The booster zone: how to accelerate growth with strategic customers

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to present a method to help management teams and sales leaders evaluate opportunities and risks in business‐to‐business relationships from an outside‐in perspective. Design/methodology/approach – The approach derives from practical work with companies over the past ten years and has been validated by five benchmarking consortia held by Columbia Business School (New York) and the University of St Gallen (Switzerland), in cooperation with approximately 30 large‐scale enterprises from the USA, Asia, and Europe. Findings – An increasing share of wallet follows an S‐shaped curve, such that for high and low performing companies, increasing the quality of the customer relationship usually leads to only marginal growth. In contrast, companies situated in the area around the steepest part of the slope are the best growth candidates that promise the potential for exceptional gains. The paper refers to this area as the “booster zone”. Originality/value – Investing in business‐to‐business (B2B) relationships located in the so‐called “booster zone” drives above‐average growth. Mapping customer relationships properly offers also a valuable early‐warning function and complements widely used, past‐oriented performance indicators effectively.