Does your client team know how to sell?
At some point in the business lifecycle, agencies and consultancies start to run out of referrals and repeat clients.
This same point is typically when agencies and consultancies start to take on business that isn’t a great fit. This is also usually the point when agencies and consultancies take a serious look at their business development function. If they don’t have a “biz dev” or “growth” person on the team, they often want to hire one. Or if they already have someone on the team, they get more aggressive in their new business activities.
New business takes a ton of resources. Hundreds or thousands of hours are invested every year in new business growth. Travel and hard costs rack up.
You absolutely need new business, but what if you could get more business from the clients you’re already serving? It’s typical to see agencies and consultancies leaving 10-20% of a client’s current revenue on the table simply because they aren’t paying attention or asking the right questions.
Can you count on the people running your accounts to look for and act on client expansion opportunities?
For most companies, the answer is no, save for some superstar CS/AM people. It’s not systematic and it’s typically not taught.
So how do you encourage your team that manages the day-to-day relationships with your clients to systematically identify and act on expansion opportunities? Here are five things to implement:
1) Build and maintain a strategic account plan and revisit at least once per quarter with leaders on the internal client team. This plan is crucial to keeping expansion top of mind. It should include:
Basic company and contact information
Roles of contacts (influencers, budget holders, executive, etc.)
Relationship health assessment
Account risks - what could negatively impact your relationship and revenue with the client?
Risk mitigation strategy
Expansion goals and current expansion opportunities
Competitive landscape - can your services be replaced?
12-month action plan, organized by quarter
2) Hold quarterly business reviews with your client. Don’t charge them for it. Have these in person, if possible. Use these to review successes, challenges, and what’s ahead. Don’t just focus on the work you’re doing with them. Know the industry, the competitive landscape, and challenges the company is facing. Never sit down and start a conversation with, “How’s it going?”
3) Expand and deepen your relationships with the client. Know the other players and bring value to the table for all of them. Match the titles of your team and their team. Your VPs should be talking to their VPs. View part of your job as helping your day-to-day contact win with their bosses and advance their career. Never go over the head of your primary contact (unless you have a major issue that needs to be dealt with).
4) Don’t leave other team members out of expansion discussions. People doing things for your client often have great insights and ideas.
5) Incentivize the team for expanding business. There’s usually a disincentive to expand business. It means more work, but their paycheck doesn’t change. Develop a bonus structure that makes expansion worth it for the team. Achieving the bonus should be challenging, but reasonably attainable.
We often spend so much time teaching and training the mechanics of serving a client, that we forget to teach people how to look at a relationship strategically. Putting these five enhancements in place will go a long way to expanding your engagements with your current clients.