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Join for freePosted: Mon 12th Oct 2026
Finding more customers is only one way to grow sales.
In this practical 30-minute session, Paula Bolton shows you five places to look for growth in your own business.
Learn how to identify and profile your most valuable customers, find out why they bought from you, spot potential revenue you're currently missing and map out more ways for customers to buy from you.
Explore how past customers, upsells, entry-level offers, repeat revenue, referrals and strategic partnerships can create additional routes to growth.
Expect practical exercises you can use during the session, plus a couple of useful tools to help you put the ideas into action afterwards.
Work out who your best customers are and find more like them
Find sales opportunities you're already sitting on
Create more routes to revenue
Paula is a five-time founder with more than 20 years’ experience across sales, commercial leadership and business ownership.
She has built businesses across sales consultancy, credit management, events and entertainment and specialist construction, and has successfully sold two companies.
Her businesses have worked with organisations ranging from growing SMEs to global brands, including Hyundai and Lyle & Scott.
Through Paula Bolton Consulting, she helps businesses identify where sales performance is breaking down and where the strongest opportunities for growth sit.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Caitriona O'Connor: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Lunch and Learn. My name is Caitriona, and I'll be your host today. For those of you attending a Lunch and Learn for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for start-ups and small businesses.
I'm pleased to introduce Paula Bolton, the founder of Paula Bolton Consulting. In this session, Paula will show you five places to look for growth in your own business. If you have any questions, please post them in the chat, and we'll do our best to answer them at the end of the session.
Today's webinar will be recorded, and we will send a follow-up email with the recording and further resources later today. Over to you, Paula.
Paula Bolton: Thank you so much. I'm really delighted to be here at my first webinar with the fabulous Enterprise Nation. I've been a sales and business consultant for more than 20 years, working across sales and commercial growth.
I've started six companies and successfully scaled and sold two, and four are still going today. A couple of questions were submitted in advance, but I think you'll find the answers are featured throughout this presentation.
The main thing I want to talk about is the five key places where you can find more revenue within your own business, without necessarily trying to attract 100 new leads, which can be quite costly these days with digital marketing and SEO. Throughout the exercises, keep one question in mind: where is the low-hanging fruit that will bring revenue into my business fastest?
There are often customers, conversations, offers, and relationships already sitting inside your business that haven't been properly exploited. When new clients come to me saying they need more leads and more revenue, the first place I suggest is to look within the business.
So where do we look? We can look at existing customers, open opportunities, past customers, gaps in what you currently offer, and partners. The questions to ask are: who currently buys from you, who almost bought from you, who used to buy but doesn't any more, and who is already selling to the people you want to earn more from – in other words, partners?
The first place is your best customers. We want to identify those who are worth keeping, growing and cloning – and, you're going to hate this, potentially even getting rid of. Stick with me.
The second is open opportunities: reviewing enquiries, proposals and deals that haven't converted, and why. We can then use that information to get more from within your existing customer base.
The third is your existing customers, where we look for relevant upsell, cross-sell, downsell and repeat opportunities. The fourth is past customers: who went quiet, who stopped buying, why, and what you can do about it. The fifth is partners and other people's audiences.
One framework I've used a lot in my businesses, and I'll keep this really simple, is the ABC framework. It's not my framework – it already exists out there. What we're looking at is: who are my A customers?
Your A customers are brilliant. You're really happy when they call or email you, they pay on time, and they're a good fit and easy to work with. They have the potential to buy again, and they're typically a profitable company.
Your B customers are good. They have some growth potential, including the potential to become A customers. Your C customers are low margin, take up most of your time for very little profit, and often pay late as well.
We do this exercise partly to help with the other tasks we're going to cover, but also to see which customers are worth protecting. Your A customers are the ones to protect, so how can we show them more love? Your B customers are worth developing, and your C customers are the ones we can learn from – and the ones that may be damaging the margin in your business.
If you speak to your customers frequently, you'll generally be able to tell your As from your Bs from your Cs. It should be quite a straightforward task: you just want three columns.
I did this with the credit management company I sold, in order to scale it. As a business, we made the decision to remove quite a few of the customers in the C category, and I can tell you it was liberating.
With some of them, we put boundaries in place. For example, we told them they could no longer send 64 voice notes via WhatsApp, and that there was a set way we were going to communicate. At least then the C customers had a boundary, and they could choose whether they wanted to continue working with us.
That not only felt liberating, but it allowed us to focus our energy and time on our A and B customers. We were able to develop them more and spend a lot more time nurturing those relationships.
The same exercise feeds into the next part, which is cloning your top 20%. Once you know who your A customers are, you can look at the similarities between your A and B customers. For my credit management company, I took the best 20% of my A customers – the top spenders – and put them in a spreadsheet.
I looked at whether they were in a particular sector, whether they had a certain company size, and whether they were in a general location. I also asked what the main pain point was that triggered them to buy from me, and what they had already tried.
Once you have this intelligence, you can use it in three ways. First, you can go to those top A customers and see whether they know anyone like-for-like who they might recommend you to. Second, you can seek partnerships with them, such as joint content or a joint webinar.
Third, if you're going to attract new business, you can tailor your proposition, your marketing and your ads so that they appeal to the real type of customer you want to get.
To give an example, I'll keep using the credit management company because it makes sense. I went down a further level, beyond company size and location, to look at who the decision makers were within that top 20%. I looked at the founders and directors, their values and priorities, and even their hobbies – so you can do a bit of internet stalking.
I found that most of the decision makers were men aged between 45 and 60, and they all randomly had a keen interest in golf or played it. I used that to bring golfing language into my blog posts and marketing, and when I reached out to them, I talked to them about golf. Yes, I got my knowledge up on golf.
I also asked them which events they attended where similar, like-minded people were gathering. Guess what? A lot of the networking events were at golf clubs, so that's where I went. That's how I was able to massively scale my business using the most profitable top 20% of my A customers.
It's a really useful exercise, because what you're asking is what your best customers can teach you about where your next revenue opportunity is. It didn't mean every 50-year-old golfer was my target client, but it certainly put me in the right place at the right time to be referred for more of the same type of customer.
Part two of my lesson today is the 20-opportunity audit. We do this to find where good opportunities are leaking revenue in your business, and where genuine buying interest is being lost. Start with the last 20 opportunities, which I think is a good number to begin with.
First, look at the customers you've recently won and ask why they bought from you. Then use that insight to sharpen your positioning and messaging on your website, in blog content and on social media.
Next, look at the opportunities you lost. Maybe you lost them to a competitor, so why did they choose the competitor over you? Do you need to fix gaps in your social proof, your proposition or your pricing?
Did they think you were too expensive, and was it really about price? A lot of people say it's too expensive, but it's not always the price that's the problem. Sometimes they just think it's too much for the level of risk right now.
When people say, "Not now, I'm not quite ready," you can look at what stopped them from moving. You can then create follow-ups, triggers and re-engagement plans to bring those past enquiries back into your business.
Then there's no decision at all, where they've completely ghosted you and vanished off the face of the earth. Look at whether there was something in your process that you did or didn't do that stopped the momentum.
This is quite an intelligence exercise, but it's about making data-driven decisions to improve how you speak to the open opportunities currently in your pipeline. When you start to see similarities in the data, you can adjust your next pitch or your next scheduled meeting. You can pick up revenue really quickly that way, just by making slight adjustments.
Number three is looking at your existing customers again and giving them more ways to buy from you. Most businesses have a core offer and perhaps a more premium offer. A lot of businesses miss out on the free value, such as a guide, webinar, tool or useful content, as an entry offer.
Think about the way a customer flows through your business. At the moment, your B customers might be sitting in an entry offer, such as an audit, a diagnostic or a lower-level version of your core offer. Think about how you could take them to a higher-revenue offer, or perhaps an upsell.
In my consulting business, people might join a free webinar as my free value offer. The next entry-level offer might be a workshop or a strategic audit, which isn't as expensive as sales implementation. Once people have done a workshop or an audit, I contact them to see whether they're ready to purchase sales implementation.
Then there's the all-singing, all-dancing fractional leadership, which is my top-level offer. After that, I want something I can offer on a repeated basis, whether that's a retainer, membership, maintenance or renewal. In my case, that's monthly sales coaching.
What a lot of people miss here is the downsell. Say you came into my business interested in the strategic audit, but you're not quite ready to buy. Instead of saying, "No problem, do keep us in mind," I might have a downsell offer, such as a paid masterclass or a paid webinar.
That way, you're still keeping the person in your business, still building rapport and still helping them, which is the most important thing. They just enter the funnel at a middle level before flowing through the business. So the task is to think about where your customers currently sit, and whether there's an add-on or downsell you could bring in to take them to the next level.
There are four key ways to grow customer value that I've often used and advised my clients on. The first is the upsell. Going back to my example, that could be the sales system implementation or even fractional sales.
The second is the cross-sell. If you're an accountant, a related product might be accountancy software, where you earn a commission for selling it. If you're a business coach, it could be a leadership workshop you've created, and if you're in marketing, it could be ongoing advertising for repeat and recurring revenue.
The third is the downsell, as I said, and the fourth is repeat and recurring offers. Create these four boxes. What do you have that you can upsell? What related, non-competing products or services can you cross-sell? What can you downsell to keep a potential customer in your business, and what do you have that is repeat and recurring and readily available? Hopefully I'm not going too fast, but I'll address any questions at the end.
Next, we want to look at the customers who've gone quiet. Maybe they bought from you once, depending on what you sell, or they stopped buying and never said why. They've just vanished.
What I'd advise against is contacting your whole database. For one thing, some of them might be C customers. For another, you want to take the time to look at RFM, which is the framework I use for this.
RFM stands for recency, frequency and monetary value. Recency is how recently they bought from you. If it was last week, this probably isn't the right time, and they might go into a different nurturing funnel.
Frequency is how often they've bought from you. Were they buying for a long time and then suddenly stopped, or did they buy once or twice and then stop? Monetary value is how much they spent.
For the quickest, low-hanging-fruit wins we talked about at the start, find the high-value customers who've gone quiet and the repeat buyers who've stopped. Also look for first-time buyers who should logically be ready for the next purchase in your customer journey.
The options from here are endless, but to give a helpful example, for customers who've gone quiet it might be a nice email campaign, or you might pick up the phone and say, "Hi, I'm here, where have you gone?" For repeat buyers who've stopped, it's a similar process. Segment your audience using this data to win back the past customers you want, and use it to find out where they went and why, tweaking and learning as you go.
Finally, step five: other people's audiences. I love this one. Who is already selling to the customers you want more of? With my credit management company, I asked who on earth was already speaking to all the B2B businesses I wanted to work with, and it was mostly accountants and bookkeepers.
Think about who is already speaking to your target customers, who is hanging out where they are, and how you can build trust with them. Does that audience trust the people you want to work with, too? Does what you sell complement and fit naturally alongside what they offer?
You don't want something that competes. You want something that complements and makes the partner, who is already selling to the customers you want, look good.
There are several ways to make this work. You might have an official referral scheme, although with the accountants we worked with there was no commission involved: they referred us, we referred them, and it was a great, quick way to reach a mass market of customers we wanted to attract.
Another brilliant option is affiliates. It made sense for us to sell software such as Xero or QuickBooks, for which we got an affiliate commission, and there are lots of options online. If you're in marketing, for example, you could affiliate with tools like ScoreApp or Notion, so pick a couple and use them to generate little bits of extra revenue.
We also used to recommend Peninsula, the HR company, and received something like 30% as a referral fee if the customer bought. Another option is to meet with people already selling to your target customers and create a bundled package offer for their customers, yours and new business. Beyond that, there are strategic partnerships, where you co-host events, content campaigns and so on.
I would start with five. Pick five businesses that already have the attention of the customers you want to reach. Whenever I've started and scaled my own businesses, I've begun with who I know that can help me help other customers, and I've reached out to them first. Referrals always work so much better than trying to attract new customers.
I appreciate I've talked quite a lot, so this is really the final point. I know there's a lot of information here, and I hope it's been helpful. I'm not saying go away and implement all of these things, because they're quite big, in-depth tasks, but they're very useful.
I would take these areas and score each category out of five. The ones with the highest scores are the ones you should prioritise and start with.
To recap, the five places to find more revenue are as follows. First, your best customers: segment your As, Bs and Cs, then find the top 20% you want to attract more of. Second, open opportunities: review what's old but still in the pipeline, and tailor your message using that business intelligence.
Third, your existing customers and the product value ladder, where there may be an add-on, downsell or recurring revenue option you can bring in. Fourth, re-engaging the past customers you want back. Fifth, partnerships and other people's audiences, so you find people you can work with to bring more revenue into your business.
Thank you, that's all from me. If there are any questions, I'd love to hear them.
Caitriona: Thanks, Paula. We have a question here asking what you do if all of your customers are type C.
Paula: Love that question. If all of your customers are type C, I would still segment them, into C1, C2 and C3. I would look at getting rid of C3 completely, which will be liberating, I promise. I know that's a really scary thing to do, and I was scared at the time, but I can't tell you how liberating it is.
Then I would think about what I have that could bring those C customers into a B, but only if you really want to keep them. I hope that helps. I'd still categorise and segment.
Caitriona: Thank you. We also had a question asking whether we can share the slides afterwards, which I believe we can. I'll include them as a PDF in the follow-up email, so please do look out for them.
Hola is asking whether you can clarify the customer classification. Do you mean how we class customers as A, B and C?
Paula: Yes. If I go back to the slide – I know I've whizzed through it. Am I still sharing the screen?
Caitriona: No. What we can say, Hola, is that we'll share the slides in the follow-up email, so maybe take a look there.
Paula: Yes, the breakdown of the customer classification is in there. You'll generally have a feeling for who your As, Bs and Cs are, and you'll definitely know who your Cs are.
I struggled a little to work out who my As and Bs were, so I went on to resources like Companies House and looked at their financials. I looked online to see whether they had a good following and were active. I also asked how often I spoke to them, whether I liked speaking to them, and whether my team did.
You could do this in an hour, depending on how many customers you have. We went really in depth to get that intelligence and use it across our existing and new customer base.
Caitriona: Thank you. If a business owner only has one hour a week to focus on growth, which of these five areas should they tackle first?
Paula: I think the question comes back to you: which one means the most to your business? It depends on what you do and what you have.
Personally, the biggest difference came from partnerships, because those partners are already selling to people, and from networking with them. Enterprise Nation is really great for building those relationships – they're not paying me to say this, by the way. The other one was cloning my top 20% of customers, because I was able to attract the type of customer I really wanted to work with. I would say those two are amazing.
Caitriona: Thank you. How can a business with a small customer base identify meaningful patterns without much data to work with?
Paula: That's an interesting one, especially for people who are just starting out. With the likes of AI these days, you can go and research, and there are a lot of surveys out there relating to your particular business. You don't even need AI – you can literally go on Google.
For my industry, there were a lot of surveys about sales leaders, sales consultants and B2B businesses, and how they were or weren't struggling with sales, and why. So you can use external data, and there are lots of different tools available these days to get that information.
Caitriona: Brilliant. Thank you so much. We've come to the end of the session, so thank you for your presentation, Paula, and thanks to everyone who joined us today. We'll share the recording, the slides and further resources in a follow-up email this afternoon.
Paula: Thank you very much. Goodbye, everyone. Thank you, Caitriona.
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