You already have the customers. You just have a small share of each one.

I ran a business to £27M and never once asked a customer what percentage of their spend came to me.

Not once. I could have told you what every account was worth to the pound. I had no idea what that pound was a fraction of.

Nobody teaches you to ask. It feels faintly rude, like asking somebody what they earn.

Then one of our Outgrow advisors told me about a distributor. $14M one year, $25.5M the next. No acquisition, no new sales hires, roughly the same list of customers as before. What changed is that the people who had spent a decade taking orders started ringing people instead.

I found that super interesting when I first heard it and reflected back on the time when I was running my system integration business. What irritated me was that the growth was sitting there the whole time, and reason nobody collected it was not the market, which I often blamed when things were not looking too rosy.

The question

Pick your tenth biggest customer. Not the top one. You are far too invested in the top one to be honest about it.

Now answer this: what share of everything they spend in your category comes to you?

Most founders cannot. They know the invoice. They have never gone and found the denominator.

So they have been treating a 12% relationship and a 90% relationship in exactly the same way for years, and only one of those has any room left in it.

I sat with an owner last year who worked out he had about a tenth of an account he had been calling “ours” since 2011. He wasn’t cross with the customer. He went quiet, and then said, nobody has ever asked them.

Loyal is not the same word as exclusive. Loyal usually means they keep buying the thing they have always bought from you and get everything else somewhere down the road.

How to actually ask it

Not a survey. On a call, in a normal voice, the way you’d ask anything else.

“Roughly what share of your spend in this category comes our way at the moment?”

Then shut up.

People answer it far more easily than you would expect. It costs them nothing, and being asked flatters them slightly.

Then the follow up, which is the one that actually pays:

“What would have to be true for that to be a bigger number?”

You are not selling now. The buyer is telling you, in their own words, exactly what sits between you and the rest of their budget. Sometimes it’s price. More often it’s that they had no idea you did the other thing.

That’s the part that still gets me. A good chunk of what people are chasing on a Sunday night is sitting behind a sentence nobody said out loud.

What it looks like when someone actually runs it

A talent and professional services business had five flat years and then put on $900K of new growth, 18% in five months. A copier and IT services firm did 20% in half a year. An IT company nearly tripled its count of new customers in the first month, which I would treat with some suspicion if I hadn’t watched the same shape happen elsewhere.

None of them found a new market. They went and asked the people who were already paying them.

Why it won’t happen on its own

Because “ask your customers what share you’ve got” is advice. Advice does not survive a Tuesday.

Somebody has to decide who gets asked this week. Somebody has to write down what they said. And somebody has to look at that list on Friday, notice that four of the eleven never happened, and say something about it, which is the bit everyone quietly skips.

That is what Outgrow is. A sales operating system. Sales doing, not sales training. Prescribed daily behaviours, five to ten minutes a person, logged, looked at every week, done by everyone who touches a customer rather than only the people with sales in the job title.

You don’t need more customers to grow 15 to 30% next year. You need more of the ones already picking up the phone to you.

I got to £27M without knowing that. I have no idea what it cost me and I have stopped trying to work it out.

What share of your best customer’s spend do you actually have, and when did anybody last ask them?