Why your happy clients might be leaving you
As the director of a UK services organisation, you deliver excellent work, yet you may find yourself in the same position as other CEOs, with sales growth having flattened or beginning to drift downwards.
One issue is that organisations often look at the wrong signals of relationship health. CEOs frequently mistake invoicing as evidence that a client relationship is secure. “They seem happy” is another misleading measure.
Don’t rely on invoice value
To reduce risk and grow revenue, we recommend a new approach to these relationships. This involves systematic client management, shifting the organisation from individual intuition to structured systems for key clients. For example, consider how we measure success. Revenue has traditionally served as “proof of safety”, but it is a lagging indicator. By the time a decline in invoicing appears in your financial accounts, the client may have stopped ordering. Relying on revenue as a health check is like looking out the rear window while driving: not recommended!
Other measures of client relationship health
Organisations also use client satisfaction to predict client retention, but we find this unreliable. Satisfaction is just a baseline and does not reflect commitment to your future mutual growth. Another measure is NPS, which gauges how likely clients are to recommend you. While useful and common, NPS does not account for competitors, cultural differences or business blockers.
A “single-threaded” approach, where you rely on just one contact within the client organisation, is risky. If your only contact moves roles, your entire network within that organisation can vanish overnight. This is why “stakeholder breadth”, the width of your network across different departments, is another measure; it turns out it's a strong leading indicator of relationship resilience. A wider network helps you surface blockers: people who you may not even know. And they exist despite your main contact being one of your champions.
In summary, there are several ways to measure relationship health, and each has its own trade-offs:
Measure | How well it predicts | Strengths | Weaknesses | What it tells you |
Revenue | Very low (it lags) | Easy to take from your finance records | Shows a problem only after the loss | What happened last year |
Client satisfaction (CSAT) | Low | Picks up day-to-day friction on projects | Can give false comfort | How the client felt at one moment, not their commitment |
Net Promoter Score (NPS) | Moderate | Standardised and easy to benchmark | May not reflect the views of budget holders | General sentiment, which can mask risk |
Share of wallet | High | Shows your true competitive position | Hard to measure unless the client is open with you | Where you rank among the client's suppliers |
Stakeholder breadth | Very high | Earlier warning that a relationship is weakening | Needs mapping by hand, and the discipline to keep it current | How resilient the relationship is and where it can grow |
A combined set of measures, as used by clients of Symbioss | Highest | Best when you need to rethink how client relationships are managed | Takes commitment and time | Where the risk and opportunity sit among your key clients |
Predicting growth requires a different, more systematic and structured approach to managing your client relationships. So instead of settling for “satisfied”, you should ask yourself if you are becoming more valuable to your clients. Hand in hand with this, focus on widening your contacts and understanding their long-term plans.
At Symbioss, we have developed a system to measure, plan, act and govern client relationships, which we implement alongside your teams. We developed it after many decades of managing client relationships and experiencing the same painful issues.
If you're feeling the pressure of stagnant sales despite doing great work, and you would like to chat about how to spot relationship drift before it turns into a loss, get in touch.
Liz Ashton, Director
Comments