Ask the owner of a growing South African business about their best customers and you will often hear about one or two corporate contracts that seemed to land out of nowhere. Usually there was a good internal relationship, the timing was right and everything lined up. Those contracts now pay a large share of the bills.
Winning more of them is far harder, and not for lack of trying. The first ones were won because the right things happened to be in place, often by luck rather than design. Nobody is quite sure what went right, so nobody knows how to do it again. In the meantime, one or two large customers carry the revenue – that is customer concentration risk.
Most of these businesses have already shown they can win a big contract. The better question for them is how to win more, so that no single customer can hurt them. That is what it means to hunt big sales: putting in place, on purpose, what was there by accident the first time.
What is customer concentration risk?
Customer concentration risk is the exposure a business carries when a small number of customers account for a large share of its revenue. Lose one of them, or let one of them renegotiate hard, and the whole business feels it.
Accounting rules treat this as material. IFRS 8, the international standard listed companies use to report on their operating segments, requires a company to disclose when revenue from a single customer reaches 10% or more of its total. If one customer at 10% is worth telling investors about, a private business with several times that share of its turnover in one account should be paying attention.
Why do growing businesses win one big contract and then stop?
In most cases the first contract came from a person rather than a process. It might have been the founder’s relationship with a senior buyer, or a former colleague who had moved into procurement. Neither can be repeated on demand.
So, when the business goes after its second or third corporate account, it starts from nothing. There is no agreed way to qualify the opportunity, map the buying group or manage the months between first meeting and signature. Every big deal becomes bespoke, expensive and hopeful.
Why are big corporate deals so expensive to chase?
Large contracts take a long time and involve many people. The 6sense 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Study, based on close to 4 000 survey responses, put the average buying cycle at 10.1 months. In the deals I see, six or seven stakeholders is normal, each with a different concern and a different veto.
All of that time is senior time. The founder and often the financial director spend months on meetings and procurement paperwork while the rest of the business waits for them.
Much of that effort ends with nothing signed. Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna analysed around 2.5 million recorded sales conversations for their book The JOLT Effect. They found that between 40% and 60% of deals were lost to the customer doing nothing. Fewer than half of those losses came from buyers preferring the status quo. Most came from fear of making the wrong call.
So, the cost of a big deal goes beyond the months spent winning it. It also includes every deal that took the same months and ended with “let’s revisit next quarter”.
Why is the formal sales process often too late?
By the time a tender, request for proposal or shortlist arrives, a smaller supplier is usually on the back foot. The same 6sense study found that buyers went on to purchase from their early favourite 77% of the time.
The work that wins large contracts starts before there is a deal to chase. It means finding the right person in the business, someone senior who has a problem you can solve and already knows they have it, and having that conversation first. If you are the first supplier to show them you can solve it, you are usually the one they buy from. You haven’t joined an opportunity, you have created it.
Who you speak to, and what you say, decides whether that happens. Senior buyers care about top line, bottom line, risk and time to value. Lead with features, capability and price and they will route you down to procurement or IT, where your job becomes being compared on specification and price. That is selling bottom up. It gets you access to the business, but not permission to be in the conversation that decides anything.
How do you win bigger sales faster?
The answer is to stop treating each large deal as a one-off and build a repeatable way of winning them. A shorter sales cycle uses less senior time, which makes each contract cheaper to win. A business that can win corporates by design rather than by luck can also spread its revenue, so no single customer holds the power. Businesses that manage this tend to do six things:
- Choose your targets. Decide which corporates you can serve well and why they should care, rather than chasing whoever answers the phone. Deciding who you won’t chase matters as much as deciding who you will.
- Create the opportunity. Don’t wait for a shortlist. Find the senior person who has the problem you solve, knows they have it and can sign off, and start that conversation before anyone else does.
- Sell top down, through one executive sponsor. A big deal can involve seven or eight people across finance, procurement, legal and operations. Manage all of them together in a single process so that no ball gets dropped, but anchor the deal on one executive sponsor with the authority to sign off and the standing to carry the rest of the business.
- Make the first decision smaller. A committee that cannot agree on a large yes will often agree on a small one. A pilot with one team, one measurable outcome and one date is easier to approve, and the second decision is far easier than the first.
- Build the buying process into your sales process. Big deals pass through the same checkpoints every time, legal, security, procurement and finance. A repeatable process tells you in advance where each one sits and what it needs, so you can get ahead of it instead of discovering it late. That is what makes a deal faster, not a quicker verbal yes.
- Grow the customers you already have. The cheapest large contract is often an expansion of an existing one, where the trust is already built and nobody needs convincing that you are real.
What should the people running the revenue engine take from this?
One big corporate contract is worth celebrating. Relying on it for years is where the risk sets in. The aim is to win several, so that losing any one of them is a setback rather than a crisis.
Winning bigger sales faster, and therefore more cheaply, is a sales goal. For the owner and everyone responsible for revenue, it also decides how much control the business has over its own future.
Hayden Lamberti is a business coach at Grow, where he works with South African business leaders on strategy and growth. He spent his earlier career in technology, including as Managing Director of AlwaysOn, where he oversaw growth in its user base from 2 million to 12 million. He has also built and scaled businesses at NTT and Internet Solutions. He holds a BSc in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA from the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS).
