Strategies to Secure Large Clients and Achieve Significant Sales Goals

Discover the proven strategies that helped me grow our business from $3 million to nearly $10 million in just two years.

I was too young to be the VP of my family’s business when I started in the role. More still, I was happy selling and helping my clients. If you have ever worked in a family business, you know that things work like this: You are told to do something and you do it. In this case, I was being asked to do something I had never done before, nor had anyone else.

A few days into my new role, the CEO gave me the goal of $10 million in revenue. The company was only generating $3 million. I looked over the client list and saw that the average revenue was $35,000 annually. I divided $10,000,000 by $35,000, meaning I would need 285 clients.

Fortunately, I had worked for a $4 billion staffing company in Los Angeles. My first manager was failing, and he quit soon after hiring me. Sometime later, they hired a manager who did his job. Even though I was in operations, I was calling prospects and winning deals. I was the bird dog, booking meetings and joining my manager on the calls I booked. In a single year, we went from 2,000 hours to 24,000.

I knew there was no way to win 285 clients that would spend $35,000 in the current year. In the industry I learned to sell in, every major company already had a supplier providing them the people they needed. The major companies had little reason to change from one company to another. To hit the $10 million goal, I needed to be strategic, so I came up with the following steps:

1. Create a List of High-Value Clients: If you want or need to win big deals, you need to spend time building the largest list of the largest clients. Some names on your list will be difficult to acquire because of their existing supplier relationship or simply because they worry about interrupting their business. Some, however, will be open to a conversation.
2. Prioritize by Revenue Potential: Recast the list by opportunity size from highest revenue to the lowest revenue. You don’t have to be right. The idea here is to prioritize the highest-revenue opportunities, so make an educated guess. Later, as you are pursuing these large clients, you will be able to make a better guess.

Note: You might believe that you should try to spend your time with companies that it’s easier to book a meeting with, especially when every large client is already working with a partner. More than one salesperson has shown up frustrated after being told the company is happy with their existing supplier. A few suggested that we should call on companies that weren’t using what we sold. I gently explain that we don’t call on people that don’t buy what we sell because they don’t buy what we sell!

3. Pursue the Highest-Revenue Opportunities First: Pursue large clients in order of revenue opportunity, starting with the highest. A very large client is likely to spend more than a number of smaller large clients, bringing you closer to your revenue goal more quickly. Why wouldn’t you call the largest clients first? You will need to call all these companies anyway, so there is no reason to start with a lesser opportunity.

Note: Let’s imagine you have 60 large clients, you can call every large company once a month by making three calls to large clients every day, reaching out to all 60 at least once over the course of four weeks. If your clients are already working with your competitor, you will always be top of mind using this strategy.

4. Replace False Positives with Viable Leads: Some companies on your list of large clients may turn out to be false positives, meaning they don’t spend what you thought they did. You may also find that some of the large clients are not a good fit for you or your company. When this is true, remove the false positive and replace it with another large client.

I’d like to tell you that I hit the $10 million goal my first year as VP of sales, but I came up short. I generated $7.8 million. In the following year, we hit the $10 million mark. I had won a large brand of The Limited as well as Victoria’s Secret, DHL, and Toys ‘R Us, along with some smaller large clients.

Achieving Success with Large Clients

You will never win large clients if you don’t spend your time pursuing the ones in your territory. Some percentage of your competitors will be frustrated by hearing the contact tell them they are not going to change suppliers. Here is a fact: Given a long enough timeline, every one of the large clients on your list will change their partner.

The gods of sales have a warped sense of humor. Just when you get someone from a large client on the phone, the contact says, “Sorry, we just signed a contract with one of your competitors.” But if you are disciplined enough to make your calls consistently, you can thwart the gods of sales and become the person who gets the business first.

If you are a salesperson, I would encourage you to follow the steps above if you want to win large clients. The more time you spend with large clients, the more your client portfolio will become the envy of your sales team.

If you are a sales leader, you must ensure that the most valuable large clients are being pursued. Do good work, and I’ll see you here tomorrow.