Find Your Missing £Millions

This week one Recruitment CEO announced she had found £7M additional revenue. The money all came from opportunities within her companies existing client accounts.

But I for one am not surprised. It sounds bold, but I believe this statement to be entirely true:

…Most recruiters can double their billings with the right AX strategy.

If that sounds like a goal worth pursuing then rad on as I break down how to set about finding the revenue you're missing.

Find Your Missing Millions

In 2019 I built a highly effective account expansion framework for a national recruitment business with over 400 consultants. We needed a way to make more of the clients we had won and had no clear strategy in place. The goal was to put revenue growth on autopilot.

With a large headcount it had to be simple, sustainable and scalable. And it worked. What we built helped the business increase revenue by over 20% in 6 months before COVID hit.

I have spent the last 5 years refining the process. And having shared the approach with dozens of high performing agencies over the years, I've learned a lot.

The False Premise

Having helped over 30 agencies build out their Account Expansion Strategy here is my biggest lesson.

You must score and rank your accounts in order to know how to treat them, but…

…Most recruiters score accounts on a false premise:

• Either they focus on job quality, not Account Quality.

• Or they focus on a clients value today, rather than its potential.

That means high value accounts get ignored because they aren’t performing today. The way you score clients should align with the 5 levers for strategic account expansion. If you’re not measuring the right levers future opportunities will be missed.

Read on and I’ll show you what I mean.

The 5 SAX Levers

Strategic Account Expansion relies on you having a strategy for growing accounts in five ways.

Lever 1: Time

The first lever you can pull to increase the potential value of an account is to spend more time with them. It's crucial you have a playbook for how to do this whilst adding value. Consider the events, meetings, calls, and other touch points you can have with your clients. Spending more valuable time with them is the basis for account growth.

Lever 2: Engagement

The topics you talk to your client about are a key determinant for the value you hold for each other. More strategic conversations increase your value; more transactional one reduce it. A client who will only talk to you when they are hiring will have less potential for growth than one who discusses their five year plans.

Lever 3: Collaboration

Having a variety of ways of working, service levels, products or models will enable you to increase the collaboration between you and your client. In doing so you'll have opportunities to deliver more value and in turn capture more value from the account. A recruiter who only works on multi-agency contingent terms will find account expansion tough.

Lever 4: Loyalty

Loyalty is found in feedback. What can you improve, how can you work better to support their goals, what do they love about your processes. That feedback should be built on data. By asking a client how they feel about your work and sharing metrics with them to shape the conversation you can prove yourself the only choice winning all the benefits that loyalty brings, including...

Lever 5: Advocacy

A great client spends time with you, then they talk about their goals, then they work more closely with you, then they commit more deeply and finally they shout about it. They give you reviews, testimonials, case studies, introduction and referrals. Securing this kind of value from your client is a sure sign of your value to them.

The Cascade

As you can see, the 5 Strategic Account Expansion Levers form a cascade - it's easier to get your client on video saying how great you are, if you've first taken feedback and discussed the data that proves how well you're performing. Similarly, if you want to move a client from exclusive to retained terms then knowing more about their overarching business strategy will dramatically help.

Equally when you feel a client is failing to give you what you want in a given area, focus on ensuring you have adequately addressed the previous lever.

Strategic Account Expansion

Once you've done that you can track the trajectory of each score and your rate of progress. Accounts that stall need work or need to be cut lose. Accounts that are in growth mode will be the best source of revenue going forward - until they're not.

Of course all this relies on having a playbook for each lever, a score card and a ranking system. But it is the SAX Levers that are the fundamental element in the entire Account Expansion Strategy.

If you want some help developing your Strategic Account Expansion process or more to the point - finding the millions you could be missing - let me know.

Keep Growing,

Ben

P.S. If you want support building out a strategic approach to account expansion and avoiding the common pitfalls I've seen recruiters fall foul of, let me know. I'm not saving we can definitely double your revenue, but my clients have seen first hand how much opportunity they've been missing when we get started.

P.P.S. If New Business is the more pressing issue for your business head to 90k-in-90days.com and let me know if you're interested to talk.