Monitoring your clients’ portfolio — what for?

Laurent Guichard
CUBICLE
Published in
4 min readNov 16, 2020

At kopilot, we strongly believe that our app needs to move towards client analysis to better differentiate from accounting and reporting solutions.

Why exploring the client-side? Here are our five key principles:

  1. Wake-up call.
  2. Dynamic clients’ segmentation.
  3. Tailor-made client management.
  4. Prospecting your new “best clients.”
  5. Developing an operational guide.

1. Wake-up call sound

A lot of causes may explain a sales decline. Those factors can be extremely varied and combined within each-other: poor performance of salesforce, the raising of a new competitor, the evolution of your customers’ needs, the poor choice in client selection, the insufficient renewal of your clients, name it…

Analyzing your sales in real-time allows you to sound the wake-up call in the event of an abnormal situation and therefore react as soon as possible.

In case of an internal sales force failure, you may take steps to restructure your sales team or train your salespeople to perform better.

In case of failure with your current portfolio, the signals are feeble. It is no obvious solution that highlights the weaknesses of your clients’ portfolio.

2. Dynamic clients’ segmentation

Assessing your client portfolio's performance will allow you to rank all your customers according to various axes. We opted for the RFM framework.

  • Recency: Do we maintain our clients active enough?
    Clients being in different situations requires different actions. Know where your clients stand to adopt the most appropriate actions.
    ➡️ Plan the invoice of your active clients.
    ➡️ Propose additional services (products) to your sleeping away accounts.
    ➡️ Propose maintenance or an upgrade to your hibernating clients.
    ➡️ Play your last cards with your leaving clients.
    ➡️ Clean your data with your clients having no activity.
It is critical to keep a balanced activity within the portfolio.
  • Frequency: Is our sales model encouraging the recurrence?
    A recurrence funnel is a powerful tool to diagnose your clients’ behavior. How often did they buy something from you over the last 365 days?
    ➡️ Identify instantly the nearly recurring clients to boost your revenue.
    ➡️ Ensure your sales model matches the level of risk you find acceptable.
Identify where you lose your clients.
  • Monetary Value: Are we able to increase the value of our clients?

All three axes pursue the same goal: sorting your client to identify:

  • the best clients who represent a high potential growth for your company;
  • the loyal clients who do not show great potential growth, but rather a steady one;
  • the small clients who slow down your development and can easily monopolize more resources than they return to you.

3. Tailor-made management of your customers

Depending on the category in which a customer will be placed, your business strategy will differ. The customer portfolio analysis allows you not to miss out on sales opportunities and to focus on the highest value-added sales at the same time.

Your CRM will be more efficient when you develop sales and customer relationship strategies specific to each customer profile

4. Prospecting your new “best customers.”

Keeping an eye on the performance of the client portfolio can anticipate downturns. If you notice that a significant number of customers are leaving you, it might already be the time to start a prospecting campaign.

Knowing who your best customers will allow you to target prospects at similar organizations for the best customers and better train your sales force to better match your ideal customers.

5. Developing an operational guide

If you take the time and care during your performance analysis of the customer’s portfolio to document all the encountered problems and the provided solutions, you will gradually develop an operational customer relationship guide.

For every problem, think about possible explanations and successful solutions that have been put in place; and compile these pieces of information.

This evolving “best practices” guide will be shared internally with management and sales teams and your partners, too, to better manage the customer portfolio in the short and long term.

Linked articles

  • 👉 Recurring Revenue, here.
  • 👉 Sales Forecast, there.
  • 👉 The benefits of having real-time business information, click here.
  • 👉 60 performance indicators, over there.

kopilot is a digital CFO for the use of B2B SME business owners. It works well for companies having not the resources to hire a dedicated person for finances.

It integrates seamlessly with #Harvest, #QuickBooks Online, #Sage Business Cloud Accounting, and #Xero.

It takes less than 5 minutes to get the digital CFO ready. There is no-setup and nor installation cost.

There is a 14-day free trial, and the subscription is unlimited (unlimited data, unlimited users, unlimited sync), but per company.

kopilot.
Digital CFO for B2B SME business owners.

Try it on www.kopilot.io. It is free.

Stay tuned and think to follow us on Medium, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn; or keep an eye on our changelog. Interested in taking the trial, it is here: www.kopilot.io!

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Laurent Guichard
CUBICLE
Editor for

Founder. Inspired sometimes. Husband, father of two.