Building a Dream Client Base

The latest seminar hosted by the Yorkshire group of the professional services marketing association, the PM Forum, gave some useful tips for building a dream client base which are relevant to most industry sectors.

Presented by Stephen Holgate from PACE Partners International, who has spent more than 20 years helping businesses to grow, the message was that marketers must identify actions that would help their organisation “win more of the right work from the right clients at the right fee”, an appropriate objective for businesses in any sector.

To help formulate what the perfect client base would look like in two to three years time, Stephen suggested sending a post card back from the future – the aim being to clearly define a vision for the years ahead. This postcard would include the sectors being worked in, the number of new and existing, the type of clients, the type of projects and relationships, fee levels and profitability, even client location.

Stephen introduced the PACE Pipeline which set out five actions required to reach the dream list; prospecting, promoting, projecting, protecting and pruning.  Focusing on the first and last actions, Stephen said the prospecting process had filters, the reasons for approaching a particular client. Among these were:

• existing relationships
•  likely quality of business
•  prestige value
• ability to meet demand
• potential longevity of the relationship.

 Triggers, the reasons that made clients more open to an approach could be:

• change in their strategy
• policy change.
• change in personnel
•  personal contact
•  sector growth

Pruning would allow space for growth and would influence the design of the client base for the future, being carried out where, for example, the volume of work and revenue with a particular client was low, there was no strategic fit or the association with the client created the wrong image or poor staff morale and high churn. Work could be left to ‘wither’ or the client serviced at a distance but ideally an ‘honest’ meeting would be the preferred option.

The advice is relevant for any business sector not just professional services and the list of actions for the marketer is key. These include:

• facilitating discussion on the postcard and the vision
• providing focus on the client list
• championing the cause internally, ensuring there is agreement with managers over the list
• managing the actions required.

A varied range of activity indeed, but the lesson here for marketers and business development managers is that the differing teams with their different priorities and different methodologies need to meet, discuss, share knowledge and ask questions of each other in order to help them all achieve success and build that dream client base.