Yes, And: The Slippery Scope of Account Growth

Borrowed

"Deadlines don't budge in a project that recognizes the REDPOINT PRIME. When someone comes up with a new and valuable idea in other environments, the team extends the project deadline to accommodate it. When a new idea comes into a REDPOINT-based project, the first question asked is, 'Can we do it and keep to our schedule?' If not, the idea is recorded and reserved for later consideration. When a deadline is in jeopardy, REDPOINT demands a decrease in scope that doesn't risk the value of the outcome. People become amazingly innovative when a leader takes this position."

From "The Primes" by Chris McGoff [Book]

Learned

Growing existing clients is one of the best forms of growth within agency. Even when you invest, sales cycles are typically shorter and less costly, the team that already knows the business, the client gets more value, which means a stronger case study. And coming into a year with a strong base of existing accounts makes revenue growth that much more in reach.

Account growth can happen through the client, but for the most part, it comes from our understanding of the client’s goals and proactively bringing ideas to the table. What happens after launch? What other activations or features would make the project more effective?

What’s interesting, though, is that the same instinct to add value can also get us in trouble.

If we’re lucky, the client loves our “pitch.” We’re excited, too. We may have already shown them how it could come to life. Even if we say, “Great, we’ll put together an estimate,” no one has laid out the implications. In many cases, there’s a plan already in motion. Let’s say it’s a website migration with a launch date and goals we committed to months ago, on a schedule that was never designed to absorb something new. And yet, we just did.

I’m in the tail end of putting an addition on our house, so the contractor metaphor is very real. Imagine talking to your General Contractor and coming up with an idea together. You ask whether they could do it. They say yes and quote a nominal amount because they’re already there. You move on, expecting it’ll get done. What you don’t hear is that the project you hired them for just moved weeks out to accommodate the request.

There’s a fine line here. The temptation is to get careful: create a backlog of ideas to present later, hold the team back from sharing anything until we’ve estimated the scope, slow the whole thing down. There’s a version of this I respect, where the deadline doesn’t move, and any new idea gets parked until the next phase. But "careful" gets heard as "no," and it takes away the very thing that grows the account.

More than once in the past few months, I’ve had clients say something like: “we’re okay with whatever the cost is, we just want to know if you can do it and what the timeline looks like.” They’re not waiting on an estimate. They’re waiting on an answer.

To me, the simple approach is “yes, and.” Yes, we can do this. And here are the implications. The first question isn’t what it costs; it’s whether we can do it and hold the schedule. If we can, great; if we can’t, that’s the conversation: budget, timeline, impact on requirements, or all three. Is this critical enough to impact the project? If so, why?

Most of this comes down to timing. The implications have to move at the same speed as the idea, in the same conversation, not a week later once we’ve sorted it out internally. Waiting doesn’t spare the client the bad news. It just delivers it when there’s the least room left to do anything about it. And in my experience, naming the constraint early usually improves the idea. The team finds a simpler way in, or a smaller version that ships now.

Thought

Where might "yes, and" help me this week?