The Growth Opportunity You May Already Own

By Larry & Jennifer Goddard

When growth slows, the instinctive response is almost always the same:

Find more customers. Hire another salesperson. Increase marketing. Generate more leads. Enter a new market.

Sometimes that's exactly what a company needs to do.

But before investing heavily in acquiring new customers, leadership teams should answer a different question:

How much growth is already sitting inside the customers we have?

For many middle-market companies, the answer can be substantial.

New Customers Aren't the Only Path to Growth

New customer acquisition gets enormous attention because it's highly visible. A new account feels like growth.

But your existing customer base may contain opportunities that are larger, faster and potentially more profitable.

Consider what may be hiding inside it:

• Customers buying only a fraction of the products or services you could provide.

• Large accounts where you capture a surprisingly small percentage of their total spend.

• Divisions or locations within existing customers that you've never penetrated.

• Long-standing relationships that have never been approached strategically about expansion.

• Customers whose businesses have grown substantially while your sales to them haven't.

• High-potential accounts receiving the same attention as customers with little room to grow.

None of these opportunities requires finding a new customer. They require seeing an existing customer differently.

Revenue Tells You What a Customer Buys. It Doesn't Tell You What They Could Buy.

This is an important distinction.

Suppose you have a customer generating $2 million in annual revenue.

That's useful information. But by itself, it tells you very little about the opportunity.

Imagine that customer purchases $10 million annually of the types of products and services your company could potentially provide.

You're capturing 20% of their wallet.

Now compare that with another $2 million customer whose total potential spend is $2.5 million. The customers look identical on a traditional sales report.

They are dramatically different growth opportunities.

The first potentially represents $8 million of uncaptured business.

The second represents only $500,000.

If both receive the same level of sales attention because they currently generate the same revenue, you're allocating one of your most valuable resources—sales capacity—based on where you've been rather than where you could go.

Why Wallet Share Matters

Wallet share is simply the percentage of a customer's relevant spending that your company captures. It's an extraordinarily useful concept, but many companies don't measure it systematically. That's understandable. The information doesn't typically exist in an ERP or CRM system. Your system knows what the customer buys from you. It doesn't know everything the customer buys from everyone else.

That means determining wallet share requires a combination of data, research and the knowledge your salespeople already possess. And salesperson knowledge can be surprisingly valuable.

Ask the salesperson responsible for a major account:

• How large is this customer's business?

• What else do they purchase that we could provide?

• Who currently supplies it?

• Why aren't they buying it from us?

• Which locations, divisions or product categories aren't we serving?

• What would have to happen for us to win more?

Suddenly, a $2 million customer becomes something much more useful:

A $2 million relationship with a quantifiable growth opportunity attached to it.

That's a very different way to manage customers.

The Opportunity Isn't Always Another Product

Wallet share is often interpreted too narrowly as simply cross-selling more products.

That's certainly one opportunity, but there can be many others.

A customer may operate 20 locations while you serve only five. You may supply one division but not another.

You may have a strong relationship with one decision-maker but little penetration elsewhere in the organization.

A customer may have acquired another business and nobody has explored whether your relationship can be expanded into the acquired company.

Or perhaps your customer has grown 50% during the past five years while your sales to them have remained flat.

Each situation should raise the same question:

Why?

That's where analytics become the beginning of the conversation rather than the end of it.

Your Salespeople Probably Know More Than Your Data Does

One mistake companies can make is believing analytics alone will reveal the answer.

They won't.

Data can identify unusual patterns, prioritize customers and expose questions leadership should be asking.

But your salespeople often know things the data doesn't. They may know that a customer's business is down. They may know a competitor has a long-term contract. They may know the customer won't consider another product because of a technical specification.

Or they may say:

"I've never asked."

That answer is valuable too.

The strongest approach combines data with the knowledge of the people closest to the customer.

Analytics identifies where to look. Salespeople add context. Leadership decides where to invest.

Don't Confuse Potential With Opportunity

There's also an important discipline required here.

Just because a customer could theoretically buy another $5 million from you doesn't mean that $5 million represents a realistic opportunity.

Some business may be locked into competitors. Some products may not fit. Some opportunities may require unacceptable pricing or investment. Some customers may be extraordinarily expensive to serve. Others may simply have no interest in expanding the relationship.

So the objective isn't to calculate the largest theoretical number possible.

It's to identify addressable, winnable and profitable wallet share.

That's the number that should drive sales priorities.

Your Best Growth Opportunities Deserve Your Best Resources

Once you begin quantifying customer potential, another strategic question emerges:

Are your sales resources aligned with the opportunity?

Imagine discovering that 20 customers represent $15 million of realistic expansion potential.

Would those 20 customers currently be receiving disproportionate attention from your sales organization? Would your strongest relationship builders be assigned to them? Would each have a specific growth plan? Would senior leadership be involved where appropriate? Or would they continue receiving roughly the same attention as hundreds of other accounts?

This is where wallet-share analysis becomes more than a sales exercise. It becomes a resource-allocation decision. Your company has limited sales capacity. The objective isn't simply to keep salespeople busy. It's to put that capacity against the opportunities capable of producing the greatest return.

Before You Buy More Growth, Look at What You Already Have

None of this suggests companies should stop prospecting. New customers are essential to long-term growth. They replace inevitable customer losses, diversify the business and create new sources of revenue. The mistake is assuming new customers should always be the first place you look.

Before adding salespeople or significantly increasing lead-generation spending, leadership should understand the opportunity already present within the customer base. You may discover that the fastest path to your next 5%, 10% or even 20% of growth doesn't begin with someone who has never heard of your company.

It begins with someone already buying from you.

How SOAR Elevate™ Helps Make the Opportunity Visible

Most companies aren't suffering from a lack of data. They're suffering from a lack of visibility.

SOAR Elevate™ analyzes customer and revenue information to help leadership teams identify where meaningful growth opportunities may exist and then combines those insights with the knowledge of the organization.

For wallet-share growth, the objective is not simply to create another customer report.

It's to help answer:

Which customers have the greatest realistic expansion potential, how large is the opportunity, and where should our sales organization focus first?

Once those answers become visible, growth becomes much less about asking everyone to sell harder. It becomes about focusing on the opportunities that matter most.

Bottom Line

Companies often spend significant money trying to acquire customers they don't have while overlooking opportunities within relationships they've spent years building.

Your customers already know you. You've already established credibility. You've already overcome many of the barriers associated with winning new business. The question is whether you're capturing the full value of those relationships.

Before you spend more money finding your next customer, make sure you've found all the growth hiding inside the customers you already have.

Question to Consider

Think about your ten largest customers.

For how many could you confidently estimate their total potential spend with your company and how much of that business you're currently capturing?

If you can't answer that question, there may be considerably more growth sitting inside your existing customer base than your revenue reports are showing.