Cross-Selling, Culture and Control: What PE-Backed Firms Get Right (and Wrong)

At the beginning of 2026 I wrote an article about the importance of cross selling to value creation in PE backed firms and those preparing their investment case. Whilst aggressive buy and build strategies scales your firm quickly, real asset growth and sustainability comes from investing in an integrated and strategically aligned focus on real value.  Cross sell is highly effective and very low risk. 

In PE-backed professional services firms, cross-selling is often identified early as a key value-creation lever. It makes sense: the client base already exists, the capability already exists, and incremental growth is typically high-margin. And yet, many firms struggle to sustain momentum beyond the initial push. The issue is rarely strategy. It is execution.

The structure–culture tension and why it doesn’t work

One of the most common mistakes is framing cross-selling as either a cultural issue or a structural one.

Firms that lean too heavily on leaning into the culture thesis rely on goodwill, trust and informal collaboration. This can work when the formal drivers and informal culture are aligned — until growth, integration, or leadership change introduces complexity or a sense of unease with what people are being asked to do.

On the other hand, firms that lean too heavily into creating structures to mandate behaviour through process, technology and reporting create outcomes that rely on compliance without commitment.

The most effective firms strike a balance: just enough structure to make collaboration easy, and just enough cultural reinforcement to make it desirable. 

The challenge is more easily understood and addressed as a behavioural one.

Behaviour is key

My favourite model for developing cross selling programmes is the EAST Framework, developed by the UK's Behavioural Insights Team, also known as the 'Nudge Unit'. if you want a behaviour to happen, you should make it Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely.

So what does that look like in a professional services context

Make it Easy: Remove friction before adding incentives

Most cross-selling efforts fail not through lack of ambition but because they ask too much of busy professionals.

If cross-selling requires the individual to:

• Remember what other teams do

• Navigate ambiguous ownership or origination

• Fill in forms (matrices/tables/trackers)

• Instigate awkward internal conversations

…it simply won’t happen consistently or sustainably.  And risks burning out the account managers you put in place to build the structures and encourage the behaviour.

The first leadership task is therefore to reduce cognitive and practical friction. In practice, this means:

• Being explicit about priority services — start with just the few that matter most to value creation.

• Being explicit about target clients — plans to cross-sell to everyone will result in cross selling to no-one

• Being explicit about relationship ownership — who is accountable for the client, and who is contributing

  
  

Make it Attractive: Shift the emotional payoff

Professional services leaders often assume that financial incentives alone will drive cross-selling. They help — but, in my experience, much less than one would expect. What actually makes cross-selling attractive is confidence and clarity.

People are more likely to act when:

• They understand what “good” looks like

• The risk of getting it wrong feels low

• The personal upside — reputational as well as financial — is visible

  
  

In practical terms:

• Frame cross-selling as risk reduction for the client and part of our ongoing professional obligation, not revenue generation for the firm

• Build on what is already happening – use the same language as everyone else, reflect what people say they want to see: make it feel familiar

• Share specific examples of introducing a colleague which materially improved client outcome

• Recognise contributors publicly, not just closers privately

  
  

In PE-backed environments in particular, simplicity matters. If the incentive or referral logic cannot be explained in one sentence, it will not change behaviour.

Make it Social: Use norms, not mandates

Behavioural change lives or dies on social cues. In firms where senior leaders openly share clients, collaboration becomes normal. In firms where leadership rhetoric and behaviour diverge, silos harden again, if they ever truly unfroze in the first place.

Two social dynamics matter most.

• Leadership modelling. When senior partners actively introduce colleagues into their client relationships, they give implicit permission for others to do the same

• Visibility. Making cross-selling activity — referrals made, introductions held, outcomes achieved — visible across the firm changes behaviour faster than any policy document

  
  

Make it Timely: Aim for success

Even firms with good intentions often miss the moment.  Cross-selling prompts are frequently delivered at quarterly meetings, during strategy away days or as part of annual objectives. By then, the moment to reward the behaviour may have passed.

The first question I ask a client is – when are your performance and bonus conversations happening? If there isn’t time to construct the programme and for those involved to achieve results that can be measured and rewarded – then the timing will need to change.

Post-merger and integration contexts deserve special mention. Cross-selling is often pushed hard immediately after deal close, before trust, clarity and role definition are established. But cross-selling is an outcome of integration, not a substitute for it. The right time is once service positioning, ownership and internal trust are clear.

Sustaining Momentum: Why cross-selling stalls

Many cross-selling programmes do not fail outright. They fade. Momentum is lost when:

• leadership attention moves on

• measures are no longer reinforced

• recognition becomes sporadic

• and cross-selling slips back into “nice to have” territory

  
  

Sustained cross-selling requires consistent focus. Leaders must continue to talk about it, model it, and reward it — not as a project, but as part of how the firm serves clients.

Cross-selling does not start with systems. It starts with behavioural design.

Make it easy. Make it attractive. Make it social. Make it timely. And then keep going.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, 2009, Richard H. Thaler and Cass R Sunstein