A change of financial year is often a time to reflect on performance and plan for the next financial yea
You might be looking back at great revenue and profit for the last year or you might be looking at the missed targets and gaps in your revenue. Either way, going into your next financial year with a robust plan will help you maintain the great things and help you fill those gaps.
In a previous article, I gave my two favourite reflective questions. What did I (or we) do well and how do I repeat this? What did I (or we) not do so well, and how do I improve? A new financial year is a great time to be brutally honest with these questions especially when it comes down to your business development and sales. You need to be constantly refining and improving your approach to keep you and your firm moving forward. Apart from these two reflective questions, what else can you do right now to get fully geared up for the new financial year? Here are the three simplest and most effective things you can do to really focus you and your team on identifying, engaging and winning new clients:
Identifying where your existing clients came from “Success leaves clues”.
Spend some time looking at your previous successes with clients. How did you find them, what was the very first contact point with them? As an example, initial contact points could be things like networking, referrals, an inbound enquiry, or a conference. Once you look at all of the sources of your previous success you can reflect on whether you have stopped doing anything that helped you win clients. We all do it from time to time and this little exercise can help focus some of the thing you might want to invest some time on this year. This work and research will help you decide which activities you might need to do more or and which activities you might want to reduce or stop.
Which clients do you need to let go of?
It seems strange to be talking about letting go of clients to grow your revenues and improve your business development. This might feel counter intuitive, but please bear with me. Have you got one or two clients at the minute that you do a few (or lots) of additional work for outside of their normal fee-paying hours? Have you got a small client who constantly asks for more of your time than some of your biggest clients? Have you got a few clients who are stuck on a very old, very low price? Now is the time to offer them the opportunity to pay what you are really worth or find another firm. Think about it for a second, if you raise your prices (to reflect your real fees or hours worked for them) and they stay, then your revenue goes up, and if you raise your prices and they leave, it frees up your time to find a client who really does value what you do. You should be in a position where working with your clients is a partnership built on trust and both parties value each other.
Make like mother nature
This is a simple piece about aligning your activity and results in a meaningful timeframe. We encourage to have a strategic plan for business development that you then break down into manageable and effective quarterly plans. Why quarterly plans? Because that timescale gives you enough time to have an impact and put in the hard work for business development but isn’t such a long period that you will lose all of your opportunities for growth if the quarter doesn’t go well. We have learned that this quarterly approach is one that works really well in professional service firms and one that helps you achieve your goals in a structured and planned way. I love the work of Jim Rohn, and his ant philosophy. One of the things he talks about is “The ant thinks summer all winter and winter all summer”. In essence focus on the good times when you are being challenged, and when times are good remember there may be challenges ahead. Take time to invest in a robust stretching, challenging and rewarding plan for you and your team for the next financial year. I look forward to hearing about your successes in the coming year
