Will your clients grow?

Hey, everybody! Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute. This week, coming to you from Omaha, Nebraska. You know, I've been having a lot of conversations with agency owners around setting new business goals and growth goals for the year. And one thing I want to remind you, because I think this gets forgotten a lot is remember that the gold standard, the best practice for agencies in terms of your go-get number is that 60% to 70% of your go-get number should come from existing clients. In other words, let's say you want a million dollars of new business this year, 600,000 to 700,000 of that million should come from your current clients. That's the gold standard. Now a lot of agencies don't hit that gold standard and the reason they don't is because their account service team hasn't A, been told that that's their goal, B, they haven't been incentivized to sell into current clients, but most important of all, they've not been given either the tim e or the tools or the coaching to create growth plan for every client, to look at the client's business and ask yourself, how can we help them grow their business?

And some subset of that growth is going to be work that we can do for them. The ideal growth plan, though, means that some of your suggestions and some of your recommendations have nothing to do with how the agency makes money. In other words, you're actually being a great business partner and you're suggesting things to your client that may or may not line your own pockets, but they are the right things for them to do to grow their business. And when your AEs show up that way, when they show up as a business-thinking partner and they start bringing ideas and suggestions that, to the client, it's very clear that you're not just trying to sell them something, but you really are thinking about their business and you're applying what you know, and you are making good marketing and sales recommendations, and maybe you're even sticking your nose into things that are outside of marketing and sales, which is absolutely fine. Your whole goal is, how can I help our clients grow their business? So retain more of their customers, get new customers, increase their pricing, whatever it may be and for every client it's going to be different, but most AEs are so busy just making sure the work gets done that you've already been contracted to do that they're not thinking proactively or as proactively as they could or should about the client's business. So, if you want to hit that gold standard of 60% to 70% of your net new income for 2022 comes from existing clients, it means your AEs need to have a plan and you need to help them make that plan.

All right, I'll see you next week.