Growth may be closer than we think

A lot of business development energy goes into finding the next new client. New clients feel like growth. They show up in pipeline reports, conversion rates and sales meetings. They give a business a visible sense of movement.

But recent B-to-B research raises an uncomfortable question. What if some organisations are looking too far away for growth that already sits much closer to home?

Vikas Mittal, Vivek Astvansh and Sonam Singh analysed responses from 44,822 B-to-B customers across more than 6,000 suppliers between 2017 and 2024. Many customers found suppliers through repeat business or referrals, pointing directly to the commercial value of existing relationships. Yet interviews with 25 CEOs, chief strategy officers and chief marketing officers found that more than 95% focused budgets on acquisition rather than deepening what they already had.

New client acquisition matters. It may simply be over-weighted.

The research also found that around 80% of suppliers relied on executive instinct or sales-team judgement when shifting growth investment year to year. One executive described having no rigorous model for determining customer mix or growth spend. Another said decisions came down to intuition and educated guesswork. Honest reflections, and probably familiar in many businesses.

The practical problem is that significant spend goes to sales calls, advertising, trade shows and websites without clear evidence of what actually drives the customer's decision.

Rather than asking suppliers what they think works, the researchers asked customers directly how they found the supplier they used for their current project. Customer-side evidence gives a more grounded view of how buying decisions actually form.

Suppliers can become attached to their own activity. A website rebuild feels strategic. A trade show feels visible. A campaign feels measurable. But the buyer may be responding to something less dramatic: prior trust, a colleague's recommendation, or the straightforward experience of working with you before.

That gap is worth sitting with.

Which existing clients have the strongest reason to reselect you? Where are you creating enough value that a client would confidently refer you? Which relationships are quietly underdeveloped? Which clients know only one part of what you do? Where is loyalty being assumed rather than deliberately earned?

For businesses working in behavioural, leadership and wellbeing development, this has particular relevance. The value in this kind of work is rarely created in a single transaction. It builds through accumulated trust, practical support and usefulness over time. A profile, survey or diagnostic may be the product, but the deeper commercial value often sits in helping a client make better decisions about people, teams and performance.

That shifts the growth question. Instead of asking only how to find more new clients, the more productive question may be how to become more valuable to the clients who already know you. A client using a behavioural profile may also need team-level insight. A client working through a leadership programme may benefit from follow-up measurement. A client asking about wellbeing may need organisational data, not a one-off workshop.

Ask where repeat value is visible but not being named. Clients sometimes don't refer because they haven't been helped to describe what they got. They don't buy more because the next useful step hasn't been made obvious.

Measure the source of work more carefully. Not just new lead source, but repeat source, referral source, prior-project source. Those categories deserve far more attention than most B-to-B growth systems give them.

Worth noting too: around 60% of leaders interviewed said vendor advice shaped their growth spending. A marketing platform or channel provider will naturally frame growth around the activity they sell. Leaders still need their own evidence.

For many B-to-B organisations, the strongest growth opportunity may not be another campaign or another push for cold leads. It may be a more disciplined understanding of the clients who already trust them, the work those clients still need done, and the reasons they would confidently recommend them to others.

That is not a softer approach to growth. It may be the more evidence-based one.

References

Mittal, V., Astvansh, V. and Singh, S. (2026). Effective business-to-business sales growth strategy: Evidence from a study of 44,000 customers. Management and Business Review, 6(1), pp. 16–22.

Mittal, V., Astvansh, V. and Singh, S. (2025). Effective B2B sales growth strategy: Evidence from a longitudinal study of 44,000 B2B customers. SSRN working paper, posted 12 July 2025.