The Problem
Stalling agency growth and agency new business is an issue many of us encounter and can, if you are scaling for sale, become a very real concern and cause of much hand wringing. “Why is it …” we were asked the other day by a new client “that so many agencies of our type grow quite spectacularly until they hit fee income of £2m and then can never get past that barrier?”
In our experience it is because of client churn rate and a lack of sufficient investment in new business to counteract it.
Measurement
The way to assess your client churn rate is to divide the number of clients lost (or value thereof) by the average number of clients you have (or value thereof) over a year and multiply by 100. Ergo, if you lost 4 clients during a year and had an average of twenty, then your client churn rate is 20%.
A salesperson should generate three times their cost in sales (GP).
So if you want £250k GP of new business, expect it to cost you £75k in salary and contributions, or one new business person.
Starting from a base of £250k in Y1 sales, Figure 1 shows what happens over time in this scenario.
Figure 1.
Solution
To counteract this stalling agency growth and deliver sustained growth, you should increase your new business target by the previous year’s churn rate each year. This, of course, is all well and good and many agencies do, naturally adopt this rationale. However, where many fall down is in how they implement the strategy. Many simply increase their existing new business team’s target from, say £250k to £500k and say “go for bigger clients!” or worse still, sack their existing team and fall for the promises of a fresh new business director with a ‘little black book’ of contacts they take from agency to agency every two years.
Figure 2 shows what can happen if you take the approach of increasing your new business budget by the churn rate rather than just the target.
Figure 2.
You can read a related article HERE which looks at the different hunting strategies many agencies employ to help them win more new business to avoid stalling agency growth.
We also recommend you read this article, 11 Agency Growth Secrets from 6 of the best founders.
