Written by Charlotte Duckworth

Win more business: How to prioritise what’s important

4th September, 2024 •

You need to win more business. Maybe it’s part of your annual performance review, your business strategy or your personal targets. When it comes to business development, there is so much activity you could be doing, but where do you start?

Without a plan, we can end up doing lots of different activities. We fire out messages over email, engage on LinkedIn, invite prospects to events, the list goes on! And sometimes we end up spreading ourselves too thin and missing opportunities that are right in front of us.

When it comes to generating business, knowing where we should focus our energy is critical to success. We can save ourselves time, stress and uncertainty by taking a logical approach and prioritising the activities that are more likely to reach positive outcomes.

Read on to improve your B2B (business to business) sales and strategic growth, and learn how to create more opportunities to win more business.

Where to start

An analogy sometimes used in sales is the idea of “hunting” and “farming”. To define this:

Hunting – Actively pursue new business opportunities with the aim of converting them into clients.

Farming – Nurture existing client relationships and uncover new opportunities that create value.

Regardless of the analogy, it’s useful to consider how much of our time we should spend focused externally on generating new business from new clients, versus the time we give to our current clients to catch up, listen, understand their situation and identify needs that grow the relationship.

Sales growth experts at McKinsey (2022) share that in a healthy pipeline, especially in business-to-business services, 70% of revenue should come from existing clients.

This gives us a first indication of how we should spend our time. We want to make sure we are prioritising our existing client base to uncover opportunities with our current clients!

You might have heard of the Pareto Principle, or the 80:20 rule, which states that roughly 80% of outcomes come from 20% of causes.

We can use this 80:20 rule when it comes to generating business – we can’t be everywhere all at once! Even if we were to focus solely on our current clients, we can still end up being pulled in lots of different directions.

Instead, we want to identify and focus on our best clients – our top 20%.

If we combine these different principles together:

Within the 70% of time we spend generating business from existing clients
we should spend 80% of this time
on our top 20% of clients

You might need to read that twice!

How do you define your top 20% of clients?

What qualifies as a ‘top client’ can feel obvious if we have a high quality relationship and they generate significant revenue.

However, it’s easy to prioritise clients we like and communicate with often, even if they take up our time and don’t offer the best overall returns.

To take a more objective approach, follow this 6 step method to categorise your clients (and use the table below):

Define the features of your ‘ideal client’ persona. This might include revenue generated, quality of relationship, potential for strategic opportunities, amplification of brand, values alignment, loyalty, no excessive time commitment (!) etc.
Weight each feature. Assign a weight to each feature ranging from 1(low importance) to 5 (high importance) based on the importance of this particular element of the relationship
Score each category. Choose a client and rate how they perform on each feature from 1 (poor) to 10 (excellent) based on your experience
Calculate the total. Multiply the weight of each feature by the client score for that feature
Results. Sum the totals to determine the final score for each client: The result.
Repeat. For each client, rate each for the features to calculate your total. Compare your scores to identify your top 20%!

We can use this information to take a more objective view of our key clients and identify the top 20% that we should aim to prioritise for new opportunities.

EXAMPLE: You can use this table as an example to guide you through the process

How to build an understanding of your clients

You want to know your top 20% really well.

This includes knowing all of the relevant stakeholders in each of your top 20% clients so that you can proactively manage these relationships.

Creating a stakeholder matrix for your strategic accounts enables you to evaluate your relationships and identify areas for improvement.

To create a stakeholder matrix, choose a client from your top 20% and follow these three key steps:

Write down everyone you can think of (client side), that is involved in this account
Draw this stakeholder matrix (as above) on a page and plot each person into the matrix. The X axis represents each person’s level of interest in your work, while the Y axis shows their influence within their organisation, particularly in driving decisions and outcomes.
Reflect on your stakeholder matrix and identify what you want to improve

For each individual:

Rate your relationship and engagement with them (low-medium-high)
Do you need to get that relationship to a “high”? If yes, how can you do this?
Who else from your organisation is speaking/has a relationship with them?
What motivates them? What’s in it for them?

More generally:

Is there anyone else outside of the matrix that you need to involve? (beyond your current contacts)
Succession planning: Who are the “rising stars” you should build relationships with? How can you build relationships with them?
Are there any stakeholders you want to move? How can you do this?

Completing a stakeholder matrix shouldn’t create any huge surprises, but it helps us to identify new priorities and actions. By improving our relationship with key stakeholders in our most important client accounts, it enables us to uncover new opportunities.

In summary

When it comes to business development, to ensure that we prioritise our time effectively, we want to:

Focus 70% of our time expanding relationships within our existing client base, to generate more business
Focus 80% of our energy on the clients that are in our top 20%, our best clients, who bring us the most revenue, opportunities and quality relationships
Identify gaps in key client accounts using a stakeholder analysis and create an action plan to consolidate these relationships for the future

At Higson we run workshops and training programmes to help individuals and teams to generate new business opportunities for strategic growth. If you would like to learn more strategies to enhance your business development approach please get in touch.