A cool new innovation I’m proud of myself for stumbling upon is [drum roll]…
The Client Hall of Fame.
Ok, I’m sure I’m not the first to do this, but it’s been useful in our Q2 planning and hopefully it helps you too.
Most of us have something like a Client HoF in our heads, but it’s a powerful exercise to formalize it on paper.
At Sales Schema, to make it into the Client HoF and get a jersey ceremonially placed atop the rafters of our “Madison Square Garden”, which is actually a shared document in Notion, clients have to meet just two criteria:
- Retained for at least one year
- Fun to work with.
That’s it.
We searched a decade of records to find everyone who met this criteria, and we started to see meaningful trends and commonalities.
(Context: our company Sales Schema helps agencies and B2B service companies scale through targeted outreach).
It turns out our best clients are slightly bigger in headcount than we thought and their deal sizes are larger than anticipated, which makes them more patient (a hypothesis anyway) . Surprisingly there was no meaningful trend in terms of the services or verticals our HoF clients focus on.
A lot of business planning religions ask you to unearth a ton of cold, unfeeling statistics about retention, profitability, sales cycles, and conversion rates in order to make big decisions.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t know your numbers, but they’re risky when you’re trying to answer the most powerful planning questions, such as:
“Who should we sell stuff to?” and “How should we sell more stuff?”
In the attempt to remove emotion from decision-making, which is impossible, the quant-based starting point leads many of us to over-optimize around one metric at the expense of everything else.
I like the Client HoF concept because it feels like the right combination of logic and emotion, something like 80/20 former-to-latter. It lets you be more deliberate about the places where you will be emotional.
“We liked working with Jane and the team at ACME, they were cool”, is emotional, but it’s a recollection that helps your team find more people like Jane, and it’s a better starting point than a dozen metrics about conversion rates, sales cycles, and team utilization.
The Client HoF is like working backwards – you pinpoint the best clients then figure out what they have in common instead of the usual way where you try to figure out all of the possible ways that someone could be a great client, and then try to harness all of that noise into a target-able “avatar”.
The next thing I want to try is capping the Client HoF at 20 spots so we’re forced to zoom in further on the best of the best.
Have you implemented something like a Client HoF in your agency? How did you do it?
