Megadeals are signed with existing customers. How much of your growth plan is aimed there?

Megadeals are signed with existing customers. How much of your growth plan is aimed there?

I have worked with client management and megadeals for more than 20 years, first for more than a decade at American Express and since then as a co-founder of Njord. If there is one lesson those years have taught me, it is this: megadeals are signed with existing customers.

The research behind the Megadeals book, where I was one of the megadealers interviewed, gave me a chance to test that lesson against the experience of others. The authors spent between two and ten hours each with more than 60 people who close deals worth 10 million dollars and more, and worked with over 100 Fortune 500 companies along the way.

The wider research points the same way. Most B2B buyers choose a vendor they already know, and a handful of accounts carries most of the revenue.

Put those together and the conclusion is hard to avoid. The deals that make a company's year sit in a small number of accounts, and they tend to go to a vendor the buyer already knows.

Look at how the largest B2B companies grew and the same pattern shows up. They followed three steps. Land an entry deal in a large account. Expand and orchestrate inside it, launching more offerings into the same customer and reaching more and more of its stakeholder groups. Then acquire complementary products and services, and push that bigger portfolio through the same doors and the same approved vendor status. For most of them, roughly 80 percent of revenue comes from somewhere between 10 and 100 customers.

The companies that do this well share one habit of mind. They treat a key account as a market of its own.

Yet look at almost any B2B pipeline review and most of the opportunities are new logos. Names the team has not sold to yet, in markets where the brand is still unknown, with sales cycles everyone expects to run long.

New logos matter. They are how a company proves it can grow, and they are what boards, investors and sales plans are built to reward.

But it leaves one question out of the room.

"Where inside our existing customers have we not sold yet?"

It is rarely on the agenda. Commercial teams usually know their customers better than anyone. The way most companies plan, measure and pay for growth simply points them somewhere else.

That is where many B2B companies leave their biggest growth on the table.

The first deal with a large customer is almost always the hard part. It takes months, sometimes years. It needs a champion who is willing to put their name on it. It needs proof, references, legal, security and procurement. When it finally lands, the team celebrates, hands the account to delivery, and goes back to hunting.

But in a large organisation, that first deal is normally a small fraction of what the account is worth. One business unit. One country. One function. One product. The rest of the account, every other unit, region and buying centre that could use what you sell, is still white space.

And here is the part most companies miss. A contract with the parent company does very little to warm up the rest of the account.

To most of the people who would decide the next deal, you are still a stranger.

Known in one unit, a stranger in the next

In 2024 the LinkedIn B2B Institute, together with Bain and NewtonX, studied 515 B2B buyers at large corporations. One finding should change how every commercial leader thinks about existing accounts.

When the entire buying group knew the vendor at the outset, the vendor won 81 percent of the deals. When only the function recommending the purchase knew the vendor, the vendor won 4 percent.

Read that again with your existing customers in mind.

When you land in a large account, you become known to one function. The team that bought from you. The champion who argued for you. The users who work with your product every week. To them, you are proof.

Now look at the next deal you want inside that same account. A sister business unit. A neighbouring country. A different function that could use the module next to the one already running.

That deal has its own buying group. Its own budget holder. Its own IT security, its own legal, its own finance controller, its own people who carry the risk if the decision goes wrong. Most of them have never met you. Some of them have never heard your name.

I learned how much those people matter at American Express. We were selling a contract to a large global retailer, and the owner was so invested in the process that they gave us a framework of exactly which parts of their organisation we had to engage, down to names and telephone numbers. Two groups on that list I would probably never have thought of myself: the cashiers, and two people who entered transactions into the accounting system.

The cashiers were an easy sell. They were tired of turning American Express cardholders away. The two people in accounting took more time, mostly meetings over coffee. Then came the final decision. With the pen literally suspended over the paper, the customer turned to those two people and asked whether they were comfortable adding our services to their system. Had we skipped them, we would have been in real trouble.

Every expansion deal has people like that. They sit in the unit you have not sold to yet, they carry part of the risk, and they decide whether your name feels safe.

In one of our recorded client meetings, a commercial leader at a company with a dozen products put it plainly: cross-selling into existing accounts is difficult "because new products often require reaching entirely different stakeholder groups, making it feel like new business acquisition rather than account expansion."

That is the point. Each offering is its own deal, with its own buying logic, its own risk-bearing roles and its own proof requirements. The relationships that won the first deal rarely transfer to the next one.

In other words, the typical expansion deal starts in exactly the position the research says loses: known to one function, unknown to the group.

The unit you landed knows you. The buying group in the next unit mostly does not, which puts the expansion deal in the position the research says loses.

This is why expansion so often feels like it should be easy and turns out to be hard. The account team assumes the relationship travels with the contract. Relationships are personal, and familiarity has to be built unit by unit.

The companies that grow inside their key accounts understand this. They treat every untouched unit inside an existing customer as a new buying group that has to get to know them, with one enormous advantage: the proof is already sitting next door.

Why the white space gets left on the table

The white space gets left through a series of perfectly reasonable choices.

The first deal is a honeymoon. The customer is testing whether you deliver. Your team is careful not to push for more before the first project has proven itself. That is the right instinct, for a while.

Then attention moves on. The board wants new logos. Sales gets paid on new logos. The pipeline review is built around new logos. The account is handed to someone whose job is to keep it.

Meanwhile the champion who brought you in has a mandate that ends at the edge of their own unit. They will happily take a reference call. They will not walk your proposal into a sister division where they have no authority and some political risk.

So the account sits. Renewed every year, valued by the people who use it, and almost invisible to everyone else in the organisation.

This is the quiet paradox of key account management. An account's full potential is realised at the expand. Yet in many companies the key account function carries less weight than new business sales, and account managers drift into order-receiving: answering requests, processing renewals and keeping the customer happy.

Map the white space before you sell into it

The fix is to make the white space visible, box by box, and then choose where to play.

We use a simple sequence for this.

  1. Start where the position is strong. Find the accounts where delivery has gone well and the people who bought from you would say so. That is the core, and it is where proof lives.
  2. Map every box. Inside those accounts, draw the matrix. Products down one side, footprint across the other: sites, countries, business units, functions, user groups. Mark what is already landed. Every empty box is a possible upsell or cross-sell.
  3. Group the boxes into micro units. Some boxes share the same buyers, the same problem and the same argument. A finance function in three countries is often a single play. Clusters like these let one piece of proof work many times.
  4. Put a value on each box. Give every box and every cluster a revenue number, so the choice is made on value.

In Njord's concentric growth model, existing customers are Ring 0, where Incumbent Leverage is strongest. Similar buyers come next, where proof from delivery still carries. Low-proof markets come last, and they are only reachable through intentional design. Expansion is Ring 0 work: it is where the odds are best and the cost of winning is lowest.

Inside each Ring 0 account, the matrix turns the white space into concrete boxes, and the micro units show where one piece of proof can win several of them.

The decision rule is simple. The boxes where proof travels furthest and the money is largest are the expand focus. High value without transferable proof is a proof project, and it should be planned as one.

The top right quadrant, where proof travels and the money is large, is where the expand motion starts.

What comes out is a ranked shortlist of plays, each with an account, a box, a cluster, a value and an owner.

Done properly, the exercise changes the conversation in the leadership team. The white space becomes a number that can be put next to the new logo pipeline and compared on value, on proof and on time to close.

Proof travels, but only if someone carries it

In complex B2B, buyers choose the decision they can defend. The question every risk-bearing person in a buying group is quietly asking is: has this worked somewhere like us?

For a new logo, answering that question is hard. You need references from comparable organisations, in the same industry, the same geography, under the same constraints. Most companies have fewer of those than they think.

Inside an existing customer, the most comparable reference you will ever have is sitting in the next building. Same group policies. Same IT standards. Same procurement rules. Same culture. Often the same executive two levels up.

That is an extraordinary advantage. But it only works if the proof actually reaches the people who need it. And it rarely does on its own.

The head of the sister unit does not read your case study. The IT security lead in the next country does not know that their colleagues already approved you. The CFO who will sign the expansion has no idea how the first project went. Proof that stays inside the landed unit is worth almost nothing to the next one.

So the work is to carry the proof you already have across the account: to the right roles, in the right units, in a form they can repeat to each other. A short summary of what was delivered and what went wrong along the way. A peer conversation between the head of the landed unit and the head of the next. Content that speaks to the problems of the unit you want to enter.

It works. In one Fortune 500 engagement, a single site that already ran the solution was used as the lighthouse for seven other sites in the same group. The proof already existed. The work was carrying it.

One of the most effective ways to carry it is also one of the oldest. Invite the next unit's stakeholders to something they would welcome anyway: a webinar, a customer event, a roundtable where people from the landed unit share what they learned. For the majority who are not ready to buy, an invitation educates and builds trust without pressure.

A known supplier is far easier to defend. And when an analyst, an industry expert or a peer confirms what your customer says, the buyer has a second, independent source to point to.

Be present before the signal

Most expansion motions are reactive. The account team waits for a trigger: a renewal, a new budget cycle, a reorganisation, a request for proposal from a neighbouring unit. Then it moves.

By then the shortlist has usually formed. In a Bain and Google survey of 1,208 US B2B buyers, reported in Harvard Business Review in 2022, 90 percent chose a vendor that was on their day-one list: the set of vendors they had in mind before doing any research.

Research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and the B2B Institute suggests that only around 5 percent of potential buyers are in market at any given moment. The other 95 percent are not buying yet, but they are forming the memories they will draw on when they are. When the trigger finally fires in the unit next door, its buying group will start from the vendors it already knows.

If the only people who know you are in the unit you already serve, you start that deal as the outsider, even though you are the incumbent one floor up.

This is why we argue for always on presence inside key accounts. The goal is that the people in the untouched units recognise your name, understand what problem you solve, and have seen that their own colleagues trust you, long before anyone asks them to decide.

Always on means exactly that. It runs continuously, against the customers you have and the accounts that resemble them, whether or not a deal is open.

Signals need careful reading, though. Engagement data can show that an account is paying attention, which stakeholders are reading and whether interest is rising or falling. Whether a deal is moving through procurement, whether the stakeholders are aligned and whether the CFO has approved the budget are questions it leaves open. A signal tells you where to look.

Mistaking interest for the ability to buy is one of the most expensive errors in key account work. High interest with thin proof is what we call the Capital Trap, and the most convincing pipelines are often the most dangerous ones.

There is a second reason to stay present across the whole account. Gartner's 2025 survey of 632 B2B buyers found that 74 percent of buying teams showed unhealthy conflict during the decision, and that groups that reached consensus were 2.5 times more likely to report a high quality deal. Expansion deals that cross unit boundaries are exactly where that conflict lives. A vendor that only one side of the table knows is a vendor that the other side can easily block.

Every expansion starts with its own Red Fiat

There is a common mistake once a company has landed. It proposes the big group agreement. One contract, every unit, every country, the full platform.

It sounds efficient. In practice it pulls every stakeholder in the group into one decision, and it hands every one of them the power to say no. The deal that was meant to accelerate growth becomes the deal that stalls it.

At Njord we use a simple picture for this. Arriving with the full vision is like trying to park a 20 metre bus in a crowded car park. There is no space big enough, so it collides with what is already there: existing systems, current initiatives, other vendors. Every overlap pulls in more people, more meetings and more decisions. A small red Fiat slips into an open space and is parked before anyone has to move.

The open space is a gap the customer already has: something no current system, initiative or plan covers. Fill that, and the first deal in the next unit can be approved by the few people who own the problem.

The first deal probably landed because it was small enough for a few people to approve within their own mandate. The next one should be designed the same way.

For each box on the shortlist, ask what the smallest commitment is that the new unit could make on its own, inside its own budget and its own sign off limit, that would still produce a live reference in that unit. Then design the offer around that. One unit, one function, one country at a time, each one making the next easier to defend.

Four principles shape a good Red Fiat:

  • Scope reduction. Fewer roles carry exposure, so fewer people have to say yes.
  • Risk-sharing. The commitment is reversible or outcome-based.
  • Isolation. It sits beside critical systems.
  • Design for proof. The reference it produces is the real asset.

A pilot tests technology. A Red Fiat constructs the proof every later deal leans on.

The aim is a deal that one person can approve, fund and defend. One functional owner who can say yes. A scope that stays inside their sign-off limit. A term they can approve alone. A budget line that already exists. One visible result, then expand. The principle behind all of it is simple: reduce the number of stakeholders needed to say yes.

A Red Fiat is a design. Land quietly, then expand deliberately.

This is how Ring 0 compounds. Proof builds box by box. Every unit you establish makes the argument stronger for the unit next to it, and the cost of each new win falls.

Five questions for your next account review

If you want to know whether your company is growing its key accounts or just renewing them, bring these questions to the next review.

  1. What share of this account have we actually landed? Count the units, countries and functions that could use what we sell, and how many already do.
  2. Who in the untouched units knows us? Name them. If the answer is "our champion knows them", the answer is nobody.
  3. What proof from the landed unit has reached the next one? Count the reference calls that have actually taken place.
  4. What is the Red Fiat for the next box? The smallest scope the next unit can approve on its own.
  5. Who owns the white space? If expansion is everybody's side job, it is nobody's job.

The second question is usually the hardest one to answer honestly. That is where the work begins.

Stop counting logos

Most B2B companies measure growth in a way that hides all of this.

A new logo gets a bell, a Slack message and a slide in the board deck. A second business unit at an existing customer gets a line in the renewal report. The incentives follow the applause, and the team follows the incentives.

In complex B2B, the market is finite. For many companies it is a few hundred accounts that matter. Every one you have already landed is the closest you will ever be to the next deal: inside the procurement framework, inside the security approval, inside the group, with proof one floor away.

Sales Yield is a better measure: the gross profit lifetime value you win, divided by everything it cost to win it.

Sales Yield = Gross profit LTV won ÷ Total commercial cost

Commercial cost includes the executive and specialist time spent on pursuits that produced nothing. Measured this way, the picture changes. Expansion inside existing customers is where proof is strongest and the cost to revenue is lowest. It is where Sales Yield is made.

The access is already there. What is missing is familiarity across the rest of the buying groups, a map of where the value sits, and someone whose job it is to carry the proof from the unit that knows you to the units that do not.

The companies that grow fastest keep winning inside the customers they already have.

David Klättborg is co-founder and Account Director at Njord. He has worked with client management and megadeals for more than 20 years, including more than a decade at American Express Sweden, and is one of the megadealers featured in the Megadeals book. He works with Njord's clients on how they grow inside their most valuable customers and deals.

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