THE MECHANICS OF GROWTH (PART 3) – INCREASING WALLET SHARE
Increasing Wallet Share — The Unclaimed Territory Inside Your Existing Accounts
In Part Two of our series on the Mechanics of Growth, we examined how to win more market share through demand creation. Now we turn to the second growth engine, one that’s often the most neglected yet, in fact, the easiest: increasing wallet share.
Organizations spend extraordinary time, money, and energy chasing new logos, but comparatively little on engineering the systems, behaviors, and narratives required to deepen value with the clients they already serve.
This could be a strategic oversight of massive proportions.
Most companies underestimate how much incremental growth lies dormant within their current customer base, including unused capacity, unexploited capabilities, unresolved problems, and unaddressed opportunities. In many cases, the cost of capturing the next dollar from an existing customer is a fraction of the cost of securing the first dollar from a new one.
Historical research on this topic has not varied much over time, with two key numbers: It is 5X as expensive to sell to a new customer as to an existing one, and an existing client will spend 67% more.
Instead of treating existing customers as static, this engine frames them as dynamic ecosystems of evolving needs, shifting priorities, and untapped economic potential.
Why Companies Under-Earn in Existing Accounts
Increasing wallet share sounds straightforward, but the mechanics behind it are deceptively complex. Most organizations under-earn in their current accounts for structural and behavioral reasons:
1. The Relationship Illusion
Account teams equate longevity with loyalty, mistaking familiarity for strategic influence. This leads to a subtle complacency (“they love us,” “they’ll come to us when they need more,” “we already have a great relationship.”)
In reality, familiarity can often mask atrophy. When interviewing clients’ customers, I ask, “Is your relationship strategic or tactical?” and “Why?”
It’s shocking how often vendors of very strategic solutions are viewed as tactical, based on how they manage the relationship.
When you’re seen as tactical, you’re not invited to strategic conversations, and you miss the opportunities that matter most.
2. The Silence of Unarticulated Needs
Customers rarely volunteer new problems. They don’t wake up and say, “We’d love to spend more money with you.”
Most incremental opportunities are hidden, unexpressed, or only partially understood. If you have a tactical seat at the table and they only see you in your swim lane, you are not being included.
Organizations with multiple product lines often struggle to connect their own portfolio to customer needs. If you don’t know what else you can solve for them, neither do they.
3. Fragmented Internal Ownership
Product teams build features without clear commercialization plans. Customer success teams chase satisfaction scores instead of outcomes. Account Management teams focus on renewals, not expansion.
No one owns the system of wallet-share growth. Customers are clear about one thing, regardless of industry: they are not looking to speak with 4-5 sellers from the same vendor.
4. A Narrative Stuck in Yesterday
As industries evolve, customers’ priorities change. But many vendors continue to communicate value through outdated lenses, missing the chance to reposition their relevance and expand their footprint.
The outcome is predictable: The customer’s spend grows, but not with you.
The Architecture of Wallet-Share Growth
Increasing wallet share requires mastery across three interconnected dimensions:
Understanding the Landscape (Penetration Strategy)
This begins with a structural question: Do we understand the whole economic landscape of this customer?
Most organizations operate with partial maps and partial narratives. They know their primary contact and immediate use case, but lack visibility into the broader ecosystem: other business units, subsidiaries, decision centers, embedded competitive solutions, budget cycles, and strategic priorities.
A healthy penetration strategy maps the full field, the problems you solve today versus the problems you could solve. Wallet share grows when the organization sees the whole field, not just the familiar corner of it.
Reframing the Opportunity (Value Innovation)
Penetration is structural. Value innovation is behavioral. This is where expansion truly happens, not through more SKUs, but through reframing the customer’s understanding of “what good looks like.”
When a seller or leader illuminates a risk the customer has normalized, identifies waste the customer has stopped noticing, quantifies inefficiencies hiding within the workflow, or reveals an outcome the customer didn’t realize was possible, they spark the psychological moment that unlocks expansion.
Value innovation is not a product pitch. It is commercial insight applied to existing contexts. It shows the customer that their current state is acceptable, but not optimal, and that the path to “better” runs directly through your expanded capabilities.
Aligning to Strategic Priorities
Expansion is most effective when aligned to priority areas the client is already committed to fixing: annual strategic plans, executive KPIs, digital transformation initiatives, compliance pressures, efficiency mandates, and growth strategies.
But sellers often fail to connect their broader portfolio to these drivers. They engage at the level of renewal instead of the level of executive priority.
Wallet-share leaders do the opposite. They position themselves not as a vendor of products, but as a strategic partner advancing the client’s most important outcomes.
The Wallet-Share Mandate: Earn More by Solving More
The second engine of growth requires organizations to shift from selling more to solving more. Customers reward partners who:
● Deliver measurable outcomes
● Anticipate emerging needs before they become acute
● Bring insight that shapes decisions
● Challenge assumptions with evidence
● Make the customer better through the relationship
When organizations operate this way, wallet share expands naturally because customers see the provider not as a cost but as a lever of progress.
This engine is quieter than market share. Less glamorous. Less publicly visible. But when properly executed, it becomes the most predictable and most profitable engine of growth.
At BETR, we help organizations identify and quantify untapped wallet share opportunities across their customer base—mapping where value is being left on the table and building the systems to capture it systematically. If your teams are under-earning in existing accounts, let’s talk about how to fix it.
Up Next In This Series:
In Part Four, we examine the ambitious—but often misunderstood—growth engine: Target Market Expansion and how organizations can enter new segments, new geographies, and new use cases without diluting focus or strategic coherence.