Should B2B Marketers Focus on Driving Account Growth?

Every B2B company has to find a balance between customer acquisition and existing account growth. Many are finding tremendous opportunity for revenue in the latter and shifting their focus to the accounts with the most growth potential, but it's not a simple transition. eMarketer's Jillian Ryan spoke with Mark Kovac, global head of Bain & Company's Commercial Excellence Group, about what measures need to be taken by B2B marketers to drive more revenue from a small subset of existing accounts.

There are company-wide resource allocation shifts to account-based management support. Instead of concentrating on acquisition, there's now an effort to use data to identify and align cross-functionally around the full customer life cycle, including retention and upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

Many companies we work with want to do both, but the capabilities and the data are very different. Marketers require a different stack for each part of the life cycle.

Our advice is to do the math. You know what your goals are. In order to achieve them, do you need to go out and win new accounts, or do you have the opportunity to reach your goal by increasing your SOW? In our experience, the easiest money is always from SOW increases.