Is your organisation’s growth falling short of its potential?

You are responsible for growing your organisation’s revenue and reputation. Despite your best efforts, that growth is proving elusive.

You win a new piece of business and lose another. Your services are strong, yet existing clients grow slowly and new ones deliver less than you expected. It is tempting to be sanguine and assume things are working well enough. Organisations track the revenue their clients bring in closely, but often manage the relationships that produce it far less carefully. In our experience, the cause often lies in the relationships themselves: how many you depend on, how well you understand them and whether anyone is aware when one starts to weaken.

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Common client relationship issues

The issues we encounter most often in B2B services organisations, and why each one holds growth back.

Too much of your revenue rests on too few clients

A handful of long-standing clients carry the organisation, and new wins never reduce the dependence. If one of them reviews its suppliers, a large share of your income is at risk, and the same exposure lowers the value of the business when you come to sell it.

10 to 20%

is the discount a buyer can expect to apply to a UK agency’s value when one client accounts for more than 20% of its revenue.

Alto Accounting, January 2026. Adviser guidance, not research.

Long-standing clients are drifting away

Nothing has gone wrong that anyone could point to, but contact has thinned and your team is no longer invited in at the start of new projects. Research finds that the decision to leave is cumulative, building through a series of events over time; in our experience, by the time revenue falls it has been building for months.

60%

of B2B customers are indifferent and a further 11% are actively disengaged.

Gallup, April 2016, cross-sector. Defection research: Hollmann, Jarvis and Bitner, 2015.

Your key client relationships sit with one or two of your people

A few senior people in your team have won and held your most important clients for years, and nobody else knows those clients as well. When one of them leaves, retires or steps back, the client can go too.

the chance of a client following a person who leaves, once that person has served the client for three and a half years.

Raffiee, Strategic Management Journal, 2017. Peer-reviewed; US lobbying clients.

New decision-makers at your clients judge you differently

Contacts change, and the people who replace them owe you nothing: you must win the relationship again. Younger decision-makers, now the majority of buyers, are more critical of suppliers, and many buyers research options with AI before contacting you.

90%

of business buyers born after 1980 cited dissatisfaction with a supplier in at least one area, against 71% of older buyers.

Forrester, 2023. Global; dissatisfaction is not intent to leave.

Recognise any of these?

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Leaders cannot see the client portfolio clearly

Each client is managed separately, so the leadership team cannot say which relationships are strong, which are weakening and where attention would make the greatest commercial difference. Forecasts rest on what each team reports, and decisions about where to put people rest on instinct.

45%

of sales leaders and sellers have high confidence in their organisation’s forecasting accuracy.

Gartner, February 2020. Measures confidence in sales forecasts; cross-industry.

Your CRM holds data, not client insight

Some organisations have no CRM; many more have one used only for contact records, or barely at all. Either way, it does not tell leaders how each relationship is doing, and the real knowledge sits in inboxes and memories.

76%

of CRM users and stakeholders say less than half of their organisation’s CRM data is accurate and complete.

Validity, 2025. US, UK and Australia; Validity sells CRM data software.

You measure satisfaction and fees, not the strength of the relationship

The survey scores look reasonable and the invoices are paid on time, so the relationship is assumed to be healthy. Yet neither a satisfaction score nor an invoice tells you how much the client values working with you.

57.9 out of 100

is how advisory and accounting practices score for the strength of their client experience management, against 62.5 across all industries.

HLB and McorpCX, June 2026. Sample size not disclosed.

Growth inside your clients is left to chance

Opportunities for more work sit inside your existing relationships: new departments, new needs and new people. Some are found by chance or by one determined individual, but there is no consistent way to spot them, agree which to pursue and follow them through.

11%

of professional services organisations with a relationship management platform almost always use it to identify new contacts and growth opportunities.

BoardEx, 2020. Vendor research; sample size not published.

Our perspectives

See the evidence

What these problems cost

Every client you lose has to be replaced, and replacing one is slow and expensive.

new customers can be needed to replace the value of one that is lost.

McKinsey, Experience-led growth, March 2023. Consultancy estimate from client work, not a measured study.

What changes when we work together

We work with your leadership and client teams on the relationships that matter most. We complement your CRM rather than replace it: your CRM records day-to-day activity, and we show where each relationship is heading and the action it requires.

Revenue protected. You see which client relationships are weakening earlier than invoice values alone would show, and act before revenue falls. Key relationships are held by the organisation rather than one person, and new contacts at your clients are won over deliberately.

A clear view for leaders. The leadership team sees the whole client portfolio: the strength and vitality of each relationship and what it is worth beyond the fees.

More reliable growth. Each important client has an agreed plan for growth, and your team follows it through.

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Three new orders in four weeks, stopping client drift

Before

Growing its business with PR agencies had long been a board goal for a global media rights business, but a key agency client had drifted: one contact, irregular meetings and sporadic orders.

What we did

We ran a pilot: a RelaValue Scan and an in-depth assessment of the relationship using the RelaValue Index module, which identified the gaps. From that, we agreed focused actions.

Outcome

Within four weeks, the agency placed three new orders, plus a service expansion and a new line of work.

“A huge thank you for all your work on helping us to develop our business with PR agencies. As you know this has been a strategic objective of the Board for a long time and it was particularly gratifying to see it finally happen and to get these good results from it.”

CEO, global media rights business