The heart of growing your revenue is opportunity acquisition. More opportunities equals more sales (provided you win at the same rate and the average deal size is the same). But some sales organizations (and some salespeople) fail to acquire enough opportunities to grow.
Failure to Acquire Opportunities from Existing Clients
Some sales organizations (and salespeople) don’t create enough opportunities from their existing client portfolio.
These sales organizations do all of the work to acquire a client and then settle for a relatively low wallet share–even though they already have the relationships (or should), already have a contract, and already have some ideas as to how they might create more value for their clients. They stay focused on new client development, winning new clients only to half-win them, too.
Never let it be said that I even hinted at the idea that you should slow down your efforts to hunt and to win new clients. But you also can’t easily grow if you don’t develop the clients you’ve already won, and that means working to acquire new opportunities from within those clients.
Failure to Acquire Opportunities from New Clients
Even more sales organizations struggle to grow their revenue numbers because they believe that their existing clients can–and will–provide them with all of the opportunities they’ll ever need. But then they stall. Worse still, they lose a major client (or two), and all of sudden they find themselves in a tail spin.
There is no way to win new clients and develop new opportunities fast enough to solve the problem of stalled or declining revenue once you start experiencing it. The time to have started hunting is long past by then. Even while you are developing existing clients, you have to keep your foot on the pedal.
Growth
Growing your revenue number is never really easy. But the recipe calls for acquiring new opportunities from within your existing clients while at the same time winning new clients. Focusing on only one at the expense of the other is the cause of stalled–or declining–revenue numbers.
Questions
Do you spend more time farming opportunities within your existing clients or hunting outside?
Is your wallet share such that you can confidently say that you have all of the opportunities that you should have from within your client portfolio?
How many new clients do you have to win to acquire enough opportunities to hit your revenue targets?
Are you neglecting one source of new opportunities? Are you neglecting both?
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