How to create a high performing agency team culture, with Alison Coward

Transcript:
Jenny: Welcome to Episode 12. Now, this episode is a solo episode, and it's all about growing existing business and existing accounts. So this episode really is for you if you are an agency account director or an account manager in the role for a few years, and it's your responsibility to grow that business to grow your client business, and to expand the account and to grow those relationships. Now, this has come up because many of my students, the people that work with me, often have questions like, how can I grow my account without coming across as salesy or pushy and compromising my client relationships? Or what do I need to do? So the client sees me as someone that brings value, because at the moment, they just see us as very transactional. Some people ask me about asking for referrals, we all know it's a lucrative thing to do. And it's a very smart thing to do. But how do you actually ask without coming across as salesy? And what questions should I be asking my client to really understand their business to uncover business problems? And how do I sell without being inauthentic and really having a client centric approach? And do I need to be more assertive without putting my clients off? So these are some of the questions that I'm asked all the time about selling to existing clients. And that's the reason why I've decided to put together a series of podcasts around growing existing business. And the key really here is having a client centric approach, and ensuring that you continue to add value to your clients. So in this episode, we're going to be looking at the different value levels that you can give to your clients, and what skills you need to deliver those that add value. Why is it important to retain and grow our existing clients?So let's step back for a moment and just ask ourselves, why is it important to retain and grow our existing clients? Well, there's a number of statistics on online, some of them you may already be familiar with. But some of the really standout ones is, quite frankly, it's cheaper to grow your existing clients. So according to the Harvard Business Review, it's anything from five to 25 times more expensive to go out and get new business. And when you think about it, the cost of pitching is huge. And that's often where we stand a one in four chance of winning the actual business. So it's a huge investment. So it's cheaper to grow the existing account, because they're already familiar with us, and we already understand their business. It's also more profitable. Now, according to Bain and Company, if you increase your retention rate of a client by 5%, it can increase the profit margins by between 25 and 95%. So again, retaining your existing business is much more profitable. There's also a study by Gartner that says, 80% of your future sales come from 20% of your existing clients. Now, that is quite an eye opening statistic. So if we are thinking about that, then we really do need to be nurturing, and adding value to these existing clients. Now, there was a study by Gartner in 2019, that really looked at why accounts don't grow. And the really interesting statistic that came out of that was that, although there's a belief among the account management fraternity that exceptional service leads to account growth, it's proven not to be true. Exceptional service delivery leads to retention, for sure, but it doesn't necessarily lead to growth. And the findings from that study concluded that what you need to grow an account is to have what they call customer improvement conversations. And if you are having those customer improvement conversations, then it can increase your account by 48%, and increase the likelihood of renewal or retention by 94%. So increasing your ability to grow an account by 48% is really huge. And so we really should be paying attention to what does a customer improvement conversation really mean? Customer Improvement ConversationsSo the study defined a customer improvement conversation as three core things. The first thing is to provide customers or clients with a unique critical perspective. Now, when you think about that you think about, you know, that could create some tension in your client relationship. If you are providing something unique, and something critical to maybe what they're doing already. But this really is going to move the needle for them, because they're going to suddenly see you differently and see you as someone that can add a huge amount of value, because then you are showing them something that perhaps they hadn't seen before. Point two was for you to paint a vision of your customers future business, which means you need to be ahead of the curve looking at trends, looking at the future of their business, so that you can spot opportunities for them to capitalise on, or also avoid chal...