A tool to help you understand and prioritise your clients

Each of our clients should (hopefully) have a scope of work - showing what we’re contractually obligated to deliver - and we allocate our resources accordingly. But that’s not enough.

“Doing what we’re contractually obligated to do” isn’t enough to develop client relationships (to cross-sell, upsell, or survive a change in personnel) and, right now, it may not be enough to keep a client at all.

Churn is higher than usual at many agencies and it’s only occasionally because results are lacking…

…and agencies are feeling squeezed for resources (I recently wrote about two pinch points many of us are feeling), so we can’t go above and beyond for everyone. We need to segment and prioritise our clients. Done right, this will give us a blueprint for the clients we’ll take on in future and we’ll be much better equipped to develop every relationship we have…but here’s the tool I use to start.

How to fill it in

• Clients in the top two boxes represent the majority of your revenue. Perhaps you have a target revenue amount (I recently wrote about Rise at Seven’s objective that “every client should be paying us £20,000 per month - clients that do would make up those top two boxes); perhaps you have a minimum engagement level that’s moved up recently and some of your clients would now fall into those bottom two boxes; perhaps you just want to say “we’re happy with what these clients are paying us and we’re not happy with what those clients are paying us”
• Clients on the right hand side have the potential to pay you more than they currently are. Perhaps you’ve used AI to determine how much money they make and spend, which makes you think you could get a bigger share; perhaps you provide one of your services for them and you feel like you could provide two or three; maybe you work on projects and you think you could get retainers. Clients on the left hand side are probably giving you what they’ve got (or what they’re ever likely to trust you with).

How to use the tool

• The high sales, high potential box will need your best people. You (the owner) will have a personal relationship with the senior people at the client’s business (and the day-to-day contacts too), which will hopefully transcend the services you provide (e.g. you speak to them about the big picture and you’ve got no idea on the status of the work, the client should be speaking to the account manager for that). You’ll talk about these clients in a leadership meeting, if only to say “what have we done for [these clients in the top right hand box] this month to develop that relationship?” - because when you signal it’s a priority, your leaders will make it one. You’ll have a dedicated relationship manager for those clients, ideally, whose job it is to make them happier and happier - and not just to deliver the work
• The low sales, high potential box may also require a relationship manager. At Rise at Seven, we had some small work with parts of big groups (a little project for one of Frasers’ businesses; or a THG brand; or RVU etc.) so we’d make sure one of our Client Partners was treating these accounts like they were some of our most important…because they could be (and eventually were). These businesses are more likely to give you briefs - that you’re more likely to win - than unidentified new business leads who might knock on the door at some point so, if you’re targeting growth, asking your people which clients could give you more and how you might facilitate that is a very good place to start
• The high sales, low potential box might have some of the things outlined above, or it might not. You will focus on delivery and managing overservicing, because you know you won’t recoup any losses. You can’t sleep on these clients, but it’s worth trying to understand why you’re not going to get more out of them and updating your ICP and ways of working accordingly
• The low sales, low potential box is full of client relationships that should be allowed to expire. Maybe you’ll decline to renew their contract; maybe you’ll try to “sell” it on to a subcontractor and make a little cash out of it/make sure the client keeps getting the service; maybe you’ll do what I remember happening in the early days of Branded3, where we told those clients they need to triple their spend or find a new agency…it worked more often than you’d expect!