Skip to content
  • There are no suggestions because the search field is empty.

How Does Client Sense Help You Identify Growth Opportunities

This article explains what a growth opportunity looks like in relationship data, where the signals appear in Client Sense, and how to take action on these signals

In this article:

Short answer

Identifying growth opportunities means reading the clients you already have for signs that more work is available, rather than going looking for new names. Client Sense surfaces those signs from communication data: clients whose engagement is spreading across your firm, accounts resting in a single pair of hands, referrers whose flow has changed, and companies whose profile points to services they are not yet buying.

Why it matters

For professional firms, as much as 80 percent of revenue comes from existing relationships. The opportunities inside that base are rarely hidden. They are simply unrecognized, because the evidence sits in communication patterns that the firm rarely has access to.

This is distinct from prospecting. Identifying growth opportunities looks at organizations your firm already works with. Prospecting looks at those it does not. The techniques overlap, but the starting point is different and so is the conversation you end up having.

Firms struggle here for a specific reason. Opportunity spotting has traditionally been a matter of instinct, and instinct does not scale past the accounts one person happens to think about. It also carries no weight in a partner meeting. A hunch that a client is growing is easy to dismiss. A record showing that client has gone from dealing with two people at your firm to nine in eighteen months is not.

What this looks like in practice

William Buck, an integrated accountancy firm across Australia and New Zealand, reached the point where their old methods stopped working. With more than 100 directors, 900 professional staff and over 80,000 contacts, tracking relationships through spreadsheets and pen and paper had produced a siloed picture in which people saw their own interactions but not the firm’s. Read the full account in the William Buck case study.

A worked example at your own firm might compare two clients of similar size. One has gone from two contacts across one department to nine across three. The other has narrowed to a single partner and a monthly billing exchange. Both are opportunities. The first is an account to invest in. The second is an account to rescue.

How to do it in Client Sense

Four views produce most of the signals worth acting on.

Look for change, not level

A client with high contact is not necessarily an opportunity. A client whose contact is rising is. Open the Engagement view from a company’s Contact Card and read the direction of travel across emails, meetings, departments, offices and contacts, along with fees where a financial system is connected. Widening departments and offices is the strongest single indicator that a relationship is broadening rather than simply busy.

Find concentration and white space

A heat map shows the connections between your firm and the individuals at a client as a grid, which makes both risk and opportunity visible at a glance. A column with a single dark cell is an account held by one person. Empty rows are people at the client nobody has met. Steps are in How to Run a Heat Map Report for a Specific Company.

Segment by company data

Company Insights enriches your company records with high-level publicly available information such as industry, size and social profiles, appearing across contact cards, Dynamic Favorite (Favourite) Lists, reports and search. It surfaces public company information only, never personal information, and can be enabled at no extra cost. This is what lets you ask whether the twelve manufacturing clients using one service should be using two. Details are in Company Insights, Built into Client Sense.

A Dynamic Favorite (Favourite) List builds on the same idea, updating itself against rules you set such as job title, company, industry or volume of contact, so a segment stays accurate without being rebuilt.

Check the obvious gap first

Before anything more elaborate, run a Cross-Servicing report between two practice areas where the client need follows naturally. It is the fastest route from data to a named list. See How to Generate a Cross-Servicing Report.

Tip: Signals compound. A client whose engagement is rising, whose coverage is concentrated in one partner, and who sits in an industry your firm serves well elsewhere is a stronger candidate than one showing any single indicator on its own.

 Turning the output into action

A signal is a reason to have a conversation, not a conclusion. What separates firms that convert from firms that report is what happens in the next fortnight.

  • Shortlist to ten. More than that and the list gets circulated rather than worked.
  • Test each signal against what people know. Ask the relationship partner what changed. Sometimes the rise in contact is a dispute, not growth, and the data cannot tell you which.
  • Decide what the opportunity actually is. A second service, a wider set of contacts, a review meeting, or a rescue. Naming it prevents a vague instruction to go and build the relationship.
  • Give it an owner and a date. An opportunity with neither is a note in a document.
  • Record the outcome. Otherwise the same signals reappear next quarter and nobody knows whether the last round worked.

Important: Client Sense records who communicated with whom and how often, not what was discussed. Rising contact can mean a growing relationship or a problem. Always check with the person holding the account before treating a signal as good news.

Common pitfalls 

  • Reading volume as opportunity. The busiest accounts are often the ones in the middle of heavy matters. Look at breadth and direction rather than quantity.
  • Chasing every signal. A firm that pursues forty opportunities badly does worse than one pursuing eight properly.
  • Ignoring the fee picture. Where fees are connected, a client with rising contact and flat fees is telling you something worth understanding before you propose more work.
  • Treating the report as the insight. The insight arrives when someone who knows the account looks at the data and explains what it means.
  • Only looking at the top accounts. The largest clients are already watched. The interesting movement is usually just below them.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is the difference between identifying growth opportunities and prospecting?

Identifying growth opportunities looks inside the client base your firm already has. Prospecting looks at organizations that are not yet clients. 

What counts as a signal worth acting on?

The most reliable are breadth and direction. A client dealing with more departments, more offices or more people than a year ago is broadening. A client narrowing to one partner and a billing exchange is at risk. Both merit attention, for opposite reasons.

How often should we look?

Quarterly suits most firms, aligned to whatever client review cycle you already run. Looking more often tends to surface noise, since relationship patterns move slowly.

The data shows rising contact but the partner says nothing has changed. Who is right?

Probably both. Rising contact frequently reflects a difficult matter rather than a growing relationship, and the system cannot tell the difference because it does not record what was discussed. Treat the data as the prompt and the partner as the interpreter.

Can we automate this process?

Partly. A Dynamic Favorite (Favourite) List updates itself against rules you set, so a segment stays current without rebuilding. Deciding which movement matters remains a judgment call.

Our partners resist BD teams telling them about their own clients. How do we handle that?

Bring a question rather than a conclusion. Asking why a client has started dealing with three more departments invites the partner to explain something they know and you do not. Arriving with an opportunity already defined tends to land as an instruction.