Identify untapped accounts

Start with a spreadsheet. Pull every paying account from your CRM, for example HubSpot, and from your billing tool, for example Stripe. One row per account.

Add these columns: account name, owner, start date, what they buy today, what they pay, number of users or projects, and the date of your last real conversation. If you cannot fill a column for an account, mark it as unknown. Unknown is a finding too.

White space is everything a customer could buy from you but does not. Put your products, tiers or services across the top of the sheet and your accounts down the side. Mark what each account has.

Do not guess what they need yet. Just look at the grid. Rows with many gaps are your candidates, and columns with few ticks show an offer that nobody knows about. The idea is explained in Map the white space before you map the pitch.

Give every account a score from 1 (weak) to 3 (strong) on four questions:

• Fit: does the account look like your best customers in size, sector and growth.
• Usage: do they use what they have bought, close to its limit or beyond it.
• White space: how much of your range could they use that they do not have.
• Health: are they happy, paying on time and answering your messages.

Keep the scoring rough. You are sorting, not auditing. A score you can set in thirty seconds per account is better than a model you never finish.

Health comes first. An account with a score of 1 for health is not an expansion target. It is a retention problem, and you should fix that before you ask for more. Read You cannot expand an account you have not made successful first.

Move these accounts to a separate tab with a note on what has to change. Check the tab again next month.

Add up the other three scores. Sort from high to low. Take the top ten.

Ten is the right size because you can act on it this month. A list of eighty accounts is a report, and reports do not get actioned. For each of the ten, write one line with three parts: the gap, the likely reason it exists, and the first step. For example: "No reporting add-on. They export data by hand every week. Ask how long that takes."

For most accounts the first step is a question, a useful report, or a check-in. Send them their own usage summary. Ask how a goal they mentioned is going. Invite them to a short review.

When the customer shows interest, move to How to handle expansion conversations. Put every step in your CRM as a task with a date, so the list does not go stale.

• Starting with the accounts you know best. They are rarely the untapped ones.
• Scoring revenue size alone. A small account with the right profile and high usage often expands faster than a large one that is quiet.
• Building a scoring model with fifteen columns. Four is enough.
• Including unhealthy accounts because they have a lot of white space.
• Making the list once and never opening it again.

• You can name ten accounts, each with a gap, a reason and a next step, within an afternoon of starting.
• At least half of the ten have had a real conversation within 30 days.
• Some of those conversations lead to an expansion, and you can see it in your expansion revenue.
• You repeat the audit every quarter and the shortlist changes. If the same ten names appear every time, nobody is acting on the list.