Turning a $2m account stuck in neutral to a $50m customer by gathering better account intelligence

My national account director traveled to my local office to meet up with me and my account team 20 years ago. He wanted to talk about our progress in one of my largest accounts. In my mind, I was like, "great, we're crushing it." We had a great story to tell him. We had grown this account from $0 to $2m in two years.

We settled into a conference room. He walked over to our white board, picked up a marker, looked me in the eyes with the entire account team sitting there and asked:

"Taylor, tell me what you don't know about this customer?"

I thought, "Wait, what I don't know?" I looked down at the table at my sales report and knew I had nothing.

My follow up, "What would you like to know?"

He replied, "exactly, what you don't know."

Now, I'm thinking, "wait, how do I know what I don't know if I don't know it?"

In my mind, I felt utterly unprepared for that question. The problem: I was obsessing over the 100% growth from last year. We had just landed the #1 client in the industry and we did all of this in two years. Why doesn't he ask me what I do know, because I know a lot! Embarrassing, right? Go play the clip from the conference room scene in the movie Office Space, "I'm a people person," because that's how I felt in that moment.

He would later confess that when he saw my reaction, he knew it was going to be an epic, historic meeting. He wasn't trying to trip me up or belittle me in front of my team. He had asked the question from a place of genuine curiosity. Not condescending or accusatory. Just a sincere question because he wanted to see and understand how he could help me grow for the future. He had the numbers. He knew what we had done. That's why he came to visit. My account had made it to corporate's radar. Not just for the recent growth, but the total opportunity. He was there to support me in ways that would eventually be life changing.

Lesson for leaders: Don't hold your people back by asking them soft questions. Challenging them the right way could change their life.

I reluctantly diverted my attention from my current business and started thinking about the divisions, service lines, regions, locations, functions and people we had not met with. I rattled off about 10 areas for him to add to the board. We ranked them by size, location and where we have immediate capacity and capability. We created an account intel gathering mechanism and determined what info we wanted to go capture, information we needed to know in order to place us in the best position to expand, diversify and grow the partnerships.

When we were done, I had a 180-day action plan and about 100+ account intel gathering meetings to go schedule. Each meeting was determined because of its link to the strategy, and not just random activity. Each Friday, I sent him an email with an updated tracker that I kept in real-time. Each time I got to update it, I was able to add to my answer for his question, "what I didn't know about this account."

What happened next from this approach was, frankly, inevitable. Not because of my efforts, willpower or need to be right. It was running the operating system that we built around this account, one that contained the growth strategy, the plan, and created a knowledge loop that kept feeding us the account intel we needed to win more business.

We captured in the next two years 4 new groups, 4 new locations and 3 additional groups that started using services for the first time. That turned into $20m, then $40m and eventually $50m per year for 10 straight years.

Account intel gathering sounds super boring until you realize it's not. It starts you on a path to not only know what you don't know, but to bring knowledge to the client they didn't know either. This area will make everyone more consultative in their approach and place them in front of the best opportunities to grow their accounts.

A leader once said to me, "The key to wisdom is knowing what you don't know." How true.

Gathering account intel is just one of 21 growth drivers in large account sales that our system, the Vitality Index, addresses. It diagnoses and scores your accounts, builds the exact growth strategy the team needs now to increase sales, and guides execution until you become a Vital Partner to your accounts.

For the growth driver, Account Intelligence, we handcrafted over 50 plays to get salespeople from where I was in 2006 to what I became in 2008, the #1 supplier to the #1 client in their industry. That took 4 years for me from contract signing, but now you can do this too in a quarter of the time with the Vitality Index.

Strategic sales is 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 large accounts has been our life's work for the past 30 years. The system will help most sellers willing to master strategic sales in less than a year. 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.