Many professional services firms have the bad habit of underinvesting in existing client relationships. Rather than spend time and money pleasing their current clients, these firms focus their sales and marketing budgets on acquiring net-new logos. They prioritize uncertain prospects over their pool of actively engaged (and paying) clients. This is a mistake, even if those existing clients are small and unlikely to engage in repeat business.

Here is a good rule to follow if you’re trying to build a quality professional services firm: Make sure every client is happy and that your highest-potential clients are thrilled. When a firm adheres to this simple rule, success is practically a given. It is impossible to overstate the importance of high client satisfaction to the professional services business model. When existing clients are happy, new clients are much easier to come by.

When firms focus too much time and effort on prospecting activities, they fail to create long and enduring relationships with their existing clients. This results in poor client satisfaction, fewer follow-on projects, fewer referrals to new clients, weaker client reference checks, and so forth. Poor client relationships create a steady headwind against the growth of the firm.

Chronically weak client satisfaction often results in a firm culture that prioritizes new client wins. A firm that has inferior existing relationships is like a water bucket with holes in it. There is so much potential revenue leaking out of the bucket at all times that the firm continuously has to scramble to fill it up with new clients. This is a fool’s game. Life and financial performance are better when your current clients are happy.

So, how do you invest in existing relationships? Below are a few best practices. For your highest-potential clients, you should be doing all of the following:

• Get your executives involved. Clients love it when they can speak directly with the CEO or a partner of your firm. Make sure that an executive is participating in a quarterly call, lunch, or meeting.
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• Learn the client’s industry and business. To best serve your clients, you need to understand the opportunities and challenges within their respective industries. You have to put in the work to educate yourself on how their businesses work. Most industries have various trade websites that are filled with perspectives on the future of the industry. Read those and get educated. Also, if a client is publicly traded, read through the quarterly investor conference calls and parse out the pressing questions from analysts.
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• Send out a monthly best practices e-newsletter. An email newsletter helps reinforce your firm’s unique capabilities and knowledge. The newsletter could be focused on a vertical industry or on a specific service line of the firm. Even if some of your clients rarely read the newsletter, it will keep your brand front-of-mind when their next services need arises.
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• Provide free onsite thought leadership sessions. Once or twice per year, put together a half-day workshop focused on a leading-edge topic that is relevant to a key client’s business and industry. Put one or two of your top experts in the room and provide insight that the client might not get anywhere else. The focus could be an introduction to a new technology or a new industry trend. Provide lunch and hand out high-quality printed versions of all presentation materials.
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• Do the basics well. Periodically take the client sponsor to lunch or dinner, ask insightful questions, set and meet expectations, and so on.
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When professional services firms focus most of their business development efforts on new prospects rather than existing clients, it is almost always a sign of trouble. In a healthy firm with happy clients, it is always easier to earn future revenue from existing clients than it is to find and win new clients. Firms that think otherwise are usually hiding from client satisfaction deficiencies.

One caveat to this topic is that if a firm has traditional salespeople, it may be fine to focus those folks solely on new client acquisition. If you’ve got great hunters, let ’em hunt. But this only works if senior delivery leaders in the firm, who are not day-to-day project personnel, are actively nurturing the existing client relationships.