Cross-Selling: What is Your Firm's Lifetime Value to its Clients?

I'll be hosting a Webinar for CPA Leadership Institute on Wednesday, August 25 from 1 pm to 2:40 pm (Eastern Time).The topic is: Cross-Selling: What is Your Firm's Lifetime Value to its Clients?You can learn more at the CPA Leadership Institute's Web site here, and even get a detailed outline of the Webinar, in pdf, here.This topic takes me back to the late 1980s, when I began to seriously study Total Quality Service, as it was then called by Karl Albrecht in his book, The Only Thing That Matters.This book had an enormous influence on my thinking (it's one of my Top Ten Best Business Books), because it was TQS that led me to the study of Value Pricing.It was an epiphany when I realized that billing by the hour not only generates lousy customer service, it's also a lousy customer experience. No one likes to be surprised by price.Studying TQS leads you into customer loyalty economics, and one of the metrics is always "What's the lifetime value of a customer to your firm?"The logic being that you need to sometimes ignore the math of the moment and make an investment in the relationship. This is also where the billable hour fails miserably, as pointed out brilliantly by VeraSage senior fellow Paul Kennedy in his essay on why timesheets are damaging to customer relationships and lifetime value.But I believe there is a more important metric: What is the value of your firm to your customer?This forces us to think about constant innovation, and offering services that can help customers through the various stages of their lives and business—from womb to tomb, so to speak.I hope you'll be able to join us for the Webinar, but if not read the Kennedy essay and any book by Karl Albrecht.