We got a large account to cancel 30 supplier contracts and give it to us at $10M in ARR.

In large-account sales, you will often meet clients who have created a massive vendor population for each service category. I have seen large national clients have as many as 500+ vendors performing the same functions across multiple locations. That may seem excessive, but this example is actually pretty typical, especially in major corporations.

And I do understand why clients add so many. They are protecting against potential service gaps, they hold on to relationships because they love what's familiar, and they leverage incumbent contracts to get better pricing. Each time they add a new vendor, one user needed a "special" fix that the current pool couldn't handle. Or a group had a preexisting relationship with a vendor from their last company, one they felt they couldn't live without. Procurement teams may also add more vendors just to see how much they can reduce costs by leveraging the incumbents' desire to drop prices and stay on board.

The justification for adding vendors can eventually overwhelm the reasons to consolidate.

Our experience has shown that when you keep adding vendors, incumbents naturally begin to lose interest and deprioritize the client in favor of other deals where they have less competition. This causes service gaps that can trigger clients to simply add more vendors.

It becomes a never-ending cycle that can balloon a vendor list from 100 to 500+ over time.

I ran into a client like this several years ago. They were a large health system that had already accumulated 30+ vendors in our service category. They were leveraging a large vendor population to hedge against gaps in service.

What they ended up with was 30 vendors who weren't motivated by an average 3% market share per supplier, especially when other client programs in the area were more favorable in price and opportunity.

As is often the case, a flawed system gets exposed at an inflection point.

One weekend, the client had a high-profile event that required 24/7 service and support from its vendors. The vendors were casually unresponsive because they were not about to give up their weekend to compete against 29 other vendors to support this client.

Do you want to share your plate of food with 30 other hungry mouths? Feeding frenzy, anyone?

The service gaps created a mess for the buyer and forced them to pay a fortune to fulfill the business needs using whatever means were available.

That moment exposed something important: the client had optimized for supplier competition and lower pricing, but what they really needed was accountability.

As a reaction, the client immediately issued an RFP. I got the email and, within 48 hours, submitted the same response I had sent them three times prior.

This time, they took notice.

The RFP did not create the opportunity. It simply exposed a structural problem that had already existed for years.

While the incumbents were playing in a watered-down vendor pool, we were still running our playbook through a system that uncovered critical gaps in service, vulnerabilities that created risk, and problems that would ultimately cost the client more than they thought they were saving.

Our system surfaced the champions and executives who cared about this problem and were tired of sacrificing quality for price.

It also revealed that our alternative solution would be a dramatic departure for the client and would require board-level approvals to get done.

Our system had already proven what the value message needed to be to win an exclusive partnership: one that would finally give the client accountability for service and quality, while supporting the necessary investments and value-based pricing required for mutual success over the long term.

In other words, the strategic work had already been done before the buyer was ready to change.

We knew the service gaps. We knew the risks. We knew the champions. We knew the executives. We knew the approval path. And we knew the value story.

In summary:

The winning seller had already done the strategic work before the buyer was ready to change.

It's a competitive advantage for the sellers when a system is proactively running behind the scenes versus a stop-and-start motion that is reacting to events.

These are just a few attributes of the Vitality Index system. Your story can have a happy ending like this one, but you need to make sure you are running the right system to produce outcomes like these.

Most sales systems are really just sales processes sold as a "system."

A process is a linear motion. A system is made up of multiple processes that are interconnected, so when you change one, the others change with it.

That matters in complex sales because relationships, executive alignment, competitive positioning, service risk, value creation, pricing, and approvals all influence one another.

Most salespeople don't have time to learn or think about how the entire system runs, any more than a new driver wants to know how a car is built or how it works.

They just want it to work.

That's how we built the Vitality Index: to be your GPS for large-account sales, so you can drive and execute the plays that produce results like these.

Winning, growing, and protecting large accounts has been our life's work for the past 30 years. Successes like these formed the basis for the Vitality Index, a web-based system that shows B2B salespeople how to exponentially grow complex accounts.

The real competitive advantage is not just having a great salesperson. It is having a system running behind the salesperson that helps identify opportunities early, build support, anticipate barriers, and execute the right plays when the customer is finally ready to act.

The system will help anyone 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 based on your current level across two of the seven Partnership Domains: Relationships and Competitiveness.