The Best of the Best

So what’s the best piece of knowledge that you’ve been given?

For me, it’s Peter Thomson’s Magic Matrix. Many consultants have used this piece of advice and credited Peter, so rename, some give no recognition. Why not credit the originator of the knowledge? Keep life simple.

The advice shares the principle of the story Acres of Diamonds, a South African farmer who sold up his farm to join the stampede of searching for diamonds on the other side of the country.  Two years later he returned to his original hometown – penniless.

To learn that the largest diamond in South Africa’s history had just been discovered - on the farm he had sold two years previously.

So, the parable is don’t go chasing new business, look and see what opportunities exist within your own client base.

How does the Magic Matrix work?

Like all ideas, it’s very simple.

Open a new spreadsheet within Excel, other spreadsheets are available, apparently.

On the y-axis list all your current clients.

On the x-axis list all your services/products.

The go through your clients and put a tick against in the cell for all the services that a client is using.

This gives a visual representation of all the services that you are delivering for your clients.

More importantly, it illustrates the services that you are not delivering.

Therefore, you have a visual representation of clients that you may be delivering year-end accounts, but not Corporation Tax, year-end accounts but not Personal Tax, Personal Tax but not wealth planning. You can identify opportunities for strategic planning or exit strategies, if they are not being delivered.

So straight away you have created a series of meetings that you can have with existing clients. Existing relationships with people who know, like and trust you. Or by arranging meetings with them, you will be able to verify this fact. You can never communicate enough with your existing clients. They will never be upset with you, for offering new ideas. I guarantee that they will be happy to discuss new ideas for their business and I also guarantee that revenue will follow from many of these meetings.

Of course, if you put an average annual fee figure against a service, you can work out the financial opportunity that exists for the service.

Total number of clients:

250Average Fee for Year-End accounts is ￡2,500

Number of clients not taking the Year End Accounts service is 100.

Opportunity: 100 x ￡2500 = ￡250,000

For a firm of this size, finding ￡25K under your feet is a massive opportunity.

Repeat this process for all the services that you deliver and you’ll be amazed at the financial opportunity available.

No need to spend time thinking of new campaigns to work with potential clients, pick the phone up and book a meeting with your existing clients.

Once you’ve assigned an average figure against clients, you can very quickly see who your Top 10 clients are, who are your Top 50 clients.

Are you delivering the correct Account Management service to these clients? What should you change? Are your Top 10 clients receiving the appropriate level of service? Are you spending too much time with the wrong clients?

If you are not running an accountancy business, but run a business with a sales team, you can work out if you have distributed your existing clients correctly amongst the sales team revenue.

Are the account manager’s distributed fairly?

Are your clients being looked after by the appropriate account manager?

I could go on, but I should have planted enough seeds to get you thinking.

However, only 18% of the people reading this article, will take any action. 82% will read the article and do nothing. (Fact provided by my good friend Abraham Lincoln, who states that 92% of all figures quoted on the internet are made up.)

Of course, you should be able to run this information from your CRM system, but most can’t. So export the information into a spreadsheet. Write a routine and do this on a monthly basis.

If your thinking of commercializing this opportunity the Peter Thomson and Mark Allen have beaten you to it. Contact Mark directly, I’m not involved in this project.

So thank you Peter Thomson, once I applied this idea to the business I was working at, we identified account management opportunities that were 150% of the existing new business target and consequently changed the makeup of the sales team and the future of that business.

If you run the analysis on your business, let me know how many opportunities you uncover and how much they are worth.

 I reckon you find over ￡100k, what do you think?

Feeling overwhelmed?  Apps, advisory and customer experience causing you headaches? Looking for a cure to the above issues and then grow your firm, whilst spinning all these plates.

I am currently working with ambitious Accountants, looking to develop to become a “Smart Digital Practice”.  Ideas to help your clients grow.

I have worked in the accountancy software sector since May 1996. I worked at IRIS ( Corporate Sales Director: 1996 – 2006) and Thomson Reuters Digita (Sales Director: 2008 – 2011). Since working for myself, 2011, I have consulted with Nomisma, onkho and PANALITIX, amongst working with many firms directly.

I can be contacted via LinkedIn, or [email protected]