Your Existing Customers Are Your Growth Engine. So Why Are You Ignoring Them?

Here's a number that should keep every CEO up at night: 73% of revenue comes from existing customers. Not new logos. Not the deals your sales team is chasing right now. The customers who already trust you enough to write you a check.

And it gets worse. According to Ebsta's 2024 analysis, 52% of net new revenue also comes from existing customers. When you do the profit math, nearly 100% of profit — sometimes more than 100% — is generated post-sale. Companies routinely need to generate 130% of their profit from existing customers just to cover the cost of acquiring new ones.

So where does the investment go? Into new business sales. Every time.

I had a conversation with Alex Raymond on the Thoughts on Selling podcast recently that crystallized something I've been feeling for years. Alex is the founder of AMplify, host of the Account Manager Secrets podcast, and he just published a book called The Growth Department. He's spent the last decade studying how companies grow through their existing customers — and his conclusion is blunt: most companies are blowing it.

The Varsity Team and the JV Squad

Alex uses an analogy I can't stop thinking about. We treat the sales team like the varsity team. They get the best coaches, the best playbooks, fancier uniforms, a nicer bus, nicer changing rooms. The account management and customer success teams? They're the JV squad. An inexperienced coach. Ratty hand-me-down uniforms. A smelly locker room. And then leadership says, "How come they're not performing at the same level?"

It's a structural problem, not a talent problem. The people in post-sales roles are often the hardest workers and most customer-centric people in the entire company. They drive more revenue than the salespeople in many cases — they just don't talk about it. But without the playbooks, training, tools, and leadership investment that sales gets, they're left twisting themselves into pretzels to get renewals across the line and keep customers happy.

And here's the cruel irony: when they succeed through sheer heroics, leadership doesn't see valor. They see a bunch of people running around putting out fires. The respect for the team goes down, not up.

The Recurring Revenue Myth

One of the most dangerous ideas in business today is that recurring revenue is automatic. Alex calls it a myth, and he's right. Just because revenue is structured as a subscription doesn't mean it shows up without effort. But executives hear "recurring" and assume it's on autopilot — which gives them permission to hire less experienced people, invest less in their development, and treat the entire function as an afterthought.

In the early days of SaaS, we knew better. Even on a 24-month contract, we'd say we have to earn the customer's usage every month. That mindset has been replaced by complacency, and the results are showing up in churn rates everywhere.

Keep, Grow, No Surprises

Alex offers a framework that's simple enough to fit on a napkin and powerful enough to reorient an entire post-sales organization. The job of account management is to help your company win. You do that three ways: keep the customers that sales brought in the door, grow the ones with the most potential, and make sure there are no surprises.

That's it. Not NPS scores. Not CSAT dashboards. Not being a liaison with the product team. Those are trailing indicators. The real job is keeping, growing, and eliminating surprises — and delivering profit back to the business.

The $1 That Changes Everything

One of the most surprising data points Alex shared comes from Greg Daines, who has analyzed massive datasets on why customers stay or leave. The minimum threshold to get a customer excited about renewing isn't some blockbuster ROI number. It's basically $1 of measurable improvement.

Why? Because once a customer sees a dollar of progress, they can imagine the path to ten, a thousand, a million. They feel justified in their decision. They want to keep going. And here's the kicker: even customers who see negative results stay twice as long as customers where you don't report value at all. Showing up with the truth — even when it's ugly — beats silence every time.

The Path Forward

This conversation reminded me of Jane Scott, one of the best CSMs I've ever worked with. Jane was the glue that held the Xerox account together at Oracle. She knew the metrics, she knew the people, she knew what mattered. She's what happens when you invest in post-sales talent and let them do their job.

Every company deserves a Jane Scott. But you don't get one by treating post-sales like the JV team.

Alex's book The Growth Department lays out the blueprint for changing that — for building the scaffolding that account management and customer success teams have never had. If you're a CRO, a VP of sales, a founder trying to scale, or a CSM wondering why nobody seems to care about the work you're doing, go read it.

The path to long-term, durable, profitable growth doesn't run through your next cold outreach campaign. It runs through the customers who are already here.

Listen to the full conversation on the Thoughts on Selling podcast.