Guide
Account health score: how to build one for a consulting firm
A client can be unhappy for months before they tell you. By the time they say they're looking at other options, the relationship is usually already gone. An account health score lets you catch that earlier, when you can still do something about it.
Why consulting firms need one
A product company has usage data. If a client stops logging in, the platform knows. For a consulting firm, you don't have that signal. You have meetings, emails, deliverables, and conversations.
That makes it easy for accounts to quietly drift. The delivery work is ongoing, invoices are going out, but the relationship is getting thinner. No one is talking to the economic buyer. The client's main stakeholder changed roles six months ago and no one followed up. You're serving the account but not strengthening it.
An account health score turns the signals you do have into a rating that's easy to glance at. Instead of having to remember the state of every account in your head, you can see at once which ones need attention. That's the whole point of it.
What to include in the score
Not every signal matters equally. These four work well for consulting and professional services firms with relationship-led client work.
Recency of meaningful contact
When did someone on your team last have a real conversation with this client? Not a quick invoice email. A call, meeting, or substantive exchange. Weight this heavily. A client you haven't spoken with in 45 days is a risk, regardless of how well the project is going.
Contact coverage
How many people at the client company do you actually know? If you only know one person and they leave, the relationship can disappear overnight. Healthy accounts have at least two or three meaningful contacts, including someone at the economic buyer level.
Open items and outstanding commitments
Are there things you promised and haven't followed through on? Unresolved action items are a quiet relationship risk. Clients notice when you commit to something and it disappears. Tracking open items per account gives you a fast signal on execution health.
Stakeholder changes
Has anyone new joined the account, or has your main contact changed roles? A new stakeholder who didn't buy your work is a risk. They may have different priorities, or a vendor they already trust. Catching this early gives you time to build the relationship before it matters.
Two more signals worth adding once you have the basics: invoice and payment status (late payments can be a sign that a client is unhappy, not just slow) and renewal or expansion status (an account in active renewal conversation is healthy by definition; one that's nowhere near that discussion might be drifting).
Keep the scoring simple at first
A five-point or three-level system is easier to act on than a precise 0-to-100 number. Precise scores feel scientific. Three levels drive action.
Here's a starting template. Adjust the thresholds to what actually fits your firm's rhythm.
This is not a perfect score. It doesn't need to be. The goal is a fast signal that tells you where to focus, not a precise measure you can debate in a board meeting. Start here and refine it over time based on which accounts you wish you'd caught sooner.
Where to track it
Your CRM is the right home for this. If your CRM has custom fields on the company level, you can track it manually at first. Update it each week during your account review. That discipline alone, separate from any tooling, will catch problems earlier than before.
Once you see which signals actually predict at-risk accounts for your firm, you can start automating the update. In Lumenbase, email and calendar sync means recency-of-contact fields stay current without anyone typing them in. You can build a view that shows every active account with its last contact date, coverage count, and open tasks, sorted by risk level.
That view is worth spending 20 minutes on at the start of each week. It's your early warning system, and it costs you almost nothing once it's set up.
What to check in your weekly account review
- Which accounts have gone quiet in the past two weeks
- Which accounts have only one known contact
- What open items are past due across your active clients
- Whether any key stakeholders have changed roles recently
- Which accounts are approaching renewal without a recent conversation
This takes 15 to 20 minutes if your data is in decent shape. It replaces the slow realization, usually weeks later, that an account has been going sideways and no one noticed.
How to use the score
The point of the score is not to impress clients or create internal reports. It's to trigger action.
When an account drops to "at risk" or "needs attention," that's a cue to reach out. Not with a sales call, but with a real touchpoint. A quick call to check in. A note about something relevant you saw. A question about how the project is landing for their team.
Clients respond well to this kind of proactive contact. It's easy for them to stay loyal to a firm that makes them feel noticed and cared for. It's easy to leave a firm that only gets in touch when there's an invoice or a renewal on the table. The health score just makes sure you don't wait too long to reach out.
Who this works best for
This approach works best for consulting and professional services firms with 10 to 50 active accounts. At that size, you can't rely on memory, but you also don't need a complex scoring platform with custom ML models behind it.
If you have fewer than 10 active accounts, you probably don't need a formal score. You can just look at the list. If you have more than 50, you might want more automation and alert triggers built into your CRM.
The sweet spot is 10 to 50 accounts, which is where most agencies and mid-sized consultancies sit. That's also where the manual version of this exercise starts to break down, because there are too many accounts to track from memory and not enough accounts to justify a dedicated customer success team. A health score fills that gap.
See our guide on the best CRM for agencies for more on how to set up account tracking alongside your deal pipeline.