68% and falling

Aug 19, 2026 • 3 min read

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One number slipped to 68.2% this year.
Almost nobody noticed.

But I cannot stop thinking about it.

It comes from the SPI Professional Services Maturity Benchmark.

Every year, SPI Research benchmarks the whole professional services world.

This year’s report covered over 500 firms.

A quarter-million employees.

Sixty billion in revenue.

Serious data.

And this year, one figure inside it dropped.

The share of referenceable clients – the ones who’ll vouch for you, refer you, take a prospect’s call and say “yes, work with them” – fell to 68.2%.

Down from 70.1%.

Two-point drop.
Sounds like almost nothing.

It’s NOT nothing.
It’s the most important number on the page.

Because those clients are your growth engine.

Nearly every referral comes from them.

Every reactivation.

Every warm intro that becomes next year’s revenue.

And every point that falls off that 68% doesn’t just disappear.

It crosses over to the 32%.

The clients who won’t vouch.

Won’t refer.

Won’t pick up the phone for a prospect.

That side is growing.
And it’s filling up with people who used to be in your corner.

Now the part that should stop you.

The same firms in that survey were winning more bids that year.

Pipeline coverage went up.

On the surface, business looked good.

Underneath, the base of clients willing to advocate for them was thinning out.

Their client base was eroding.

And no one saw it, because no one was looking at that number.

That’s the blind spot, caught on camera.

The metrics everyone tracks looked great.

The one that actually predicts next year’s revenue was sliding.

SPI’s own recommendation, in plain words:
Firms need tools to flag the early warning signs – to catch relationships going cold before they turn into lost business.

Read that again.

SPI Research – measuring 500 firms, sponsored by an accounting-software company – arrived at the exact thing this newsletter has been saying for months.

You can’t protect what you can’t see.

And most firms have no way to see which relationships are cooling, until they’ve already gone cold.

Now here’s the part the survey can’t touch.

You don’t need 500 firms to find this number.
You already know it.

Take a second.

Nothing concrete that you could point to.
And yet you could feel it.

Those two are your 32%, forming in real time.

Not a statistic.

Real names.

And that’s the whole difference between you and the report.

SPI can measure the drift across 500 firms.

It is only a statistic.

Your list has real names.
And names can be called.

So this week – twenty minutes, no cost.

Open your client list.
One question per name: would this client go to bat for me right now?
Mark them – warm, cool, unsure.

The warm ones are your engine. Guard them.

The cool and unsure ones are your 32% forming – the drift, made visible while you can still do something about it.

Then pick one.

Just one.

Send the note.

Make the call.

Give them a reason to remember why they liked working with you.

One relationship, warmed back up, this week.

The two you just named are the ones you can see.

The harder question is what the rest of the drift is costing you.

The cooling relationships you haven’t thought about.

Across a client list too long to hold in your head.

The calculator below will give you that number in ninety seconds:

Calculate what your cooling relationships are worth →

SPI needed 500 firms and a year of data to find this erosion.

You can find yours today.

With names.

And phone numbers.

View More →

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