If you’re like most CSOs I talk to, too much of your revenue is coming from too few places. Revenue concentration risk (depending too heavily on a small set of customers, products, or markets) is a serious issue.
Gartner’s Chief Sales Officer Quarterly (3Q25) highlights just how vulnerable many organizations are when a disproportionate share of growth comes from few sources. What looks like focus on paper often turns into concentration risk in real life.
Many organizations have an industry, region, or product line where they win consistently but struggle to replicate that success elsewhere. One way out of this situation is to build and run structured sales plays that make cross-sell, upsell, and adjacent-market growth scalable and repeatable.
Diversifying Through Sales Plays
- The Risk of Losing Balance, Not Just Deals
- The Common Mistake: Expansion Without Structure
- Sales Plays as Diversification Accelerators
- Big Plays: Bold Moves That Inspire and Differentiate
- The Method: Building Sales Plays That Drive Diversified Growth
- Example 1: A “Protect & Expand Adjacency” Play
- Example 2: A “De-Risk Core Accounts” Play
- Your Next Step: Build Diversified Growth Through Sales Plays and Big Plays
The Risk of Losing Balance, Not Just Deals
Revenue concentration isn’t just a portfolio issue—it’s a structural risk. When revenue growth depends on a small number of customers, products, or regions, even minor disruptions can have major impacts.
The Pareto Principle plays out dangerously here: when most of your revenue depends on a few accounts or markets, you lose flexibility and resilience. If those few revenue streams wobble, everything does.
To counter it, build diversified portfolios that expand across customers, segments, and adjacencies. The best sales organizations don’t just sell more, they sell broader. They focus less on “what else can we sell?” and more on “Where else does our value apply?”
They first identify where their solutions solve similar problems in different contexts. Then, they equip sellers with structured, repeatable sales plays to reach new markets, expand existing accounts, and stabilize growth across cycles. However, many organizations struggle to see this process through because they pursue expansion without structure.
The Common Mistake: Expansion Without Structure
Diversification efforts lose momentum when sellers lack direction and support. We hear it often:
- No focus: Sellers don’t know which accounts or markets hold the best expansion opportunities.
- No message: Value stories stay product-centric instead of buyer-centric.
- No proof: Buyers in new markets question whether success in one domain translates to theirs.
You can overcome this by using structured, play-based approaches tied to clear growth priorities. Structure creates clarity, and clarity drives action.
So how do individual plays solve concentration risk? The answer lies in systematic execution.
Sales Plays as Diversification Accelerators
A sales play is a planned, purposeful set of actions sellers use to advance a sale or account relationship. Plays drive consistent progress, from discovery and pursuit to expansion and renewal.
A play includes five components:
- Trigger: The event or signal (renewal, new stakeholder, or market trend) that creates opportunity.
- Target: The accounts, segments, or regions where the play applies.
- Message: The tailored value story that connects buyer challenges to your broader portfolio.
- Value Proof: Quantified evidence and client outcomes that make the message credible.
- Offer: A clear next step that drives buyer action.
When they’re well-designed and deployed systematically, sales plays open new pockets of growth potential. And when an opportunity calls for more creativity, intensity, and impact, Big Plays take center stage. Big Plays create breakthroughs, especially in the most important diversification initiatives.
Big Plays: Bold Moves That Inspire and Differentiate
While sales plays are the engine of consistent progress, Big Plays are the sparks that ignite major wins.
A Big Play is a bold, atypical action that goes beyond standard selling. It combines creativity, calculated risk, and high visibility to influence a buyer’s perception and decision.
Big Plays are:
- Bold and atypical, breaking from the norm with creativity and courage to capture attention
- Inspiring, moving the buyer to act and choose you
- Differentiating, designed to create a memorable, meaningful association that gives you an edge over competitors
- Signals of investment, demonstrating commitment to a long-term partnership
- Surprising and delightful, engaging the buyer emotionally in ways that deepen trust and strengthen the relationship
- Used strategically, reserved for when pursuit intensity is high, the stakes are significant, and winning requires an extra push.
When executed effectively, Big Plays boost momentum, create emotional impact, and change how buyers perceive value.
Together, sales plays and Big Plays form a complementary system: one builds structure and consistency, and the other drives differentiation and decisive movement.
The Method: Building Sales Plays That Drive Diversified Growth
In our client work at RAIN Group, we help sales teams identify, plan, and execute sales plays from prospecting through account development, so every encounter is intentional.
To turn a diversification strategy into real pipeline and revenue, the most effective plays follow three core principles:
1. Identify Natural Adjacencies
Analyze where your ideal customer profile (ICP) overlaps with adjacent markets or divisions. Look for industries or business units that share similar needs, buying groups, or value drivers. For example, a firm succeeding in financial services might expand into insurance or fintech, where compliance and risk-reduction challenges are similar.
2. Reframe Value for New Buyers
Tailor your message so it resonates with each new audience, differentiates your solution, and substantiates results with evidence. These three pillars—Resonate, Differentiate, Substantiate—form the foundation of value-based selling and make your success in one domain believable in another.
3. Equip and Enable Sellers
Provide sellers with proof points, collateral, conversational tools, and coaching so they can engage confidently in new segments. Structured plays give direction, support, and confidence, directly solving the “no focus, no message, no proof” challenges that typically derail expansion efforts.
Example 1: A “Protect & Expand Adjacency” Play
A technology provider is heavily dependent on a few North American enterprise clients. To reduce this concentration risk and unlock new growth, they build an adjacency play to expand into mid-market segments in Western Europe.
Trigger
Provider has secured strong success stories and quantified outcomes from North American enterprise clients with similar operational challenges.
Target
Mid-market firms in Western Europe that share comparable operational pain points and buying groups with provider's existing clients.
Message
“Achieve enterprise-level performance without enterprise-level cost.”
Proof
ROI benchmarks, performance metrics, and case examples drawn from existing enterprise implementations.
Offer
A low-risk pilot designed to deliver measurable value within 90 days.
Structured plays like this can create qualified opportunities and net-new pipeline by focusing existing strengths on adjacent segments, without having to reinvent the go-to-market model.
Example 2: A “De-Risk Core Accounts” Play
Consider an industrial services provider that delivers maintenance, repair, and reliability programs for large manufacturing plants. It brings in 40% of its annual revenue from a handful of global manufacturers concentrated in automotive and heavy equipment. Growth has been strong, but the CSO is concerned about overdependence on these few relationships and wants to reduce downside risk without sacrificing momentum, so they develop a De-Risk Core Accounts play.
Trigger
Contract renewals, major plant upgrade programs, or corporate-wide reliability initiatives within the top 5 to 10 strategic manufacturing accounts.
Target
Additional plants, production lines, and regional facilities within those same strategic accounts, beyond the original flagship site or sponsoring plant.
Message
“Standardize your reliability and maintenance program across sites to reduce unplanned downtime, lower total cost of ownership, and improve safety performance.”
Proof
Internal benchmarks showing lower failure rates, reduced downtime, and better cost-per-unit metrics when multiple plants adopt the same program; case studies of scaling from one pilot site to a broader network.
Offer
A structured “Network Reliability Assessment” engagement—plant walk-throughs, data analysis, and a roadmap—to identify cross-site opportunities and build a phased rollout and de-risking plan.
Plays like this protect and diversify revenue inside existing key accounts by expanding across sites and sponsors, reducing dependence on a single plant or champion, and lowering concentration risk without betting on an entirely new industry or customer profile.
Your Next Step: Build Diversified Growth Through Sales Plays and Big Plays
The path from concentration to diversification doesn’t necessarily require massive transformation. But it does require disciplined execution of targeted sales plays and strategic use of Big Plays that inspire buyers and accelerate momentum.
Ready to Expand Into New Accounts?
At RAIN Group, we help organizations move from strategy to execution. Through purposeful sales plays and bold Big Plays, your team can sell across products, segments, and markets and build commercial resilience that lasts.
Diversified growth isn’t accidental. It comes from planned, creative moves you can repeat. Contact us if you're ready to reduce concentration risk and expand into new accounts or adjacent markets.
