The Secret To Sustainable Growth = Marketing To Former Clients

If you want to grow a consultancy practice you have to be great at not just attracting new clients, but managing accounts of past clients as well. Here's how we do this at FeverBee

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Long-Term Growth Will Come From Past Clients

If you can’t engage past clients, you will struggle to build a sustainable consultancy practice

The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.

Thus the people most likely to hire you in the future are those who have hired you in the past.

Yet it’s pretty common to work with a client, end things on good terms, wish each other well, and then never speak to that client again.

I speak from experience. This is precisely what I did for my first few years in consulting. I’d have successful projects with clients and wish them well with the rest of their lives.

Occasionally they would get back in touch with questions or ask about additional work, but it was always waiting on them. I had no plan (or intention) to deliberately stay in touch with them.

Why would I? The engagement was over.

That was dumb. If the client engagement went well, you absolutely should be in regular touch with the client. You should know how they’re getting on, what they’ve been up to, and what they’re struggling with. You should be proactively trying to help them whenever a situation arises.

Recently a past client completed a difficult platform migration. After I checked out the site, I noticed some issues which needed to be resolved. I let the client know. This evolved into an evaluation project of the new platform.

These types of situations happen with remarkable frequency - and they will happen with a lot more frequency if you make it a part of your strategy.

The Mathematics of Growth

At some point, your promotional efforts will probably hit a plateau

We need to adapt a common mantra here.

For a typical business, it’s [x] times more costly to acquire a new customer than to retain a current customer (where [x] is debated).

For a consultancy practice, it’s [x] times more costly to make someone aware of you and trust you can help them than it is to work with people who you’ve already persuaded (i.e. your past clients).

Real growth in a consultancy practice doesn’t come from attracting more and more new clients. It comes from gradually getting better at re-engaging past clients.

At some point, your outbound promotional efforts will plateau. The only way to keep growing is to ensure a growing percentage of your past clients re-engage you. You can see this below:

Now compare that same data without repeat business.

This data is illustrative, not prescriptive. But the key point is this:

A growing % of your revenue each year has to come from past clients if you want to grow.

If that doesn’t happen, you’re beginning each year from scratch and hoping you can persuade and be trusted by enough people to make a living. That’s not sustainable. Over time, the % of revenue from new clients should drop from 100% probably to something closer to 40% to 60%.

If you know that every time you acquire a client there is an [x%] chance they will work with you frequently over many years, then the value of each client increases exponentially. Better yet, you begin building your consultancy practice on more solid ground.

Invest As Much Effort Into Engaging Past Clients As Attracting New Clients

This is hands down the easiest way for most independent consultants to improve

A common mistake is to focus all your promotional efforts and sales activities on attracting new clients. And if you’re just starting out - that’s obviously what you should do.

But once you’ve worked with just a handful of clients, you need to invest as much time into engaging past clients as attracting new clients. You have to stop wishing clients well at the end of a consultancy engagement and

It’s simply impossible to grow a high six to low-seven-figure consultancy without getting a considerable amount of business from past clients. This is why we need to learn about long-term account management.

Long-Term Account Management

Adopting The Right Mindset With Your Clients

The mindset is relatively simple:

Once someone becomes a client, they’re your account for life.

Your goal is to do all reasonable things within your power to ensure they’re successful both before, during, and after working with you.

No, this doesn’t mean taking a Mad Men-style approach. The days of ‘entertaining clients when they’re in town’ are thankfully a thing of the past.

But having an open, positive, ongoing relationship is critical.

You should aim to constantly add value and be seen as someone who can help them achieve their goals is far more important.

Three Things You Shouldn’t Do To Engage Past Accounts

Let’s first cover what not to do in these situations.

There are three things I’d generally advise against:

1. Send out sales emails. For example, after working with a client you might periodically send them sales emails asking if they need further work done, offering services etc…Don’t do this. You’re teaching past clients to ignore you. This doesn’t add value to them. They’re too impersonalised.

2. Schedule ‘periodic check-ins’. This sounds like a good idea but, trust me, these will be routinely cancelled or rescheduled because there is no obvious value of anyone attending. People will look at their calendar and go ‘ugh’. It won’t be something they’re looking forward to.

3. Send out automated messages. Just avoid sending out any automated updates or reminders to past clients. You’re not dealing with 10k customers here, you’re dealing with a few dozen to a few hundred past clients. Keep it personal and relevant to them.

Now we’ve got past what you shouldn’t do, let’s focus on what you should do:

The Golden Rule: Always Add Value

Build a system where you can always add value to past clients

If you want to do this well, you should always add value.

Use a CRM to automate reminders to you to check in on past clients and then look to see if you can add any value. There are several things you can consider here:

1. Provide feedback on what the client is doing. If you’re able to track the outcome of your work, then see how the implementation is coming along. You can always suggest ideas or improvements. The way to stay engaged is to stay engaged on the project itself.

2. Provide insights or information the client didn’t already have and would be useful to them. Proactively seek out useful insights, information, or examples you’re seeing from elsewhere which might help them. For example, this might include:

   • Articles or books you recommend they should read (not yours!)

   • Relevant and interesting examples you’re seeing from elsewhere.

   • Great talks about the topic you’ve found.

   • Connections to others who are doing great work and they could learn from.

   • etc…

   You can occasionally include a question which might prompt a discussion (for example, “has [project] been affected by any internal requirements to embrace AI? I’ve been looking into this…”. But, generally, you want to always be adding value.

3. Connect them to peers. An easy way to add value is to constantly invite past clients to connect with relevant peers in the industry and help them build their connections. You might want to consider hosting private events or building a private community for clients. This is a great way to add value and build a network around you.

4. Create something valuable for them. A final option is to update your industry benchmarks and show them how they compare to other organisations. You can highlight what they are and aren’t doing well. This works best when you have several clients in the same sector you can benchmark.

Obviously, you don’t need to use the options above, but you should follow the same golden rule that you should always be adding value. If you can’t add value to clients (people you know well and have worked with) you have to consider what you’re doing as a consultant.

Make it your mission to keep your client at the cutting edge of the industry and following best practices.

As those practices evolve and improve, you can provide that insight and information to your client as well.

I’d suggest being in touch with a past client once every three months. If you can’t find a way to add value to someone at least once a quarter, it might be good to focus on improving your skillset by completing additional training courses or knowledge by undertaking more research with prospective clients.

Don’t worry about trying to make a sale. That’s not the point. The point is to ensure that if the client ever needs additional help, you’re the first person they turn to. And you might be surprised how often these relationships turn into something special.

Use a CRM To Manage Your Relationships

Don’t try to keep all this information in your head

A major step in your development as a consultant is selecting a CRM where you can begin keeping track of the accounts of people you’re working with and setting up automatic notifications and prompts to keep in touch with past, present, and future clients.

There are plenty of options out there (Hubspot, Monday.com and SugarCRM etc..), we use Pipedrive for simplicity (disclosure: Pipedrive are a past client - aha!).

Forget about all the automated messages for now. They can be a distraction. Instead simply make sure that when someone enters into your orbit, they’re entered into your Pipedrive system. Integrate it with your mailing list so you can keep track of all past interactions, and always have a date for following up with past clients.

There should never be a situation where you don’t have a future scheduled date to engage with that client.

I can’t stress how important it is to have a system which prompts you to follow up with clients to make this happen. If you don’t have this, it won’t happen.

Which would be a shame - because your long-term success is riding on this.

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Thanks for reading

Richard Millington