In two years, we increased revenue at a key account by 470% through account diversification without making a single sales call.

Forrester data shows that existing customers, through renewal and expansion, account for 61% of B2B revenue (Forrester, 2025). But what happens when you're inside a key account and you're not allowed to sell? No cold calls to other departments. No solicitation. No outbound. Just the one business unit you already support.

We had one relationship inside a key account and 80 more we couldn't touch through traditional sales activity. So how do you grow 470% in two years without selling? How do you get 80 business units to choose you over the competition when you can't even pitch them? And what does the service model look like when the client's structure determines how you grow, not your sales playbook?

You've likely heard the expression, "If you build it, they will come." That became popularized in the movie Field of Dreams, starring Kevin Costner as Ray. He played an Iowa farmer who hears a voice whispering, "If you build it, he will come." So, Ray builds a baseball diamond in the middle of his cornfield. Everyone thinks he's lost his mind until several deceased Hall of Fame baseball players show up to play one last game, including Ray's estranged father, John, who had died before they could reconcile. In the final scene, John walks out of the corn as a young man, and Ray gets to play catch with his dad. The field wasn't really about baseball. It was about building something that brought people back to him.

Up to this point, we were averaging $1.8M annually in revenue with just one of 80 business units in this account. Through our competitive and account intelligence, we knew they spent closer to $12M each year in our service area, giving us plenty of room for growth. The problem was the client forbade selling by any vendor to its business units. Its policy was simple: it would contact us if it needed help.

To grow this account, we needed to diversify. But how? The other business units were completely shut off from communication with us. We needed a different growth strategy. That's when the scene from that movie surfaced in my mind: "If you build it, 'they' will come."

First things first, we needed to build a service model to attract all the other business units to us, one that our executive sponsor would be proud to share with everyone. Attraction without support from our sponsor would be pointless. We needed both.

We couldn't sell, but we were allowed to run client surveys. We built a survey to coincide with our quarterly business reviews so we could share the feedback with our executive sponsors in real time. Here's what we learned from the first survey:

The #1 issue cited was quality. This was not surprising. The client was trying to protect its internal business units from sales calls. In doing so, vendors had no direct communication with the units and were left in the dark about what each one wanted, needed, and expected on each project.

The #2 issue was responsiveness. Our sponsor built the model to be streamlined through one client contact representing all 80 business units. This model created a massive bottleneck. Even with a digital platform, the sponsor's team still had to sort through all the vendor activity. Each instance required a separate follow-up. Many of the internal clients had not received a response from our sponsor's team in weeks, and in some cases, the team didn't respond to internal requests at all.

The #3 issue was reputation. Our executive sponsor's model had an internal branding issue. Clients stopped using the corporate vendor list and started working with "rogue" suppliers who had direct agreements and contact with business units. The model our sponsor created was having the opposite impact of what was intended.

Our solution: 1) Continue to work through the sponsor's system and processes with no direct client contact until the sponsor's team generates an opportunity and a PO is created. 2) Expand our sponsor's team with five of our own dedicated resources to help the corporate team improve service, quality, and responsiveness to all business units.

Our solution was focused on helping our sponsor realize their strategy and achieve their goals. In doing so, we would eventually achieve ours by expanding customer relationships through account diversification.

The sponsor didn't care how dispersed the spend was among the vendor community; they just wanted it streamlined through their office. The business units didn't want 30 vendors; they just wanted a few they could consistently rely upon in terms of service, quality, and response times.

Our sponsor was pleased to have the best of both worlds and felt this would turn the tide in the business units' perception of the program. She started socializing this model in all her meetings, talking about the changes and investments we had made together as one of their "strategic suppliers." She wanted each unit to give it a try for the good of the institution. She promised better service, quality, and responsiveness and became our best salesperson. We did not increase our pricing; we kept the discounts we had previously put in place. They gave us office space on-site where we could work more closely with their team to triage all the needs and requests that made it to their desks.

After 12 months in this new reality, we reported our results to our sponsor at our year-end business review. We grew from 1 business unit to 80. We showed each business unit what it had purchased and how much. We presented our latest survey results, which showed a best-in-class NPS across the board.

Without making a single sales call, we grew the account 470% in two years. We built a service model that fully supported what our sponsor wanted and fully diversified our presence in the account until it became a vital partnership for them, one they could not live without.

Account Diversification is 1 of the 21 Growth Drivers in the Vitality Index, the Key Account Growth System. It belongs to the Partnership Domain we call Expansion. The Power Play we ran from the Vitality Index in this case study is: identify how we can advance from functional delivery to enterprise-level partnership. That is just 1 of 50 plays in this Growth Driver that we handcrafted for expanding your key accounts.

In the Vitality Index, we cover 7 Domains in all. These include 21 Growth Drivers and over 1,200 power plays, next moves, and coaching insights.

Growing key accounts can be complex, so we distilled this type of work into a system everyone can use, no matter what level of experience you bring to the table. It was built from the same approach we used to create some of the largest partnerships in our industry that have lasted decades and are still running.

Winning, growing, and protecting key accounts has been our life's work for the past 30 years. In the Vitality Index, we don't tell you what to do. We show you, because we lived it. This is the system we wished we had years ago. But now, it's here! If becoming a top-producing account team is important to you, then the Vitality Index can help.

We made a sample for you to try. This is not the actual system, but it will show you a practical plan for growing a live customer in your portfolio. This snapshot will give you a diagnostic, analysis, and an actual growth plan for where you currently sit across two of the seven Domains: Relationships and Competitiveness.