Pt. 2 The Five Cross-Serving Readiness Tests: Why It Isn't Working Now (And How to Fix It)
So you've embraced cross-serving over cross-selling. You understand that making partners heroes to their clients works better than turning them into reluctant salespeople. You're ready to implement the smart-questions approach that demonstrates strategic thinking rather than pushing services.
But here's what happens next: You roll out the new strategy, train your partners on the methodology, and... results are still disappointing.
What went wrong?
Cross-serving success isn't about willpower or work ethic.
It's about readiness.
Most firms focus exclusively on cultural readiness—getting partners to "play nice" and share clients. That's important, but it's like setting up the perfect workspace while ignoring whether your internet can actually handle video calls.
Successful cross-serving requires readiness across five critical dimensions. And you're probably missing at least three of them.
The Five Types of Cross-Serving Readiness
Here's how we evaluate readiness across each dimension:
Cultural Assessment: Current collaboration patterns, incentive structures, leadership commitment, and partner attitudes toward client sharing.
Data Assessment: Client information quality, system integration, opportunity identification capabilities, and analytics readiness.
People Assessment: Individual partner knowledge gaps, communication skills, capacity for broader client conversations, and training needs.
Service Assessment: Natural synergies between offerings, delivery capacity, positioning alignment, and pricing optimization.
Operational Assessment: Current sales processes, marketing material readiness, pipeline tracking, and performance measurement capabilities.
The Two-Week Truth
It’s time to assess your readiness across all five dimensions in two weeks. Not two months, not two quarters—two weeks.
Why so fast? Because readiness isn't about complex analysis. It's about honest evaluation:
Can your partners systematically identify cross-serving opportunities?
Does your data support intelligent decision-making?
Are your people equipped for broader client conversations?
Do your services create natural expansion pathways?
Can your operations handle collaborative growth?
Simple questions. Clear answers. Immediate action plan.
The firms that succeed at cross-serving aren't the ones with the best intentions—they're the ones with the best readiness.
Beyond Ready: AI-Powered Cross-Serving
Once you're truly ready, tools like artificial intelligence become force multipliers rather than expensive distractions. When your culture, data, people, products, and operations are aligned, AI can help you identify opportunities you never would have seen and time introductions you never would have made.
But AI can't fix fundamental readiness gaps. It can only amplify what you've already built.
The firms winning at cross-serving today aren't just culturally collaborative—they're systematically ready. They've done the work across all five dimensions, and they're reaping the rewards.
The Bottom Line - The Readiness Reality Check
Here's what I've learned after twenty years in this business: Nearly every firm can be made ready to succeed at cross-serving.
The question isn't whether you have the potential—you do. The question is whether you're willing to do the work to get ready across all five dimensions.
Give yourself the readiness tests. All five of them. The results might surprise you.
And when you're ready to get serious about cross-serving, the tools and strategies that seemed impossible before will suddenly become obvious.
To all that celebrate, I wish you an easy fast and a happy, healthy New Year,
Bruce & Lefty
