Take some time to evaluate your key relationships. Maintain the ones that continue to drive your business forward, but clean out those that are no longer contributing to your success.
Your Key Relationships
We recently discussed some tips for re-focusing yourself in the wake of tax season. Today we will hone in a bit deeper on one particular area—your key relationships.
In ABLE, we call these key relationships your CRoPs—that is, your most important Clients, Referral Sources, and Prospects. Here’s a quick refresher of each of these three types of contact relationships:
- Clients – Your top clients are generally the top 20 percent, and they often generate up to 80 percent of your business. When you focus your efforts on these key relationships, you position your firm to supply more business to these top clients.
- Prospects – These are your most coveted leads—those that are most likely to bring the greatest value to your firm. It’s important to maintain close contact with them. Strive to be available the moment a prospect requires accounting or advisory services.
- Referral Sources – These contacts are valuable because they contribute vastly to your firm’s business development efforts. Referral sources come in a variety of forms, including former colleagues, current or former clients, non-competing firms, and even your own friends and family!
Performing Your Spring Cleaning
The post-tax season is the best time to pause and evaluate your key relationships. Your clients are fresh in your mind, and you likely have an idea of who is in your top 20 percent. Similarly, you know which prospects and referral sources panned out over the last calendar year. Take the time to record this information while it is still fresh. Use your findings to map out your plan for engaging your key relationships in the coming year.
ABLE’s CRoPs system makes it easy to keep up with your key relationships. For each CRoPs tile you create, you choose the number of major interactions you’d like to have with that contact each year. ABLE’s dashboard indicators reflect the status of your key relationships by highlighting each tile as green, yellow, or red. Keep your tiles green by recording major and minor interactions with your key contacts. As you perform your spring-cleaning, review the number of major interactions you have set for each contact and adjust accordingly.
Need some more help creating and maintaining your key relationships? This article from Money Crashers offers some additional advice on maintaining good business relationships.
Want to see the CRoPs system in action and learn how it can help you further develop your most important key relationships? Schedule an ABLE demo today!