Why Most Sales Models Undervalue Their Best Customers

Most sales models are built to optimize for one thing: net new deals.

That focus makes sense early on. But as companies mature, it quietly creates a structural blind spot. The customers who generate the most long-term value are rarely the ones who only buy a single product or service — yet sales goals, quotas, and incentives are still overwhelmingly designed around first transactions, not relationship breadth.

The result is predictable. Companies systematically undervalue their best customers, not because they lack opportunity, but because their sales systems are not designed to recognize or reward it.

Across banking, telecom, retail, and B2B services, the evidence is consistent: customers who buy a wider range of offerings generate higher revenue per account, stay longer, and are less price sensitive. When sales models fail to account for this, they leave durable revenue and retention gains on the table.

Relationship breadth is one of the strongest drivers of retention

One of the most consistent findings in customer and relationship research is that relationship breadth matters as much as, or more than, relationship length.

Academic and industry research shows that customers who purchase multiple products or services from the same provider have lower churn and higher renewal rates than single-product customers, even when tenure and satisfaction are held constant.

McKinsey highlights that expanding relationships with existing customers increases loyalty and reduces switching behavior, particularly when additional offerings solve related or adjacent needs.

In subscription and telecom businesses, customers using multiple services are less likely to churn because service bundling has been shown to reduce churn, making switching less attractive and strengthening overall retention. 

This is why visibility into customer behavior across products and services matters. Without it, companies struggle to see where relationships are deepening — and where they are fragile.

Why relationship breadth changes the financial math

Cross selling is often framed as a revenue uplift tactic. In reality, its biggest impact comes from how it reshapes customer economics.

Bain & Company has shown that even small improvements in retention can drive outsized profit gains, because retained customers buy more over time and cost less to serve.

When customers adopt multiple offerings, two things happen simultaneously:

• Average revenue per account increases

• Customer lifetime extends

Together, these effects compound into materially higher lifetime value.

McKinsey states that one of the key ways companies improve growth outcomes is to win more at home by increasing cross-sell and share of wallet, which directly supports the idea that broader customer relationships contribute to better overall performance and reduced churn.

The real problem is not cross selling — it is sales design

Despite the evidence, most sales organizations still treat cross-selling as secondary.

Forrester research shows that structured cross sell and upsell motions materially increase customer lifetime value and stabilize revenue, yet these motions are often underrepresented in quotas and incentives.

Sales teams respond to what they are measured and paid for. When quotas emphasize new logos and first deals, expansion behavior becomes opportunistic rather than systematic.

This creates a disconnect between what drives long-term value and what sales models reward in practice.

Leadership teams that want predictable growth need to design sales systems around relationship value, not just deal velocity.

Industry patterns reinforce the same conclusion

While the magnitude varies, the pattern holds across sectors.

Banking and financial services

In banking, broader customer relationships are closely tied to higher relationship value. McKinsey research on experience-led growth shows that organizations that deepen customer engagement across products can increase cross-sell rates by 15–25 percent and grow share of wallet by 5–10%, reinforcing the link between multi-product adoption, higher value, and stronger engagement.

This supports the broader finding that customers with wider product relationships generate materially more value than single-product customers.

Telecom and subscription businesses

In telecom and subscription models, multi-service adoption reduces churn by increasing switching costs and embedding the provider more deeply into the customer’s daily operations.

McKinsey also shows that companies focused on deepening engagement with existing customers — for example by increasing customer satisfaction and cross-selling — can generate more revenue from existing clients than by chasing new ones. The research also reports that organizations can achieve a meaningful increase in cross-sell rates and share of wallet by making existing customers more central to their growth strategy.

Further research also supports that service bundling in telecom reduces customer churn across multiple bundled services (e.g., triple-play offerings).

B2B and relationship-driven industries

In B2B and other relationship-driven industries, deeper solution scope increases account defensibility and repeat purchase behavior.

Forrester research on B2B growth engines shows that companies that adopt a customer-obsessed approach — aligning teams around retention, expansion, and long-term value rather than just acquisition — outperform peers on revenue growth, profitability, and customer retention.

This reinforces the idea that expanding relationships within existing accounts is a primary driver of durable growth in B2B environments.

What separates average performance from stand-out results

The difference is not aggressive selling. It is system design.

Across research and case studies, strong cross-sell performance depends on:

• Understanding customer context and lifecycle

• Trust-based, value-aligned selling

• Low-friction products and processes

Forrester emphasizes that many B2B organizations underinvest in retention and lifecycle management relative to acquisition, despite retention being a critical driver of long-term growth.

Most importantly, incentives matter. Bain case research shows that organizations that design sales compensation around long-term value creation and profitable behavior outperform those that reward only upfront volume or net new deals.

Operationalizing this requires alignment across sales, marketing, and customer success.

RELATED READING: Best practices for aligning sales and marketing through RevOps

The management takeaway

Customers who buy more are not just worth more. They are more stable, more defensible, and more predictable. Yet most sales models undervalue them because they are designed around transactions, not relationships.

For leadership teams, the implication is structural, not tactical. Cross-selling must be reflected in:

• Sales goals and quota design

• Account and territory strategy

• Incentive and compensation models

Marketing, sales, and customer success must operate from a shared view of account value and relationship breadth. Until sales systems are designed around relationship economics, companies will continue to underutilize one of their most reliable growth levers.

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