Your small customers are a big deal when considering your revenue streams. The top 10 percent of accounts may represent 60 to 90 percent of your total revenue – rightfully earning the majority of your sales attention.  Are you content to let 10 to 40 percent of your revenue simply continue to flow without much effort? What if, with just a little effort, you could grow the revenue from those accounts 10 percent or more annually?

In Cost-Effective Channel Alignment, Real Results Marketing’s Jonathan Bein shows just that. Passive servicing of these customers can result in some growth, he says, but there’s no direction or measurable action that goes with that. “Even minimally active efforts to grow wallet-share in these accounts yields 5 percent annual growth,” Bein says.

That’s not to say that you should turn all of your active salespeople away from those top performers. Instead, small shifts in channel alignment for all of your customers can have broad benefits. The most cost-effective channels are different for acquiring and serving large, mid-size and small customers.

For example, the cost of direct marketing vehicles is usually less than $1 per contact, compared with $100 to $133 per contact for the average field sales rep. Incorporating a multichannel approach to sales to cultivate each of your customers can quickly have measurable results.

Read more about how to cost-effectively realign sales channels for customers of all sizes.