decide what to leave out. We work on your BD thinking, not your clients, so we don’t need their names. We hold what you send in Taleist’s own systems and use it for your workshop and nothing else. We analyse it with AI, including Claude, with model training switched off. We never use it in Taleist’s research. We delete it 90 days after the month-later review. We put all of this in writing before you send anything.
Why AI models of partners?
Because partners rarely tell BD why they said no, and they won’t sit through a survey to explain it. Client Proxies give us those reasons in the language partners use, across hundreds of partner roles. Your team uses those reasons to repitch. The review a month later shows which pitches worked on your own partners.
About the research. ICON Advising Upwards, a Taleist study, fielded 15 to 19 October 2026. The panel was 240 Client Proxies: AI models of partners in law (60%) and accounting and advisory (40%) firms in Australia, the UK, Hong Kong and Singapore. Client Proxies are not real partners. The workshop uses the reasons they gave, in their own words.
Book a call
Book your team’s workshop
Book a 20-minute call. We’ll check the workshop suits your team, agree who attends and set a date. If someone else signs off the spend, we’ll send you a one-page case to give them.
Prefer email? asi@taleist.agency
Tell us about your team and we’ll reply within one business day.