How to ensure your client base is poised for growth

How you can prime your client base for retention and growth by practicing multithreading and executive alignment.

As businesses continue to brace for economic uncertainty, many firms are shifting their focus to minimizing risk and maximizing efficiency. One strategy that many firms are pursuing is to grow revenue by expanding their existing customer base through cross-selling and upselling. Cross-selling and upselling to existing customers can help to mitigate risk while providing a more predictable and efficient path to growth. However, growing revenue from your customer base is only possible when you have a stable, happy client base. It’s also much easier to grow your customer base when you have a web of solid relationships that you can rely on. So businesses need to focus on retaining their existing clients and building solid relationships with them. 

In this blog post, we will explore how revenue teams can prime their client base for retention and growth by maintaining engagement levels, practicing multithreading, gaining executive alignment, and strategically succession planning.

Maintain Strong Client Relationships with Lonely Client Reporting

Maintaining strong relationships with your client base is essential for growth. One way to operationalize relationship data is by leveraging lonely client insights. This involves monitoring and maintaining strong relationships with clients who may be feeling disconnected or under-engaged. With the help of Introhive’s Customer Intelligence platform’s Lonely Client Analysis, revenue teams can automatically identify at-risk clients and take action to re-engage with them. By keeping an eye on client engagement levels and taking proactive steps to address any concerns, firms can ensure that their client base remains stable and happy.

Multithreading Deals to Establish Influence Across Multiple Stakeholders

Establishing influence across multiple stakeholders is another important aspect of priming your client base for growth. Multithreading involves building relationships with stakeholders on both the buy and sell side of the transaction. This can help to ensure that you have a broad and deep relationship network with your client base. By establishing relationships with decision-makers and influencers across different departments and levels of the organization, you can position yourself for future growth opportunities. Strong revenue teams multithread because it’s a powerful technique that allows revenue teams to build a web of relationships that can help them retain clients and grow their revenue. By maintaining relationships with multiple stakeholders, revenue teams can ensure that their clients’ needs are being met, and that they have a broad and deep understanding of the client’s organization. This enables revenue teams to identify new opportunities for cross-selling and upselling, as well as identify potential risks that could threaten the client relationship. Introhive’s Multithreading Insights, provide dashboards that can be harnessed to reveal opportunities or gaps that your team should take to establish engagement and influence with a broad and deep pool of contacts across opportunities and critical accounts. 

Above the Line Selling to Align with Leaders

Another critical aspect of building a stable and growing client base is aligning with executive leaders within the client’s organization–executive alignment. This is known as “Above the line selling” and involves developing relationships with C-level executives, board members, and other senior leaders. By doing so, revenue teams can ensure that they are involved in strategic discussions and have a deep understanding of the client’s goals and objectives. This enables them to identify new opportunities for growth and demonstrate their value to the client.

​​Above the line selling can help to ensure that your firm is top of mind when it comes to future growth opportunities. By aligning with leaders and decision-makers, revenue teams can position themselves as trusted advisors who can provide valuable insights and solutions. Above the line selling can also help to establish your firm as a strategic partner, rather than just another vendor.

Succession Planning to Prepare for Departing Employees and Clients

Succession planning is another essential practice for ensuring that your client base is poised for growth. As employees retire or move on to new opportunities, it’s important to ensure that relationships with clients are not lost. Preparing for departing employees and clients is crucial to maintaining stability within your client relationships. By identifying key players within the client’s organization, revenue teams can ensure that they are prepared to maintain relationships and continue to provide value even after key employees or clients leave. 

Succession planning involves identifying key relationships and ensuring that they are transferred to other team members or stakeholders within the organization. By being proactive and taking steps to maintain relationships, firms can ensure that their client base remains stable and happy, even during times of transition. Introhive’s Succession dashboards give you the context to identify the account manager with the next strongest relationships to assume positions of outgoing key account managers. You’ll be able to provide your incoming relationship owners with the full history of the client relationships, making it easier for them to onboard and get up to speed while maintaining an exceptional client experience.

Growing your customer base is only possible when you have a stable, happy client base. Many firms are looking to grow their revenue by expanding their existing customer base through cross-selling and upselling. Revenue teams can achieve this by maintaining client engagement levels, practicing multithreading, aligning with executive leaders, and preparing for succession. By operationalizing these practices, revenue teams can retain their existing clients and build a solid foundation for growth.