1,500 Corporate Accounts Was a Solid Base

A Canadian service business, with roughly $15 million in sales first met with us, we discussed how the core of their business was to maintain a strong core of corporate accounts to provide a relatively stable revenue base.

They also served non-commercial, retail, customers, but their strategy was to focus on maintaining their core accounts.

The challenge they were facing was that 1,500 corporate accounts were far too many for their internal sales team to keep in touch with and cultivate.

As a result, the team focused their attention on approximately 400 of the total 1,500 accounts. These were primarily the company's 'legacy' accounts that had been customers for years (decades).

Churn, Baby, Churn

Because the focus on corporate accounts was a key part of the company's strategy we agreed to focus our early sprints in this area - to drive effective reporting and insights.

What we discovered was that, on average, 60% of all new corporate accounts were no longer clients by the four-year mark.

This was a complete shock for management because their revenue had been continuing to grow over these four year periods.

What was happening was the core accounts were continuing to grow, as they were given attention and love from the internal sales team.

The new clients were largely left 'untouched' because of the internal sales team's capacity limit, and eventually went somewhere else.

Flagging Who May Leave, Well Before They Ever Actually Leave

Based on this discovery combined with the strategic importance to the company of growing its corporate account revenue, we built an analytic dashboard that the internal sales team could use to help prioritize their efforts.

We built a model that would flag changes (up or down) in the sales volume of every corporate account.

The internal sales team then used this to quickly identify corporate accounts that were growing - to make sure those customers were recognized.

Even more important, the internal sales team used this dashboard to identify any corporate accounts who had declining revenue. This would trigger a flag in the dashboard to alert the internal sales team of the revenue decline as soon as it happened.

This meant they could monitor that customer, and quickly take pre-emptive action such as phone call, customer service visit, etc.

By getting this information to the people who needed to act on it, in near-real-time, the client began to see improvements in the retention of new corporate accounts, while still retaining the 'legacy' accounts the sale team previously solely focused on.