Once you’ve landed the lead of your dreams, hopefully after tracking them using a system in my last blog, it’s important to continue to track information related to them and their business. This information can be a gold mine when it comes to interacting with them, servicing them, and identifying opportunities for upsells.
You can use my Agency X-Ray system to not only track important information relating to your leads, but also to track the information you need to have at your fingertips with your existing clients.
Let’s walk through the most important information you need to be tracking about your clients and how you can use it to improve your business. At the end of this post, you’ll have all the information you need to level up your existing CRM.
Client Details You Should Be Tracking
The client information you need to track falls into six distinct categories:
- Demographics: Information that can help you identify places to find future leads.
- Internal: Recordkeeping information you should have on hand.
- Client Rating: Your estimation of how important the client is to your business.
- Technical Details: Information related to their website build.
- Revenue: Information relating to the fees they are paying you.
- Analytics: Information that helps you refine your process.
Demographic Information
The information you track in this category needs to go beyond name, address, phone number, and point of contact. You also need to be tracking bigger picture details that can help you identify a niche, a great lead source, or what clients are looking for from your business.
Three examples of this kind of information are:
- Company industry
- Services we have provided
- Lead source
When you track bigger picture information like this, you are able to spot trends in your clients and hone your marketing to take advantage of those trends. For example, you may notice that lots of construction clients find you through Google Ads. Knowing this allows you to create more specific ads targeting that audience.
Internal Information
This is information you need to know for internal record-keeping purposes, such as:
- Which team member built the website
- Date they became a client
- Have I sent them my Website Owner’s Manual. Thanks Kyle at Admin Bar for this awesome product!
- Have I sent them my W9 for tax purposes?
Client Rating Information
This category of information has really helped me find and retain the right clients for my agency. After being in business for almost 20 years, I have found that, sometimes, clients are not the right fit for me. Tracking this information allows me to only take on clients that I know will be a good fit and avoid overloading my team’s plate with clients we never should have taken on.
This is a modification of a system I learned from the good folks at Agency Mavericks/WP Elevation.
I rate potential clients on a scale of 1-5 in each of these three categories:
- How compliant are they with my process? Will they have a dedicated point person? Are they committed to quickly answering questions to speed up the process? Will the same people be available for in-depth planning meetings?
- How big is their budget tolerance? Are they expecting gold star work at a bronze level budget?
- How good is the client for my future/portfolio? Will the work we do for them stand amongst our other projects? Is the client in an industry that I’m trying to break into?
Currently, I only work with clients that score 12 or above. A good way to find your baseline is to run your current clients through this rating system and get an idea of where your current client base scores. Once you have an average rating, you can use that as your base or decide to make it higher or lower based on your current workload.
Technical Details
These technical details are great to have at you and your team’s fingertips, especially if you are hosting the websites you build.
- Website host/IP
- Domain registrar
- DNS location
- Email host
- Are they set up in a WordPress management system (ManageWP, MainWP)?
Tracking technical details about your clients is also a great way to identify upsell opportunities.
- Do they have a privacy policy (such as Termageddon)?
- Do we host their website?
- Are they on a care plan?
- Do they have a custom WordPress dashboard?
- Are they using our Sendgrid/Postmark?
Revenue Information
One of the key parts of running a successful business is understanding your revenue stream. It’s crucial to be able to analyze your business’s numbers to know if you’re pricing your services correctly or if you’re leaving money on the table.
These are details like:
- Project bid
- Final project price
- Money from hosting and care plan
- Total recurring revenue
- Do I need to change their recurring revenue?
- How are they invoiced?
Analytics Information
Tracking this kind of information allows you to not only have a great bird’s eye view of your process and timeline, but also allows you to know where you need access to help your clients’ out with their analytics.
- Project kick-off date
- Project go-live date
- Do we have google analytics access?
- Do we have google tag manager access?
Client Tracking: 3 Mistakes to Avoid
When you’ve been working with agencies helping them set up their own tracking systems for as long as I have, you learn a thing or two about what common mistakes agency owners make when using these kinds of tracking systems.
Mistake One
Stressing over what tool to use. There is no one right tracking tool to use. I use Airtable because it’s what works best for me. You might use Excel or GoogleSheets. Don’t stress about the vehicle when it’s the journey that’s important.
Mistake Two
Storing your data in more than one tool. That said, you really should only be using one tool for tracking. You’re setting yourself up for confusion and, eventually, failure if you spread your data around in a variety of places. One tool means one place that people know they can check for the latest information.
Mistake Three
Not using the information when you have it. One thing that drives me bananas is watching people spend hours brainstorming information to track and setting up their system only to abandon it shortly after or never use the information they collect. The information you gather is only as valuable as the insights you gain from it.
Let’s get tracking!
Now that you have a better understanding of the kinds of client information you need to be tracking, check out this 5-minute video to see what my client tracking system looks like in practice. If you want more information about all of the things my tracking system can help you accomplish, check out my Agency X-Ray course.
