This is not about Star Trek and the most famous split infinitive in screen history. This is about finding additional value and revenues in the most important area of your business, namely your existing accounts.

When you manage opportunities, you can only win a certain percentage of the sales opportunities that exist, that you have either heard about or that your customers or prospects invited you to tender for. To get control back in your sales performance you need to do something quite obvious, quite simple, but to many people – quite radical. You have to create opportunities. But from where? From the realm known as account management.

One of the most powerful things you can do is draw a simple matrix. Across the top axis is the list of things you sell, all your specific products or services groupings. Down the side you put the list of your all existing customers. Then you take your customer records and plot which customers take which of your offerings, colouring in the box at the intersection of the particular customer and the particular product or service.  Maybe you can colour the intersections differently to distinguish between different groups of customers or groups of products or services.

The most common colour in your matrix is likely to be the one you miss, the one you can’t see. Yes, it’s the white space. The white space is the area beloved of graphic designers because it lets the important content breathe on the page or screen. In account management the white space is beloved of sales and marketing people because it is the land of opportunity, the place where you haven’t yet sold something into your customer.

At this stage, of course, you haven’t created any opportunities. You’ve simply identified where they might exist.