Your delivery team knows more about your client than your CRM ever will

Think about your biggest client account. Who knows the most about it?

It’s probably not the account manager, and it’s definitely not the CRM. It’s the consultants, developers and project leads who are in the client’s offices, meetings and inboxes every single day.

The two-hour problem

Take a typical consulting account. The account manager might spend two hours a week with the client. The 15-person delivery team spends around 45. Across a year, that is thousands of hours of conversations the commercial team never hears.

In those hours, people hear things that matter:

• A new budget is being planned for next quarter.
• The sponsor is unhappy with how reporting works today.
• A competitor came in to pitch last week.
• A new leader is reviewing every supplier.

CRMs track transactions. Selling happens between people.

Why it never reaches the CRM

It isn’t that delivery teams don’t care. When we spoke to them, three reasons came up again and again.

It takes too long. Nobody on a busy project wants to fill in another form.

It doesn’t feel safe. Passing on that a client is frustrated can feel like criticising a colleague, or yourself.

Nothing comes back. If you share something and never hear what happened, you stop sharing.

What good looks like

The firms that grow existing accounts best make it easy, safe and rewarding for the whole team to share what they see. That means:

• Keep it short. A quick voice note beats a long form.
• Protect people. Make the insight about the client, never about the person sharing it.
• Close the loop. Tell people what their insight led to, and give them credit.

It matters, because existing clients are where the economics are. Work with existing clients is won almost twice as often as work with new ones, and winning a new client can cost up to 25 times more.

Where Foxlove comes in

We built Foxlove to do exactly this. Delivery teams record a check-in in under three minutes. Foxlove removes sensitive details, works out what matters commercially, and puts it in front of the account manager, who can act in one click. Then the person who shared it sees what happened.

Your people already know where the next opportunity is. The job is to make sure that knowledge arrives.