Good morning. The account you already won is bigger than the part of it you're selling to.
Sales.
The White Space Map
Of your largest customer, what share of what they spend in your category actually comes to you — a half, a fifth, a tenth — and which of their divisions, sites or product lines have you simply never called?
Robert Miller and Stephen Heiman had already written Strategic Selling (1985), which is about winning one complex deal. Successful Large Account Management, written with Tad Tuleja in 1991, is about what happens next: a customer you've won and now have to grow. Their argument was that a large account is an asset to be managed rather than a territory to be worked, so it gets planned like a small business — a charter first, stating what you're actually for inside that account, and revenue targets second. Their central model, the buy-sell hierarchy, told the account manager to sell up to value rather than down to price, because a customer who buys a commodity from you has no reason to keep you. The working instrument is a grid: down one axis everything you sell, across the other the customer's real buying units — divisions, sites, product lines, functions — with a mark wherever that unit already buys that thing from you. Account managers came to call the unmarked cells white space. The trap is reading all of it as opportunity. Most of those squares are empty for reasons that have nothing to do with your effort — the unit doesn't do the work, or it's tied to a contract you can't touch — and separating those from the ones genuinely open is this morning's work, because the number you report upwards depends entirely on the sorting.
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