The majority of consulting business owners are striving to build a sustainable consulting business, which we define as one that will thrive whilst enabling you to play the role that you want.

Systematically growing your existing accounts is one of a handful of critical strategies that will enable you to achieve this goal.

At the root of this strategy is adapting your team’s approach to meet the needs of your clients – both as people and as organisations.

Here are 40 ways to help you achieve your ambition right now, developed by Marc Jantzen, Founder of The Consultancy Growth Network, and extended by members of our community.

Implementing just a handful of these will increase your probability of success and, ultimately, the value of your consulting business.

...FROM WITHIN YOUR ORGANISATION

1.  Separate the function of client delivery and client growth. Otherwise key account management will always take a back seat to reacting to client work.

2.  Don’t assume your team knows how to grow accounts. Continually build internal capability and mind-set through training and coaching. For example, explore their fears of being perceived as ‘salesy’ and help them script how to ask for an introduction in their own words.

3.  Where possible, anchor your key accounts with engagement leaders who are permanent employees and are incentivised to sell-on, even if your delivery model is heavily weighted towards associates. This one individual will be better positioned than anyone else in your team to build that crucial trusted advisor relationship with key stakeholders on behalf of the firm. - Caroline Boston, New Minds

4.  Avoid complacency. When you have been working in an account for some time and your relationships are strong, there is a risk that proposals for additional work are not as thorough as they would be for a new client. Of course, we would expect them to be shorter, but be sure to retain high standards of both delivery and selling through-out.

5.  Apply product development thinking to service development to help you devise a modular approach to your proposition, and create the building blocks that can give you longevity and the ability to deliver more value for your clients. - Augusto Negrillo, Growth Expert, The Consultancy Growth Network

6.  Encourage your client to enter an award at the beginning of the programme. It guarantees that you will have a written case study and deepens your relationship. It can also result in a real commitment to investing in high quality implementation and provide natural upsell opportunities.

7.  While on one level, successful capability building reduces the need for your services, it also creates much higher levels of client trust. So get beyond the easy soundbite (awash on every proposal deck) to really understand the challenge of capability building in your account teams. - Dom Moorhouse, Growth Expert, The Consultancy Growth Network

8.  Map out the various types of work you’ve delivered to your clients and client segments and spot the ‘white space’ – where there is clear potential to leverage existing relationships to promote complementary service lines to grow those accounts. - Jon Stead, CMap

9.  Encourage your co-owners and partners to become informal mentors to key client sponsors. Book in a quarterly conversation to act as a sounding board, be that to support them technically or with corporate politics. You don’t need to charge for the support, but it keeps you front of mind when the next big opportunity is being discussed at a senior level.

10.  Trade any concessions you make (including going the extra mile) for internal introductions to other senior stakeholders in the account. - Simon Goodison, Smarter Not Harder

11.  As you extend your network within a client account, switch up your communication methods by using personal video messages sent to a target’s inbox. They convey the body posture, bright smiles, and trust-building non-verbal behaviours that usually get lost in your voicemails and traditional text-based emails. - Yaniv Siegel, Vidyard

12.  Involve your more junior consultants in account planning activity – they are your eyes and ears on the ground. They can also be providing insights and ideas to reinforce the capability of your firm, so encourage and help them develop a commercial mindset early on in their career. - Caroline Boston, New Minds

13. Set targets by individual key account, but where possible reward your team based on portfolio performance. No-one can forecast a single account cancelling the contract because it’s just been acquired, or doubling their investment because they just received a grant.

14. Marketing campaigns that deal with the challenges being faced by new client markets are just as relevant as those that go after existing markets. When you’re designing your campaigns, remember your existing and lapsed client base to help build visibility and credibility amongst an already warm audience and re-ignite lapsed conversations. - Ali El Moghraby, The Consultancy Growth Network

15. Introduce your client to other valuable contacts in your network who (just happen) to buy from you the services you want to cross-sell into their account. - Simon Goodison, Smarter Not Harder 

16. Broaden your proposition so that it goes beyond the primary change you’re trying to create. Offer packages to help your clients sustain the change – this gives your proposition greater longevity, taking the pressure off the need to continually find new clients.

17. Train your team to be crystal clear on your propositions, the specific situations where they can best create value for clients, and how they deliver value to that person. Everyone should be able to articulate a killer client story for each of your core propositions whenever the opportunity arises. - Deri Hughes, Honeycomb PS

18. Instil a discipline of regular review and sharing of ideas on how to grow your accounts. Use a standardised template to ensure speed, transparency and consistency of accountability.

19. A solid onboarding process can significantly improve client retention and upsell potential. It can also be used to bring other client stakeholders into the fold. Send a relevant case study soon after the sale, to re-affirm the decision to work with you, and send a video hand-off where the client's primary pre-sale contact introduces the Customer Success Manager (or equivalent in your business). - Matt Hodkinson, TGO

20. Right from the start, have the end in mind: a killer case study. This will help you focus on your evolving goal and reduce the risk of costly errors. - Annie Spilsbury, Grasshopper Ant

21. Don’t let your senior talent get stuck in legacy accounts where the profit margins don't match what you can achieve in new accounts. Remember that revenue is vanity, profit is sanity. Strategically focus your best people's efforts on further building out your most profitable relationships. - Jon Stead, CMap

22. When a client waves a carrot and asks you to deliver an implementation project at reduced day rates, be careful. Once you reduce your day rate you have anchored that value in the minds of the client and whatever they say now to convince you to do the project will be long forgotten when you pitch for future advisory work.

...BY UNDERSTANDING INDIVIDUALS

23. Find out who your clients admire. Are you connected to those people, and if not, could you be? Could they be a guest speaker at one of your events or would they join an informal dinner with your client and other influential peers in the industry?

24. Measure your important relationships and get feedback on client perception of their relationship with your organisation. Target improvement in perception by relationship, such as 'how will we take this director from passive to promoter?'.

25. Write a white paper and position your client as an authority in the subject. Ask them to write the foreword or feature their story as a case study. As you build your profile you can also build theirs.

26. Involve your client in think tanks on the future of your proposition. How do they think you could stay ahead of the competition? What do they think you should offer to the market? How do they believe you can stand out?

27. Within client organisations, broaden your network beyond the senior levels. Take time to find up and coming talent within your clients’ teams. Help them achieve their next promotion by identifying ways that they can start to deliver more value too.

28. Work hard at subtly understanding what motivates your key sponsors – to impress their boss, leave a legacy, work less hard, look good in front of their team, have a social impact or get a promotion. In addition to achieving the business aims, align the benefits of working with you with achieving these personal goals.

29. Review who your sponsors are connected to on LinkedIn and then ask for specific referrals. Make it really easy for them to affect the introduction by writing them an introduction message for them to edit.

30. Speak alongside your client at a conference, about the change you have managed and the value you have created thanks to your partnership. Any opportunity to spend time with your senior sponsors outside of the day to day that focuses on building their profile will serve to deepen the relationship.

31. In the course of providing such stellar customer service that the client cannot imagine doing without you, listen to the pains they articulate, help them evaluate their internal capability to solve their challenges and then provide a cure for their pains. - Robin Sturgis, Infofluency

32. When you are about to run a medium-term change programme (12-24 months), invest in a team building exercise that brings your team together with the client team. This will help you understand each other’s strengths, weaknesses and motivations from the start. When a deadline is missed or tension arises you will be far better placed to work it through, retain the account and grow the relationship.

...BY UNDERSTANDING THE CLIENT ORGANISATION

33. Understand your clients’ competition and market place as if it was your own. Then use your own network to expand value for your client and make introductions and referrals for additional support as needed. 

34. Benchmark your clients’ performance against their competitors and/or leaders in their field. Proactively offer solutions to improve their ranking.

35. If you’ve got a target role in mind, don’t be too narrow in your out-reach strategy. Cast the net wider than just one job title. If you can’t directly access the buyer you’re after, get leverage with other people in the business first. They might have more influence than you think. - George Berrington, The Consultancy Growth Network

36. Be proactive and meet senior stakeholders who may be impacted by the next phase(s) of a programme. Inform them about the scope of the assignment and help them identify how it could impact on their area of the business. This wider discussion can identify the challenges in other areas of the business and highlight whether you could help to address these. - David Bailey, former Growth Expert, The Consultancy Growth Network

37. Be sure to communicate the value of the impact you have created. Document it. Past victories are too easily forgotten in the heat of a change control negotiation!

38. Find out what new areas of skill development, training and experience are needed within your client’s teams. Use this to work out how you can help with improving team morale, skills and overall departmental productivity, and offer your insight and ideas to achieve those aims. 

39. Map your relationships across the client organisation, colour-coding based on their advocacy for your firm and the value you can add to them. Actively ask your strong promoters to refer you to others who will benefit most from your advice. Label the role of each person and identify who your organisation needs to develop ‘mirror’ relationships with. - Deri Hughes, Honeycomb PS

40. The point you know that you have made it to trusted partner status is when your client sits down with you to contribute to the building of your account plan. Most (if not all) consultancies reference working in partnership on their website. In truth that usually manifests in ‘flexibility’ – the consultancy bending over backwards at the whim of the client. True partnership is 2-way. Peer to peer, joint account planning is the pinnacle of strategic alignment between two organisations.

For more actionable insight into building a sustainable and valuable consulting business, become a member of The Consultancy Growth Network. As part of an international community of collaborative peers, you will have access to strategic advisors and specialist experts who can help you build a thriving consulting business.