In a previous post on account management, I talked about the joy of discovering white space, that happy place where there might be an opportunity for you to sell something else to your existing customer. I say ‘might’, because you don’t yet know if there is an opportunity. There’s something else you need to do.

In order for there to be an opportunity, you need to figure out if there is there something of value that you can deliver to your customer, something that your customer needs.

Researching your customer is probably the most valuable use of your time. The better you know them, the more you can help them. When you profile your customer, analyse their performance, figure out what they’re trying to do with the business, where their problems are, then you can start to figure our what they need to do to fix those problems. If there is something you can provide to help them fix those problems, you have created an opportunity to do business with them.

The best thing about this is that, right now, this opportunity is not a competitive one. It only exists when you proactively propose it to your customer. You created it :-).