Grow your client base and your business

Client growth is essential to growing your business, but many businesspeople don’t take a strategic view of client growth, and only focus on the acquisition of more and more clients. It costs on average 5-10 times more to source new clients than to work with and keep existing clients.

It makes sense to adopt an ongoing strategic approach to growing the value of your clients as good business practice, whether you have 10 or 1,000 on your database. These four steps will start you on the path to unlock the potential in your business and accelerate your growth opportunities.

Step 1: Unlock potential, look at revenue history

Step one is to pull together all your sales revenue figures for say the last three years, by client. Ideally you can export the information from your accounts program, or even enter it manually into a spreadsheet.

However you pull the information together, your objective is to have a list of clients down the left-hand side of your spreadsheet or page, with the years across the top: three years ago, two years ago, last year, and revenue expected for the current year.

Once you’ve done that, you can sort by client name for easy reference. If you have many clients, an alphabetical sort by name will highlight any duplicate entries you may have made, and it’s also easier to locate clients alphabetically.

The cumulative value highlights the value that any given client has contributed to your business since you started working with them. This is often a surprise because most people focus on what the sales revenue will be from a client in any given year, not necessarily their total value to the business over time. 

Finally, have a look at the clients that are forecast to generate the most revenue for your business in the current year. If you do this at the start of a new financial year, sort by value last year, but if you do it closer to the end of the financial year, you can sort on YTD and forecast value this year.

This highlights who your most valuable clients are each year, and what they contribute to your business over time, and of course, which ones are most important to your business.