By ETJ Life – helping PE-backed CEOs thrive in work and life.
The Growth Is Already in Your Accounts
When growth stalls, the instinct is to go looking for it somewhere new: a new market, a new segment, a new geography. It feels like progress. But before you spend a dollar chasing new, it’s worth asking a simple question. Is the core truly maximized?
Almost always, the answer is no. A new dollar in a new market is one of the most expensive dollars you can go get, because you’re building awareness, trust, and a sales motion from scratch. Meanwhile, the dollars sitting inside your current accounts are far cheaper to win, and there are usually more of them than you’d guess. One CEO ran the numbers and found his own customers were buying tens of millions of dollars of exactly what he sold, just from his competitors. That business was his to take back, and it was hiding in plain sight.
So start where you already have the right to win. Look hard at your install base and ask where customers are spending a nickel with you when they could be spending a dollar. The white space inside accounts you already serve is the highest-return growth on the board, and it’s the growth your team can act on fastest.
Then Show Just Enough Leg
Once you’re serious about the core, give your team a way to prioritize it. The cleanest lens is simple: rank every account by propensity to buy and potential to spend. That’s where everyone should start, because it tells the person in the seat exactly where to go and what to go get, instead of spreading effort evenly across accounts that will never move.
It also helps to name the actual trigger that makes a customer switch. Don’t assume demand. Ask what event makes someone displace a provider they already use, and why they’d swap to you. When you can answer that, your team stops guessing and starts selling into real moments.
New markets still have their place, but sequence matters. Maximize the core, then move to the adjacent segment, then go after true greenfield last. And when you do open a new segment, stand it up with a marketing-led motion first, because it’s a lower-cost way to test demand than putting expensive sellers on the ground before you know it’s there.
The goal in a new market early on isn’t to conquer it. It’s to show just enough traction, with a little profit pulling through, that the next chapter of the story is obvious to anyone looking. Prove the runway exists without over-building for it, and you get the upside of new growth without betting the core to chase it.
ETJ Life is a community for CEOs in the Performance season. This perspective reflects ongoing member interactions and real leadership challenges in the seat.