Episode Transcript
Alex Chan | Paul O’Donohue
Here’s a question for you. If you’re a business owner or CEO, are you recession ready? Now, I’ve posed that question throughout this entire series, but it’s a good question. Are you ready? This session focuses on a key strategic move, and that is account growth. I’d like to welcome Paul O’Donohue, SalesStar founder and CEO, back into the discussion today. Paul, in a previous video we talked about account retention. That’s a core strategy, but what about account growth? I mean, it’s a leading question. Where’s the easiest place to start if we want to actually grow our sales?
Well, don’t start chasing new business. Don’t go past go. Don’t collect $200. Like the easiest way to grow your business is with your existing accounts. That’s five times less costly because the clients really know you. They trust you, they’re already buying from you. So what a good strategy to do is to think about your key accounts and what your share of wallet is. Now. This is another question that often gets, you know, the most experienced sales leaders and account managers wriggling in their seats. Do you know your share of wallet with your key accounts? And sadly, most companies don’t know that. And it’s a fantastic place to start, Alex. But we really need to rinse everything we can from the clients that are already spending with us. So a great exercise to do and to get us ready for tough economic times is maybe take your top ten accounts right now and think about your share of wallet. Understand what are other competitors buying that you could be providing them? What are opportunities that they will need? How much do you know about their strategy and their needs and their pain points? How many services or products could you be selling that you aren’t currently selling to them? Now, if you add that up with your top ten accounts, how much more revenue, how much more profit would that bring to your business? And I think that is a really, really good strategy to grow in in any time, certainly through good times and recessionary times.
Yeah, look, there are some key points here. I mean, I was having this discussion with the client not too long ago, just a few weeks ago, and I said, How much could you increase your business by without getting one new customer just by focusing on growing share of wallet? And, you know, he did some quick arithmetic and he said, you know, Alex, just on our core product alone, I believe we can double our sales and go from a seven and a half million dollar company to a fifty million dollar company. So, you know, that advice is on point. It’s the easiest place to start, like you say, right?
It’s not the first time that we’ve doubled our clients growth by just selling more to the existing clients. Yeah. So fantastic story. Fantastic outcome. So what our listeners could do, Alex, and what I would recommend is downloading our key account management strategic plan and start working through the process of understanding their share wallet with their top accounts.
Yeah, that’s a great question to see if they understand that if they download that asset. Thanks very much for that, Paul. So to our viewers, remember to keep on following the series if you want to get the full picture on how to be recession ready as we continue with our suggestions and our recommendations on key strategic moves in a recessionary climate. And remember also, if you want to know more, if you want to if you want to accelerate your your success during a recession or a climate, reach out to a SalesStar high-performance coach because we’re here to help. We’ll see you next time on the are you recession ready series. Bye for now.
