3 Ways to Grow Your Existing Accounts Today

One of the greatest, history-changing advancements in civilization – really, the advancement that made civilization possible – was when hunter-gatherers started settling down and growing crops.

Instead of always hunting down or scrounging for that next meal, they could get bountiful harvests from their farms.

Thousands of years later, sales reps with a constant eye on their quotas are in search of those same harvests. After all, getting growth from current customers is far easier and cheaper than trying to hunt down new accounts, especially in a competitive climate.

If your sales team doesn’t have a plan to farm more revenue from your customer base with an up-sell or cross-sell opportunity, it’s leaving a lot of money on the table – and no one wants that. 

Here are three approaches your sales reps can use to get more quality sales opportunities. This includes your existing customer base with account-based marketing.

Map Out Your Customer’s Buying Journey

One great way to get in the door for a new opportunity is to know your customer’s buying process inside and out. This way you can pick out the prime openings for new business.

B2B customers have unique timelines and processes for when and what they buy. This wide range of variations includes (but isn’t limited to):

• Budget cycles
• Major ongoing, multi-phase projects
• Key hires and personnel changes, particularly in leadership positions
• Structural changes to the organization itself (i.e. mergers, acquisitions, downsizing, expansion)
• Contract expiration and/or renewal time
• Buying timelines

Your sales approach should focus on active listening. That means not only talking with your contacts regularly but paying close attention to the ebbs and flows within the account that they’re revealing to you (or hinting at). 

Your key account planning platform is the best place to record and analyze this customer journey data. But don’t think you need to fill countless (virtual) file cabinets full of info before you find new openings. You’d be surprised how many cross-sells and upsells start with just one or two events you think are minor but turn out to be full of opportunity.

Build a White Space Chart

Ideally, you have a pretty good idea of the inner workings of your current key accounts. This includes all of the various business units within it to the decision-makers and key stakeholders who influence deals.

A white space chart helps you match those potential B2B buyers with your full line of products and services. For each BU (or teams within a BU), you take note of what you already sell to them and what you could sell.

In Salesforce, you have the ability to report on account and opportunity data. Most of the time, when you’re using filters that cut across different product lines or opportunity types, you’re looking for some kind of data like the revenue and purchase history for each of your customers. 

You can also leverage these reports to uncover the gold in your key accounts. In other words, the products and services that your customers could benefit from but haven’t purchased yet. To do this effectively, when you win a new customer, it would be good to evaluate the account depending on the upsell potential on a monthly or quarterly basis. Work with your customer success team to identify which teams you’ve sold into. They can also help you discover where you can penetrate different groups within this business and who you need to engage. 

The white space chart will help you grow customer lifetime value because all you’re doing, really, is matching up the help they need with how you can help – and that’s at the heart of every sales process and sales strategy, is it not? 

Get the Team on One Page to Grow Your Existing Accounts

Team-based selling is how winning is done these days. This is especially true with selling into an existing customer base.

This approach is far more than just bringing in your managers and VIPs to help with closing deals. It also includes pulling together everyone in your org who has any direct or indirect connection to the account and the contacts within it.

For example, you may have different sales reps within your team who handle different products and services – the ones you want to introduce to your customers.

You also may have a marketing team who can give you the support necessary to introduce new options and influence, internal stakeholders, in the account.

Also, there is a wealth of data floating around about your most important customers within your organization. Team-based selling is one way to gather and apply this data.

Let’s not forget about customer success pros, either. These invaluable team members work wonders building up relationships with customers. They are fonts of knowledge when it comes to customer feedback and insight.

You can’t really do a great job at account-based selling unless you bring all your resources to bear. That means collecting your compatriots and their collective know-how in one place. That place is ideally Salesforce and the key account management app you use to expand its capabilities.

At the end of the day, a B2B sales process that grows revenue from existing accounts can build long-term revenue growth and a stronger customer relationship. These relationships (and relationship maps) don’t only help with customer retention, either; they can be rich sources of referrals into new accounts to multiply revenue even further.

Forget about the bush. Use these three methods to reap rich harvests every single quarter.

If you want an easier and more efficient way to put key account and revenue optimization management into place through Salesforce, check out Prolifiq CRUSH!