EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Which clients are your top 20% revenue generators?!
 

Have you ever wondered which of your specific clients bring the most revenue into your business and how you can use that to your advantage to generate more wealth and profit?

 

Well, stick with me, as in today’s episode I’m going to be talking about:

 

✅ How to find the 20% of clients that are generating 80% of your revenue.

✅ Where you should prioritise your focus on once you’ve identified those top revenue-generating clients

✅ And things you can do to ensure you remain your top clients' favourite go-to person!

 

I’m Lor Bradley, I’m a Business Strategist and I show coaches and service-based entrepreneurs how to scale a business beyond 7-figures by working smarter, and not harder.

So, have you ever heard those wardrobe decluttering experts say we only wear 20% of our clothes 80% of the time? And 80% of those clothes we might put on once in a blue moon!

Well, it’s true and this is called the 80/20 principle and this way of thinking encourages us to look at how we can maximise efficiency, or our returns in life and in our business, by focusing on the 20%.

And the 80/20 principle is exactly the same with our own clients, so if I said to you that approximately 20% of your client base are probably bringing in around 80% of your revenue and referrals, then you’re probably sat there nodding your head in agreement right now.

 

And just think, if you can pinpoint who your top 20% of clients are, it’s a much more cost effective way to scale your business whilst cutting down on ad spend and marketing costs, because it's much cheaper to capitalise on the clients you already have rather than investing in winning new clients to increase your revenue.

 

And today, I’m going to tell you how you can tap into that 20%!

 

And it’s usually the case that when you apply the 80/20 principles across what’s happening in your business, you’ll also find lots of other opportunities to streamline, strip back and identify those places where you really should be doubling down your focus on increasing revenue and profitability.

 

I’d love to hear how this resonates with you, so let me know if it does, but what you’ll usually find is:

 

💡 20% of your clients will generate 80% of your revenue.

💡 20% of your clients purchasing digital products (or courses) will usually take action, complete their journey and see the transformation happen!

💡 20% of your client base will be making repeat purchases.

💡 20% of clients will renew service agreements, or membership fees.

💡 20% of your clients will be your biggest brand, or personal cheerleaders.

💡 20% of your clients will be there and ready to buy from you if you reach out!
 

So, let’s turn those statements around and see what happens on the flip side as this is also going to give you lots of opportunities to tap into further revenue growth as well.

 

So, let’s flip it and say.

 

⚠ 80% of your clients will likely be generating 20% of your revenue.

⚠ 80% of your clients purchasing digital products or courses are likely to not take action, may not complete their journey or see the transformation happen!

⚠ 80% of your client base won’t be making repeat purchases.

⚠ 80% of your clients won’t renew service agreements or membership fees.

⚠ 80% of your clients won’t be your biggest brand or personal cheerleaders.

⚠ 80% of your clients are not ready to buy from you if you reach out!

 

And if you’re thinking “oh good grief, that’s terrible.” Well, yep, it does sound a little worrying when we spin the principle on its head in the other direction, but what it does is, it really underpins the importance of tapping into the parts of your business that ARE already working and focusing on the parts of your business that are the most profitable!

 

Alright, so let’s get started and talk about what you need to do to find that 20% of your top revenue-generating clients. Now I’m going to caveat this by saying that there are a few ways of doing this, and this is just my own example.

 

And also, depending on your type of business and the operational systems you use, you may find it easier (or harder) to find your profitable clients, BUT I’m going to say that it’s a research exercise well worth doing because, it’s going to set you on a clearer path towards generating even more profits in your business, improving your services and trimming back on what’s not working so well.

 

And when you find and focus on your most profitable clients, you’re going to naturally get clearer on:

 

✅ Who your ideal paying clients actually are.

✅ What they’re buying from you and,

✅ Why they’re buying from you.

✅ Who is most engaged with your business.

✅ What you need to do to serve your clients better and turn them into loyal cheerleaders of your brand.

 

And by understanding all these things will in turn boost your profitability, from your current clients, AND it's highly likely that when your clients become proactive cheerleaders of your brand you are going to receive referrals from them!

 

And if you’re constantly doubling down on loving your highest revenue generators, then you guessed it, you’re going to grow your business much faster!

 

What To Do To Find Your Top Revenue Generating Clients.

 

OK. So, with a bit of leg work, it’s easy to target your most engaged and invested clients. Here’s a really simple way to do it:

 

STEP ONE: Think About How You’re Going To Track This

 

So, get organised in how you’re going to do this exercise.

 

You’ll want to decide the time frame you’re going to work across and how often you’re going to do this, so for example, you might want to look back across a 12month period and do it every 12 months.

 

I’ll usually do this exercise once a year and I do it before the start of any new year as it’s a great way to underpin your strategy, and also to validate if your strategy is focusing in the right places!

 

If you have a large business with dedicated teams or people focusing on your marketing and customer care, then get them involved in the project.

 

And what you’ll need to do is, create a spreadsheet where you’re going to keep track of the information you’re going to be collating. Now you can use other types of online tools here, but I find that collating your information in a tabular format will work really well for calculating data but, you can use whatever you prefer. If you decide to track your business data in another format, you may have more manual number crunching to do, so just be aware of that.

 

Again, if you’re working with your teams, you might want to consider tools that are set up for sharing files across teams such as Google Drive.

STEP TWO: Find Your Highest REVENUE Generating Clients

 

Then for that period, I want you to collate your sales transactions for each client. This should be fairly easy to pull out of your accounting software or if you’re a content or course provider, from Kartra (or whatever platform you are using to deliver your courses). And by doing this you are looking for your highest revenue generating clients.

 

So, what I want you to do once you’ve collated this information is import it or copy and paste it into your tracking spreadsheet. I’ll leave an example image in the transcript for you to see exactly what I mean but essentially if you’re importing your sales transactions, you’ll potentially have many lines showing different transactions for the same client. And for other clients, there may just be one purchase.

 

So next, group the data by each separate client and total up your sales for each individual client. You’re going to need to be fairly competent using your spreadsheet software to number crunch that, but there are plenty of tutorials YouTube to help with grouping of spreadsheet data.

 

Now, I have revenue generated by clients from multiple sources so it takes me a little while to do this but, if you’re booking sales through one online system such as Kartra or ClickFunnels then the systems may be able to immediately provide total revenue per client and save you some time.

 

I also use Kartra which already does this, and you can generate an export of the data from Kartra very quickly.

 

And lastly in step two, once you’ve done that then sort your revenue data from largest to smallest so you can see your biggest revenue generating clients.

 

STEP THREE: Find Your Most ACTIVE Clients

 

Next, if you are a course provider (or provide another type of online service or membership that tracks user activity), then I want you to collate your user activity metrics. So, for example, you’re looking for information that tells you how many times your clients have accessed your products.

 

And in doing this, you are pinpointing your most active clients.

 

So, import or cop and paste this data into your tracking spreadsheet. And depending on what type of platform you are using; you may need to group the data just as I explained in step TWO.

 

And you should end up with a list of your most active clients.

 

STEP FOUR: Find Your Most Actively ENGAGED Clients

 

And then I also want you to collate all your engagement statistics for the last 12 months into individual worksheets. So, what you want to determine here is who are your most engaged users who might be commenting, communicating with other users or asking questions.

 

Separate each client into total sales revenue (or highest usage or highest engagement)

 

Pinpoint the clients who are generating your biggest % of your sales. (Math tip: Divide the total sales for that client by total sales for the last 12 months). For usage and engagement related metrics divide the total for that client (or audience member) by the total for everyone for the last 12 months.
 

Ok. So,

 

Where you should prioritise your focus once you’ve identified your 20% of clients that are driving your success, versus the other 80% that aren’t?

 

And once you’ve got to this step in this powerful exercise, I’ll bet that your mindset is going to really shift across into proactively keeping your business nice and tight, and stripping back on what’s not working.

 

I actually find this exercise so motivating because it forces me to stay smart with my decision making, to stay focused on what’s working and I’m also working money-smart because, my time is my money. And that’s exactly the same for you too.

 

So, I hope this podcast episode is going to renew your motivations to double down your focus on investing in what’s working right now.

 

And that’s where your focus should be as your first priority. You’re going to focus on exactly how you’re going to continue to serve and nurture those 20% of client who are fully invested in (and passionate about) your business.

 

There’s a number of things you can do and I’m going to walk through those now and I’ll give you links to further trainings I also have around some of these. And what I suggest is you create a mini-strategy around how you’re going to approach these things, and then put action steps into schedule to make them happen.

 

And once you’ve found your 20% create your action plan of how you’ll reach out to them to really capitalise on your relationship with them. And you’re going to do this in an authentic relationship building way. This isn’t about money, it’s not about upselling or generating more business or more leads. This is about nurturing and investing in your clients.

 

You can do these things in any order; it doesn’t matter, but I’m going to talk about the things you should be doing.
 

✅ This one is at the top of my list. Reach out and personally thank them for their support. There’s nothing lovelier than getting a gratitude letter!

 

✅ Leverage their testimonials everywhere you can because this is going to be a great know, like and trust builder with potential new clients. I highly recommend taking time with your top clients and creating mini case studies.

 

I’m doing this right now and I’m working time-smart by drafting some structured questions, I’m videoing the conversation with my client and then I can repurpose the content into 6 types of testimonials:

 

1) the full case study,

2) a video case study,

3) video snippets for Instagram reels/stories and so on,

4) audio snippets to insert into podcast breaks,

5) written testimonial snippets for the website and lastly

6) short quotes for social media.

 

✅ And then ask if you can jump on a call with them to ask a few questions. And listen to their feedback on how you can improve, and what else you can do to continue to help them transform their lives.

 

And don’t forget to ask them why they chose to invest in you over anyone else! And their answers here are going to be where you’ll need to look for common themes and then double down your focus on these themes in your business.

 

✅ And you can always go one step further with your clients and invite them to a group focus session where you can have a coffee on Zoom and seek feedback and potentially show them new ideas or get feedback on your product development.

 

Focus groups are a super smart way of working but they only work if your clients genuinely get value from the sessions, in other words they know you’ll be actively listening and taking their feedback on board.

 

✅  Also, ask them what they want you to talk about on your socials and what you’re currently doing that’s giving them the most value. Again, you’re looking for common feedback themes here. So, if you’re seeing a theme that’s frequently requested then go and cover it.

 

✅ Another great conversation to have with clients is around upsells. We’re often so close to our business that we sometimes fail to miss opportunities for how we can further serve our clients.

 

An example of this is when last year I was offering a 121 package which included a full strategy day and then a number of mentoring sessions. When I’d actually asked my clients how that’s working for them, many suggested I split that into two offerings.

 

So that meant they could either work with me for one day and then decide later whether to further invest in additional mentoring, and some suggested I included a further upsell option for retainer work as part of a super light touch approach after they’d successfully scaled. Now, I wouldn’t have got this feedback had I not asked them!

 

So, after making those changes, I’m seeing clients are staying for a longer time-period as they are financially committing in steps rather than to one end-to-end solution in one chunk.

And then, make sure you’re asking your top clients for referrals! You can give a reward to say thank you for any referrals they send your way.

 

For example, for anyone who refers a new client to me I will usually either offer them the choice of some mentoring sessions, or a 4-figure sum for referring into my most expensive mentoring package.

 

✅ Another great way of giving back to your clients is by giving them perks, early bird or VIP offers, and advance notice of new launches. Or just invite them to coffee. I love meeting my top clients for an informal coffee because we often don’t have time to chit chat in our working sessions, so a coffee date has become something I really look forward to and it gives us both dedicated space to talk about our relationship and what’s working.

 

Ok. So, there are few things that you should continue to do when you are focusing on your top clients. I have some further trainings on these, so I’ll link those into the show notes and on my website.

 

And these are to:

 

✅ Continue working on honing your UVP or USP (Unique Selling Points) so that you’re going to stay your client’s favourite.

✅ Continuing to double down on your business, your team and your own personal strengths.

✅ Continuing to remove friction from your processes

✅ Continuing to remove sales objections from your offerings.

✅ Continuing to go the extra mile for your clients.

✅ Continuing to find out what you need to do to keep standing out in your marketplace.

✅ Continuing to build a business model that supports client retention and builds loyalty.

✅ And, always make sure you’re unlocking their problems as this will propel you forwards in not just your client relationships but in scaling your business.

 

✅ And lastly, I want you to really absorb all this information that you glean from your top 20% clients and use it to continue refining your ideal paying client profile. Remember, your ideal paying client profile is one of the cornerstones of your business and getting this spot on is one of the fastest ways to grow your business!

 

So, next week I’m going to follow on from this episode and I’ll be diving into what you can do to uplevel the remaining 80% of your clients who aren’t nudging your business closer to success. We’ll talk about how that 80% can manifest itself in your business and also answer that question of, “if you should be focusing on what’s working, then should you be focusing on what’s not working as well?”

 

Have a great rest of day and I’ll see you next week!

 

Lor Bradley