We lost a client yesterday. More accurately, they did not renew their agreement that is ending in a few days. This really did not come as a surprise, we had be warned by the recently departed IT Director that the CFO never bought in to our services. When we went back to our original notes from 2018, the writing was on the wall that this would not be a long term relationship no matter how much money or time we saved them.
Things to take into account:
When the agreement was signed the CFO refused our terms and insisted on a lower percentage split due to the fact that “we were saving them so much money that our fee was simply too much”. Despite the fact that had we not done our job they would have happily paid their carriers 40% more. When your value isn’t appreciated at the start its likely it never will be.
We have had 6 points of contact within the company, three of which were IT Directors in three years.
In 2018, the client had 72 devices, used 120gb, spent $6,100 per month, with an average cost per user $84.72. As of January 2021 they have 143 devices, use 629gb, spent $6,662 per month, with an average cost per user of $46.58.
If this client did not use our services based only their previous average cost per user, their monthly bill would be at least $12,114.96, not $6,662, an ongoing monthly savings of $5,452.96.
What are our key takeaways? If a decision maker doesn’t appreciate your value at the start, its very likely they never will, no matter what type of results you show. Two, its counterintuitive, but in this case, the more transition, the less value and understanding they saw. Lastly, we can lose this client knowing we more than held up our end of the agreement in both savings and service, and gained a new client from one of their departed IT Directors.