How a pie chart helped me fall in love with our clients all over again
I made a pie chart for our planning meeting last week:
Whoops, wrong chart. I meant this one:
At first, I thought to myself, “Okay, nothing new here. New sales dominate our revenue.”
But then I noticed that the revenue divides into two logical groups: creating new relationships, and maintaining and deepening existing relationships:
When I grouped it in this way, it became obvious that our biggest source of revenue comes from maintaining and deepening relationships with our existing clients — people who have already paid us a license fee.
This is to be expected for subscription-based software, but less so for us. We’re a growth company, and our pricing model is an up-front licensing fee for a perpetual license, followed by a much smaller software maintenance fee in future years. New sales are still very important — all existing clients were once new clients — but existing clients need more of our focus.
To that end, we’ve created an internal “Client Services Team” with representatives from Support, Professional Services, Development, and Sales & Marketing. Our goal: 100% referenceable clients, 100% of the time.
It took a pie chart to make that happen.
(As an aside, I recently read The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures by Dan Roam. I now have a renewed interest in doodling for fun and profit, and the above pie chart started as a sketch. Thanks Dan.)
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 18th, 2010 at 11:49 am and is filed under Featured, ThoughtFarmer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I’ve been meaning to comment on this since you posted it. The other way to look at this slide is that you’ve essentially got 80% of your revenues being driven by license sales (new sales, additional sales and maintenance). Performance like that is really, really, really good. I’m virtually drooling as I write this. Do you know if this is common for the space?