Account Development Plans: Grow Revenue From Your Best Clients

Transform the way you grow key accounts.

Yes, you can achieve revenue growth and strengthen client relationships by developing comprehensive account development plans. In this episode, John and Mark share how to co-create effective account development plans with your clients. In this conversation, we answer key questions like:

• Why is it important to expand business with organizations you’re familiar with?
• How do you start building an account development plan?
• How do you prioritize clients for account development planning?
• What's an example of a simple message to get a conversation started?

Download the account development planning template: https://www.wainwrightinsight.com/landing-page-account-development-planning-template/

Connect with Mark on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markhwainwright/
Connect with John on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johntyreman/

www.breakingbizdev.com

Transcript

John Tyreman: 0:19

welcome back business developers, doers, sellers, marketers, all professionals of all stripes to another episode of Breaking Biz Dev. I'm John, he's Mark. And today we are going to break down how you can create new business opportunities within organizations or accounts that you're already familiar with. Mark, how are you feeling today?

Mark Wainwright: 0:40

I'm great, John. Good to be here today. We are, in the latter half, of this year. I think kind of recently, maybe we, uh, just, kicked off this whole new season and we're, we're into it and we're rolling. And, I'm just. Feeling good, feeling great about that. This episode today is about how we preserve and grow revenue and trust with our most important client accounts. And I call them account development plans. A lot of consultants and others out there may not call their clients accounts, but I use that word. sometimes I think the word client gets mixed up. Between is it, are we talking about the client company? We're talking about the client individual. So we'll just be clear about that. We're going to use the word accounts. If anybody has a real hard problem with that, you know, just substitute in whatever, like client, whatever, whatever word, if anybody's getting, can't get, can't get past that. So just use that. But yeah, we'll call these account development plans. And I use these in the work that I do, with my clients. and I think people find them challenging, but useful. Because, these take a good bit of work, uh, and there's a good bit of planning. And as we'll point out, there's some really, really important aspects to it that involve your clients.

John Tyreman: 2:00

in the conversations that I've had with a number of different folks about what they believe is broken in business development, one of the key, like common themes that keeps coming up in those conversations is this notion of, leveraging your existing accounts and expanding into existing accounts. you know, it's a lower cost of sale. Trust is already built. So it makes sense. earlier in a, past episode, I believe from the, series that we did earlier this year around create choreograph and contract, we talked a little bit about, this, this kind of visual framework that you have Mark, where it's like a target audience. Bullseye kind of a thing. There's concentric circles. And at the very center of it, there's people that you're familiar with, and then one layer expanded out from that as organizations that you're familiar with. That's what we'll be focusing on today. Then beyond that there's industries or markets, and then there's the great unknown beyond that. So it's those first two kind of smaller circles, tighter circles towards the middle that we're going to be talking about today.

Mark Wainwright: 3:00

When we talk about that concept of create, as we've spoken to in the past with the people that we know, people that we are closest to, we talked about using referrals to create new business. And we've spoken about that previously in a previous episode in that. That outermost circle, the great unknown, we use prospecting to go introduce ourselves and build familiarity with people and organizations that don't know us. And we don't know, right again, a previous episode where we've, we've discussed that the middle two, uh, is something I think we're going to start to tackle. And today we're going to talk about how we, like I said, grow trust and revenue with these organizations. That we know These account development plans are meant to be led by sort of the doer sellers or the account leaders. the client owners, the people that are client facing all the time, where, we find opportunities to have conversations with our current clients that are outside of. Delivering the work, right? That's a critical part of these accounts development plans is that these activities and these conversations are happening with our important client accounts that are having outside of alongside of the work we're doing with them, but outside of that. Right? So there, this is a parallel, this is a parallel track to that.

John Tyreman: 4:23

So we understand that it's important. We've got validation from outside perspectives that yes, if your focus is growth of your business, you should absolutely be focusing on expanding your existing accounts. but why, why, why is that important? Why is it important for experts do we're sellers, practitioners? Why is it important to create new business with organizations you're already familiar with?

Mark Wainwright: 4:47

Yeah. And some of these, are hopefully obvious, particularly with people that, are, In the world of sales, people that, have listened to us in the past, maybe some of these, these ideas kind of ring true, but first and foremost, new business and new opportunities with existing clients close faster, with, less effort, less time in the, in the sales pipeline. So overall, there's a lower cost of sale. Huge, right? We know what they want, that sort of thing. So, these things close faster. We avoid doing new business with existing clients. We avoid a lot of the startup costs that are typically involved with new accounts, getting invoicing and billing all kind of connected, getting the communication squared away, that sort of stuff. So that's helpful. Another aspect. Is we've worked with clients for a while, we get to the point where we understand how to be more productive and more profitable because we just know how they work. Right? So we have an existing relationship.

John Tyreman: 5:48

Well, and we know what they're focused on too. We know what their goals are. We know what outcomes they're trying to achieve. So it

Mark Wainwright: 5:56

from a business standpoint, I think those are really useful. There's two last ones here that, that kind of ring true to me. And I think, both from a sales and a marketing perspective, these are really critical. I think when we work with clients for a long period of time through various, projects, it just tells a better story. it helps us, talking about the, the sort of origin story. When we first started working together and how we partnered and we completed 1 project and another and another, or, maybe it's just someone that you're working with over a long period of time. And it's not a project based, but you're just. Working on that relationship over a long period of time. So it tells a better story. and the last one, is not necessarily, I think, top of mind, for individuals, but,, these long term engagements with existing clients allow us to create tighter, longer lasting human connections, right? Both in our personal lives in, in our work lives, it's important to develop these term mutually beneficial, respectful relationships with folks. Lot of people talked to that have these long term clients that says, Oh yeah, some people that, that I've worked with for such a long time at that client organization have transitioned to become really good personal friends of mine. Absolutely. That should happen. So I think these planning efforts, support that, and, you know, maybe even kind of enhance it.

John Tyreman: 7:09

Seems like a no brainer. So

Mark Wainwright: 7:11

of course,

John Tyreman: 7:12

why don't more firms do this and practice this and just go and try to expand their existing accounts and develop those relationships. It seems like that's, I mean, low hanging fruit is not a, you know, it's not, I wouldn't like to use that term, but I mean, it kind of applies here. Right. It's, it's easy pickings.

Mark Wainwright: 7:29

right? Right. if they're so wonderful, then why the heck doesn't everybody do them all the time?

John Tyreman: 7:33

Right.

Mark Wainwright: 7:34

and some people may do little bits of these, but I would say on whole, not enough, right? And not enough focus and not enough And I think there's a number of contributing factors. We get distracted with new opportunities. There's that whole grass is greener thing. Where, you know, a new, right. The shiny, shiny, the new client comes along and we say, Oh, let's spend some time, trying to win that work. And we'll spend less time with existing clients. Cause we kinda, we take them for granted a little bit. So that happens.

John Tyreman: 8:02

Yeah, that new logo would look really good on our slide deck. Right.

Mark Wainwright: 8:06

It's so true. Uh, unfortunately, Another one is, maybe something went wrong, you know, maybe in the course of our work together, something went a little bit sideways, uh, something went wrong with, with, the work or the relationship or communications or whatever it was, and it wasn't resolved. when the next thing comes along, people are thinking, uh, are we going to go through that again? Right? And I would say, in some cases, that's legitimate. But in many cases, issues can be resolved any, any work, any projects, anything with any level of complexity. There's going to be some issues, right? and it's not, how we completely avoid those issues. It's how we resolve them, right? It's how we address them, right? So,

John Tyreman: 8:47

Taking accountability.

Mark Wainwright: 8:49

And I mentioned this a little bit before. There's another, another reason. We just assumed that the relationship is fine. The more works around the corner, so we don't really spend any time on it, right? And that assumption can get us, get us into trouble. And, I would say the fourth one that's sort of top of mind for me is that our clients. You know, these long term clients haven't asked for anything more from us, so we haven't offered anything more

John Tyreman: 9:13

Right.

Mark Wainwright: 9:13

Maybe we would just kind of doing the same thing for them or these little bits and pieces here and there. We've always sort of thought there was potential for something more, but, we've never explored it. So

John Tyreman: 9:26

Well, they don't know what they don't know.

Mark Wainwright: 9:28

they don't know what they don't know, right? Good. so we need to have a conversation with them. And I think these plans do a good job of, helping firms be proactive to engage their existing clients. In those conversations. So there's, four reasons. I think we don't do it. And it's, it's unfortunate.

John Tyreman: 9:42

So I think you touched on something that's really important there, Mark, that is a great segue to starting to develop these plans and like your clients or these target accounts, your point of contact within those target accounts, they don't know what they don't know. And it's your job as a service provider to be able to look out into the future and see, okay, what are some additional ways that we could add value to this person, to this organization? And so you have a note here that it's really important to co create this plan with an individual client. let's unpack that a little bit.

Mark Wainwright: 10:15

When I bring up the, concept or the word planning, a lot of people conjure in their minds, we're going to get together with our team in the. Conference room with the big whiteboard, we're going to do a bunch of arm waving, and we're going to draw a bunch of circles and lines and arrows. And we're going to come up with a plan. And unfortunately the plan never sees the light of day because it's never created or developed with the client, either in mind or actually integrated into it. Right. So it's all just internally developed. It's all these what ifs and it's not informed by anything, outside. So code development gives you the opportunity to inject the client into this and to constantly, in very similar ways that we've talked about sort of the, the sales process. Bringing the client in and constantly being curious and asking them good questions and then hearing their responses and then reflecting your understanding and, coming up with this sort of big understanding of, what their needs are, what expertise you can provide and, and how you can help them achieve what they want to achieve. So this is totally in line with a lot of this sort of understanding we've talked about in the past. So. Anytime we develop one of these plans, we got to bring the client in.

John Tyreman: 11:31

Well, it's important to bring that in because it also validates the plan and it gives you that external validation of what you're trying to do. And I think that does a couple different things. Number one, you know, the client, feels, that they're contributing to this plan as well. And so they're invested in the outcome of this plan as well as your internal team. And then that's kind of giving your internal team. The confidence maybe is a good word that this plan is going to have an impact because you're co creating it with your client.

Mark Wainwright: 12:03

Exactly.

John Tyreman: 12:03

So you've got some, you've got, you've have a number of different P's of the plan and I want to get into that. So what are, what are the, give us the lay of the land here. Okay.

Mark Wainwright: 12:13

Well, before I get into that, let me just run through a quick, I guess it's another P the process, right? What are the steps? What are the one, two, three, four fives. Um, and then we can get into this, the whole P thing. And I don't even know why this came about John, but it did. Uh, but here is the first P is the process and I'll just run through it really quickly. So, get into this first one. We need to prioritize and select important client accounts to do this exercise with, and we'll talk about that. We need to pull together our internal team, start to develop this plan with the information that we have, already, the context, et cetera, and we'll get into all the, all the elements we have to. Engage the client account to uncover more information, right? To ask them questions, to bring them alongside this whole planning exercise. Then yes, they have to be willing to play along. We should set goals for this effort, whatever they may be. Sometimes there's revenue goals. Sometimes there's people goals. there's all different types of goals you can set with important client accounts. and then ultimately the final step in this whole process is we need to develop and sort of present some of these ideas. To the client that we've come up with throughout this whole planning process, that align with their needs and our expertise and help us grow revenue and trust. With these important client accounts. So there's the one, two, three, four, five, six steps in that. Now we can get to the peas, the other ones

John Tyreman: 13:36

All right. So we've got the process laid out.

Mark Wainwright: 13:39

got the process.

John Tyreman: 13:41

And so the, the first P on this list is purpose, principles, and vision. Let's talk about that.

Mark Wainwright: 13:46

Yeah. So this is, the, big picture. Okay. Before we spend a bunch of time. Doing this exercise. Let's make sure we all understand our why, which is the purpose. Why are we doing this? And it can be simple. These don't have to be a book. This isn't a narrative. This is just well, because they're really important to us. And we've worked with them for eight years. We want to continue and you know, the revenue is good and we can grow, et cetera, et cetera. What's the, what's the why behind it? Principles are, kind of the guardrails that guide this. Thanks. if we start heading down the path with this exercise and something takes a hard left turn, or they don't want to play along, or we start to get information that makes us believe that this isn't the right client account to be creating this plan around, what are our sort of principles or they want us to do something, they want us to do some additional work that doesn't align with our expertise, that takes us off course, you know, what are the guardrails here, what keeps us on track and what might take us off track and vision really is just a, A shared vision of success that we have internally. It's like after this exercise, six months, 12 months, whatever it is down the road. What does success look like? What's that little close your eyes picture in our minds that we have. So this keeps us on track. The other thing this does, this little section in the plan purpose, principles, vision does. When we get a little bit confused or sort of disillusioned on why we're doing this plan in the first place, we go back to this. This is our touchstone that says. Oh, right. That is important. Right. I remember we wrote down that purpose and that's exactly why we're doing this. So this is worth. This is worth our time.

John Tyreman: 15:17

I love the way you described principles as guardrails. And I think you touched on something that's important that I'd like to highlight is that, one of the slippery slopes that could emerge from this kind of activity. Is performing services that you're ill equipped to execute on. Right. And then that kind of muddying up the value that you create and, taking away from the services that you do have a refined area of expertise in. And so I think that's just something that I wanted to highlight that I thought that was really important.

Mark Wainwright: 15:48

You're listening to breaking biz dev

John Tyreman: 15:50

the podcast that beats up, breaks down, and redefines business development for the professional services firms of tomorrow. Your hosts are John Tyerman, founder of Red Cedar Marketing, the podcast marketing company for experts and professional services firms,

Mark Wainwright: 16:05

And Mark Wainwright, principal consultant and founder of Wainwright Insight, the fractional sales manager and sales consultant to professional services firms.

John Tyreman: 16:14

If you find this podcast helpful, please help us by following the show and leaving a review on Apple podcasts

Mark Wainwright: 16:20

and now back to the show.

John Tyreman: 16:24

So let's move on to the next P of the plan. And this is people in places. And before you dive in, I just want to say that folks who want to, learn more about account development plans, you have this awesome downloadable on your website arc, um, so folks can go to wainwrightinsight. com and you have this account development planning guide that folks should check out, but let's get into, yeah, the people in places,

Mark Wainwright: 16:49

good. So, so people in places, the people are obviously who, who's your internal team, who are your important client contacts, who are other individuals inside the client organization that you may not know. Those are all people. additional people could be other related contacts that are not within the client account. They could be collaborators, partners, et cetera. Right. So we're getting this nice list of people, internal, external partners, collaborators, all of that. And places are obviously related geographies. What different offices do, if you work with a client account, maybe they have multiple, multiple offices. Multiple offices, maybe they do business in in various locations. What are those things? Where are they? if we're doing a lot of work with 1 geographic office, is there an opportunity for another geographic office? So it's just sort of getting all the people in places down on, on this, plan. Yeah.

John Tyreman: 17:39

And then there's. Various degrees of importance of those people. I would imagine in your development plan, you have a relationship score. Is that something that you recommend people use to kind of like rank the different relationships?

Mark Wainwright: 17:52

Yeah, absolutely. And you can do this however you'd like. And it sounds a little strange, trying to bring some sort of quantitative measure of a relationship, but I like to do it pretty simply from a zero to a three, maybe where a zero is, this is an individual. We don't know at all. Uh, a one is, Oh, we know that person and we know of them. Right. So we are, Moderately familiar with them. Two is we have, a good working relationship. Everything's great. This is, this is a client contact. Maybe we interact with them regularly. And three is sort of the pinnacle of this relationship score, which is they are an advocate. Of ours, you know, when a need arises inside the client accounts, we are top of mind for that individual, or that individual is always willing to, you know, refer us and share our name to others who have similar needs. How this plays into this whole account development plans is that, you know, I mentioned earlier. Is that you can start setting some goals for this exercise. You can set goals around relationship scores. maybe you have one advocate inside a client organization and there's potentially. dozens, you can set some goals around getting to know more people, developing those relationships and creating, a whole host of, advocates inside a client organization.

John Tyreman: 19:07

Thank you for explaining that Mark. I thought that was a really important point and I didn't want to skip over that because when you're doing your account mapping and account mapping is an important part of a development plan, understanding, who are the role, the key roles within the organizations, what are the kinds of conversations that we need to have? And how do we have those conversations? Can we get a warm introduction? Can we get a referral to another department within the organization, within the account? So the next P that you have got on your list here is previous work and performance. Let's get into that.

Mark Wainwright: 19:37

again, this is, just getting all the information out about what work have we done previously? Is there, are there various projects or their various contracts? Let's get that out. Were they profitable? Uh, were we successful? Uh, Let's get that, that out because this is another thing that once you get it all out on a piece of paper and everybody looks at it and maybe we were, we're not profitable, you're thinking, okay, so if this is an important client account to us is one of our goals here to increase profitability is one of our goals to increase the number of contracts. It's a, you know, and that's kind of obvious, but, so yeah, a financial perspective I think is important with this exercise.

John Tyreman: 20:13

You got to understand, are you going to make money if you're going to, that's, that's gotta be factored into the equation of whether or not we pursue this account,

Mark Wainwright: 20:21

Yep, that too. That too. Yeah,

John Tyreman: 20:23

Um, all right. So the next P that you've got is problems or the relation with, within the relationship. So let's, let's dive into that one. Okay.

Mark Wainwright: 20:31

Yeah. That one's that one skipped oftentimes, right? People just push the, fast forward button, skip to the next problem, uh, or the next, next P. but we have to pause here because I really think that once we've got all this sort of information out and we've prioritized this particular client and, these are the folks we want to build this account development plan around and they're important to us and we have to pause and reflect on the client relationship. And there's more to it than it's just, Oh, it's fine, you know? Oh, sure. Yeah. Everything went well. It's fine. There's always more to it. There's always something maybe that was little that came up during, the work we did together last time that maybe wasn't really resolved. Maybe it was a communication issue. Maybe there was a scheduling issue, you know, who, who knows, right? Any number of issues and issues don't necessarily have this, fantastic way of resolving themselves. So it's really good to be proactive. So if there's a problem kind of sitting there, sure, the sharpness of of issues go away with time, but that usually takes a lot of time. Right? And I, and I think that The better approach is to be proactive. So if there was anything going on with the client account, maybe there's one of their team members or one of your team members that, it just wasn't a good fit or the relationship, wasn't there or whatever it is. Now's the time to bring that up because I have to tell you that your clients are not going to be willing to talk about all these wonderful future projects together. If there's this big elephant in the room, right? If you're just sitting there and you're. Yeah, but what about that thing last time? And, in professional services, rarely do we undertake work with a client. That's, simple, right? This stuff is complex, right? It takes a long time. it's typically expensive. So it is naive for us to believe that any project of any size will, come off with without any problems. So this is the time. to recognize and address them.

John Tyreman: 22:34

Clean out that lump under the rug. Don't just keep sweeping it under there. You'll trip over it every time you get in, enter the room.

Mark Wainwright: 22:41

exactly.

John Tyreman: 22:42

So the, the next P that you've got here, priorities, preferences, positioning, and your proposition. So you've got a few P's lumped into one there.

Mark Wainwright: 22:50

I love all these pieces. I think this is, yeah, I don't know what I was thinking when I came up with this. Anyway, so let's talk about priorities and preferences. I love those two things. It's, it's so wonderful to engage your client accounts and, from about priorities, what's really important right now. what's your strategic plan say? what's a priority for this coming year? That kind of stuff, like what's top of mind, like what's, what's at the top of your list, right? Tell us what's at the top of your list preferences are a lot of times tied to how do you like to work together? We've worked together for a while. We get the sense that you like to communicate this particular way. you have some, some preferences with how we invoice or bill or how we get to, how often we get together in face to face meetings, that sort of stuff. Let's just be clear about what your preferences are. Because if some things surface, some preferences surface, maybe that, we don't do well, or we don't do well enough, or maybe, we ask them the question, Hey, when you work with folks like us, what two or three things come up that you just love. And maybe this is with other consultants, maybe other folks that do similar stuff that we do. what do they do better than us? And conversely, what do we do? Better than other consultants you've worked with. Right? So what we do is we need to focus on and improve the things they don't like, and we need to enhance and improve the things that they like that we do well. So that's what preferences are all about. Positioning is where do our clients See us in the, world of, the solar system of consultants and other external experts around them.

John Tyreman: 24:30

That's right.

Mark Wainwright: 24:31

Clients of any, of any size have multiple external consultants. if it's real estate or if it's finance or whatever else, there's a number of external consultants that are working with these client organizations and, where do our clients see us, how do they see us different? Or better, or at least what's our slice of the pie that they assigned to us, right? Let's just clarify what that is,

John Tyreman: 24:56

Or, or how do we overlap with some of the other consultants and maybe there's an opportunity there,

Mark Wainwright: 25:01

great. Yeah, yeah, exactly. how can we either, do what they do better or. Work with them better. How can we collaborate with them better? All those things. So, yeah. So where do they see us? Right. we want to understand the picture that they see and the picture that they see is this, we have all these external consultants that are helping us out and they all have their own place, sort of in orbit around us. We just want to know that we just want to know where we are. So all of those things roll up to. Something that I refer to, and there's a bunch of names for it, but I refer to it as a unique selling proposition.

John Tyreman: 25:37

Tell us about this unique selling proposition, Mark.

Mark Wainwright: 25:40

So this is a statement. Typically, it can be a very short sort of one or two sentence thing. And it's generally a summation of, what we've uncovered in this priorities, preferences, positioning thing, right? It's because you have these particular goals or needs. in mind, because you like these things to be performed in a particular way and because you see our expertise filling these particular needs for you, this is how best we can work with you in the future, right? And provide the most value and, and serve your needs the best, right? Because of all of these, this information we've come, come to understand about you, preferences, priorities, et cetera. Okay. We then can serve you best by doing these particular things in this particular way. better and different than, others can. It's a kind of a summation and a clarification of the, of the working relationship

John Tyreman: 26:33

I like that. It's built on a foundation of understanding of that individual client account and their priorities, their preferences, how you're positioned in their eyes. I can see how that's related to your broader firm positioning, but it takes on kind of a unique flavor to each one of your clients.

Mark Wainwright: 26:54

it does. And, it's worth developing for our important client accounts. We don't work with different organizations, the exact same way we're all, it's all a little bit different, right? so it's worth the time and effort to, Go through an exercise where you come up with how do we characterize our unique relationship and, how can we serve you best and how can we help you achieve what you ultimately want to achieve when you get the results you want to get? It's that kind of a, it's that kind of a statement. And then ultimately, and we'll talk about this a little bit. Is it ultimately we put this in front of them. We say, did we get that right?

John Tyreman: 27:28

Mirroring and reflecting back to them. Yep. And so the understanding the priorities, preferences, and positioning lead to that unique selling or unique value proposition. The next P that you have on your list are the possibilities or potential new business opportunities within that existing account,

Mark Wainwright: 27:49

Reason I'm so explicit about where this comes in the whole process is, uh, I think there's a whole bunch of really important things we have to do first in order to, to get here. a lot of times when I'll talk to even, you know, one of my clients, I'll say, Hey, what's, what's going on with, your client, we should explore what's next for them. And the person says, Oh yeah, good. I'll just send them a quick check in email and see if there's any other work. And I said, wait, wait, wait, time out, time out. There's all these other things we have to do first, right? We have to, get a little bit bigger understanding of the organization. I mean, even if we're not developing a full blown plan with a specific client account, the first thing out of your mouth can never be Hey, what's next, right? It's, it's,

John Tyreman: 28:29

You need to bring that to the table.

Mark Wainwright: 28:30

Right. that comes later. the first things are, how do we do before? Is everything good? Is there anything we can improve? Right. Hey, what are your plans and needs in the coming year? time frame it is. And then ultimately we finally get to the point where we think, Hey, understanding what's most important to you and how you like us to work together. What opportunities do you have that fit that, or kind of understanding your plans, we think here's some opportunities for us to kinda work together. Right. Actually bringing those projects to them, kind of creating them. So that's what these future new business opportunity, that's what this section's all about.

John Tyreman: 29:04

Okay. So this is less of shooting from the hip. Oh, we need to go out and win more business from this account. Let me go check in with the prospect and it be a reactive process. So this is more proactive. This is bringing a level of understanding of, that organization to the table and being really intentional with what those possibilities could look like and making sure that that's mutually beneficial for the client and your business as well. and then lastly. So this, I'm assuming that this is, you know, a collaborative, document maybe, or, what is the plan?

Mark Wainwright: 29:42

I think the plan is really, what do we need to do? Who owns that, what tasks and activities are involved with that? What are our internal deadlines? And, ultimately what do we want to achieve here? so it's, do we want to, grow X amount of revenue? Do we want to introduce ourselves to 20 new people? Do we want to take our relationship score with these? Six individuals from ones to twos or twos to threes, that's where we bring the whole measure of success to this exercise. So, it's a table, right? It's got the, who does what by when, and, what's our measure of success to that. And the reason I put this to the end is that, now we've gathered all the information we need in order to really set out a sensible plan. And, we're able to understand. what we want to achieve and how we're going to measure that achievement and boom, we just set it out right there and it shouldn't be grandiose, but it should be, you know, achievable. And yeah, so the plan comes next and then there's a bunch of activities due dates and everything else that kind of flow from that just to give everybody sort of some perspective on this, the development and execution of these account development plans is something that generally takes months. And it sounds, that sounds like a long time. It shouldn't take. Two years, but it also shouldn't take two months, right? It should generally speaking. I think it's something that we need to develop internally. We need to start working with the client account, maybe schedule some conversations with them, get that understanding, reflect on it and build it, and then come back to them with this understanding and some, ideas about how we can work together in the future. And I think that whole process takes a little bit of time. It shouldn't take too long because ideally, this is a spark that, reignites the relationship a little bit. Maybe it re engages us. It lets us both focus on the future together. So hopefully it's something that we can develop. And execute on, heck, I don't know, over, over the course of six months, plus or minus. And, just bring some new focus and some new energy and some good momentum to our client relationship.

John Tyreman: 31:47

Well, you're probably delivering services that, you know, at the same time. So it's not like this is your only priority with that account too. So you're kind of managing, delivering on services versus, projecting out to the future and seeing what the possibilities are and planning for that.

Mark Wainwright: 32:01

Right. Right.

John Tyreman: 32:02

We touched on it earlier and I want to get into it as kind of like our last segment here prioritizing these accounts. Let's talk about the process for internally selecting the accounts that you want to go after.

Mark Wainwright: 32:16

Yeah. And, and some of this might be obvious and some of it. might need a a little bit of research, different consultants, different companies that I work with have different ways of, grading or rating or prioritizing these different client accounts. Some of the obvious ones are, revenue, how important are they financially to, to us? But that's, that's not the only one some people will just stop right there and say, well, we'll just do this with our biggest clients. The problem with just focusing on those biggest clients is that maybe, you know, and there's, there's a sort of a, an account management sort of sales term here. That's that's share of wallet. what is our share of wallet with a particular client account? If we're at or near a hundred percent of their annual spend on our expertise, the possibility to grow that is limited. But if our share of wallet is small relative to everything they spend with experts like us, then we have the ability to grow that revenue. So. Lots of revenue from specific clients is great, but, if it's not going to grow, if there's very little opportunity for us to double or triple that over the course of a year or two, then, is this development plan necessary, right? maybe what we need to do is just focus on the client relationship, and it's built into the name. These client development plans are designed around growth, right? we want to work with organizations. Sure that are great. Partners of ours, but we also want to work with ones that, want to grow and want to grow with us.

John Tyreman: 33:43

Yeah. That's a good point. I suppose another lens from which you could look at is, how big of a slice of your own revenue pie does that client represent? And if it's, a third or more of your total revenue pie, maybe you're becoming too reliant on that one account and you need to diversify your account portfolio or make those pie slices a little bit smaller.

Mark Wainwright: 34:06

and there's some other criteria you can use. You can use the, connections or contacts criteria. do they have a lot of important individuals in their organization that we don't know? we connected really well with just a few and there's a whole bunch more to meet? Are they in different geographic areas, where we do work? Can we grow with other offices? and I think there's other criteria that maybe is a little more sort of qualitative in nature, which is, are there future plans, hopes, dreams, in alignment with where we want to go? Right? do they want to do things that we want to do in our future? Or do they just want us to do the same old, same old again and again and again and again, right? Hopefully we can find some, alignments in our sort of future plans, that take us both where we really want to go. So. are, there's just a handful and I think there can be, others, not too many, but if you picture it, you can do kind of a scoring matrix, you know, when you put your criteria down and you start to rank them, one through five or whatever it is, that's a good, hopefully, fairly objective way to approach this whole sort of ranking thing because individuals and organizations can say, Oh no, no, my client, My two clients are most important. We're going to do those. And you say, wait, time out, let's find some shared criteria. Let's, try to take an objective approach at, scoring that. And lo and behold, maybe there's very little growth, possible at your client accounts. And, we already know everybody there's not a ton of growth potential there. So these development plans are focused on growth.

John Tyreman: 35:37

I like that. And the weight of each of those criterias can be different depending on your firm and where you are in your own, growth maturity and where you are against your own goals. And I think it's important to go through that, laying everything out on the table and going through that exercise of ranking and prioritizing them because you want to avoid that knee jerk reaction and you may be making a poor decision. So, yeah, I think that's a great kind of overview of, how to prioritize those, accounts for development planning. as we close here, Mark, maybe folks that are listening to this, they're having a hard time getting started or they don't know how to get the ball rolling for developing an account development plan. If you could leave, like what's a simple message that folks can use to just get a conversation started with their clients, um,

Mark Wainwright: 36:19

Sure. I think that's important in this, in this sort of co-development. the co-development nature of these plans is, critical. They have to be willing to walk alongside, you, as you co-create this whole plan. And, the hope is you can find a client in your important client accounts, that is willing to play along. Right. And maybe it's just something as simple as, look, you're one of our most important client accounts. So we'd like to take the time to create a plan. To uncover ways that we can work together in the future and we can help you achieve really what you guys want to achieve. There's hopefully going to, be some back and forth. We have some questions for you. We want to know what your plans are in the future, et cetera, et cetera. And this ultimately, is all about helping serve you better. It's about helping you achieve what you want to achieve and finding out how we can do that. So that's kind of an approach that people can take and, hopefully People out there can think of maybe one or two client accounts. Say, oh yeah, we have a great relationship. we probably could get to know them a little bit better. and something like that statement, that is inviting them into this, process, not laborious, not too much time, but just a process that helps us both clarify how we're going to work together. we'll help

John Tyreman: 37:35

Well, you, we, talked about earlier, this process can take six months. So getting started now and starting that conversation and yes, that back and forth, that's part of it, right. You know, and, and finding all those pieces and building this plan one piece at a time takes time and dedication and effort, consistent effort over a long period of time.

Mark Wainwright: 37:52

it does.

John Tyreman: 37:53

well, Mark, this has been a great episode. We went over account development plans and how, you know, why they're important, all the different elements of an account development plan, how to prioritize accounts for development planning, and then how folks can get started. So, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us

Mark Wainwright: 38:11

Yeah, it was a good episode. Thanks, John. Until next time.

John Tyreman: 38:14

until next time.