Propense NOW Offers Multiple Ways to Partner with Professional Services Firms. You Can Still Buy a “Turn Key Solution,” But Now You Can License Our Data Engine to Speed Your Internal Delivery.
By Tim Keith
Quick Summary:
Internal IT teams at professional services organizations generally have many more projects than available time to complete. While adopting an MVP framework gets more projects off the ground, it can challenge adoption and confidence of the client-facing professionals. Further, without the right data foundation and workflow integration, even reaching the MVP status can be a challenge.
Tools that are considered a true advantage require “no effort” by professionals, use clean data, and accurately deal with the many nuances. Some say that it takes repetition and focus to achieve this level of quality. Some sources would say that it takes 10,000 hours to create a truly reliable software that will instill confidence with the users to take the output to your clients.
Propense has over 96,000 hours of development time to ensure that we produce platforms professionals actually want to use on a daily basis, driving consistent revenue.
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CIOs, IT Departments, and Tech Teams at Professional Services Firms Aren’t Just Evaluating and Approving AI-powered Platforms Anymore
They’re building them from the ground up—and expending a lot of time, resources, and energy in the process.
Internal tools, AI copilots, custom cross-selling dashboards…the possibilities are expanding fast. What used to require a major investment can now be spun up quickly within the firm itself, thanks to the rise of large language models (LLMs) like Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT.
Getting something off the ground has never been easier. Getting it to actually work across the firm—and drive consistent revenue—is where things get difficult.
Is your team struggling to transform a promising prototype into a platform professionals look forward to using every day? Whether you’re building, buying, or doing both, we can meet you wherever you are in your development journey. Continue reading to learn how we provide the missing pieces you need to succeed.
LLMs Make It Easier to Start Building AI-Powered Tools—But There’s a Tradeoff
LLMs have changed the pace of innovation for professional services firms. A firm’s IT team can prototype faster and build interfaces in days instead of months.
But that speed comes with a tradeoff.
LLMs are quickly becoming a commodity. If every firm has access to the same underlying models, the model itself isn’t the advantage. It’s just the engine.
What matters is everything built around it. Without the right data foundation and workflow integration, most internally built tools hit the same ceiling: they produce interesting outputs, but they don’t provide action-driven insights or change behavior.
If a tool doesn’t solve a problem or streamline day-to-day responsibilities, professionals won’t use it. If behavior doesn’t change, firm revenue doesn’t improve, either.
Where Internal Builds Stall
The breakdown rarely happens at launch. It shows up over time.
Data is fragmented or inconsistently structured. Client relationships are incomplete. Cross-sell logic lacks context, missing the nuances of industries, services, and past work delivered. Insights live in passive dashboards instead of showing up in the flow of work.
In turn, partners don’t trust the cross-selling recommendations. Marketing and firm leadership lack visibility into what’s actually working. Eventually, adoption stalls and momentum fades.
What Actually Creates a Defensible Cross-Selling System
The firms seeing real results are building solid, 360-degree cross-selling systems with help from Propense. Those systems consistently combine three things:
1. AI/LLM Acceleration
This gets you started. It’s no longer the hard part.
2. A Data Moat
This is where the real advantage lives. A data moat isn’t just access to data—it’s how that data is structured, connected, and refined over time. That includes:
When that foundation is in place, the system can do more than surface ideas. It can produce:
Without this layer, AI tools have nothing meaningful to work with. Propense provides this critical component to professional services firms and their IT departments, strengthening internally built cross-selling tools with rich data they can’t source anywhere else.
3. Integrated Workflows
This is where most internal efforts fall apart. Insights don’t drive outcomes on their own. They have to show up where professionals are already working.
That means:
If a tool lives outside the workflow, it doesn’t get used. If it doesn’t get used, it doesn’t matter how good it is.
Like data moats, Propense gives firms the tools, structure, and expertise to build internal cross-selling platforms professionals actually want to use. Propense also integrates with CRMs and email systems to accelerate adoption.
Here’s another great tool that integrates into workflows: Hatfield, an AI-powered solution heavily focused on client service and retention, meets professionals where they are by serving up client insights 24/7. The tool keeps an eye on client activity, social media, external events, regulatory changes, breaking news, and industry signals that matter while professionals are busy completing tasks at hand. It surfaces emerging risks, timely opportunities, and important moments before clients ever have to ask about them, keeping clients happy—and competitors at bay.
Strengthening Prospecting Efforts
Even with cross-selling tools in place, many professionals and business development teams are simply reacting to opportunities rather than shaping them.
Propense’s prospecting layer shifts that dynamic, giving teams the insight to identify, influence, and create opportunities before they fully take shape.
It analyzes proposals, RFPs, and external signals alongside your firm’s ideal customer profile, identifying patterns to map what a prospect is likely to need before the first conversation even happens.
That means professionals and business development teams can:
It also elevates the proposal itself.
Often, the firm that wins isn’t the one that answers the RFP best. It’s the one that sees beyond the minimum requirements and identifies gaps, anticipates needs, and brings forward ideas the client hasn’t explicitly asked for.
Because the prospecting layer runs on the same data and models as Propense’s broader platform, those insights don’t live in isolation. They carry through—from first outreach to proposal to delivery—informing long-term account growth.
In no time, prospecting stops being reactive. It becomes a connected, continuous part of how your team works and how your firm grows.
Build, Buy, or Both. Just Be Honest About the Gaps.
Some firms will keep building internally. Others will adopt third-party platforms like Propense and Hatfield. Most will land somewhere in between.
The challenge (and potential issue) is assuming that an LLM-powered prototype is closer to a production-ready system than it actually is. What looks like a nearly finished product is often missing the most valuable elements: the data moat and the workflow layer.
Those aren’t quick builds. They require time, structure, and specialization that most internal teams don’t have the bandwidth to develop from scratch. That’s where we come in.
All Builders Welcome
We work with professional services firms at every stage of the building process. Some come to us with early prototypes, some have invested heavily in internal builds, and some are starting from scratch.
The common thread is this: they don’t want to throw away what they’ve built. They want to make it work. That’s where robust, data-rich cross-selling and client service tools like Propense and Hatfield come into play.
We don’t replace what you’re building. We strengthen it.
In the end, we help you create something that actually works and lasts.
The Bottom Line
LLMs make it easier to start, but they don’t take data, user workflows, or behavioral changes into consideration. That’s why most internally built systems struggle to take off across professional services firms.
The firms getting it right are focusing on what actually creates long-term advantage—and building around that.
Need support building your internal cross-selling and client service platforms? We’re happy to help. Platforms like Propense and Hatfield are already proving what’s possible, identifying approximately $33 billion in uncaptured revenue for nearly 20% of the top 100 CPA firms in the U.S. since its inception in 2023.
Schedule a demo to learn how we can strengthen your firm’s growth efforts.