Net new business is revenue generated from acquiring entirely new customers or by selling new products and services to an existing client base. This is distinct from recurring revenue from current contracts, as it focuses on creating completely new income streams that drive growth. Ultimately, it's a critical measure of a company's ability to expand its market presence and ensure its long-term health.
Net new business is the lifeblood of any company, serving as the primary driver for revenue growth. It's essential for offsetting customer churn and ensuring long-term stability. By consistently acquiring new clients, a business can increase its market share, enhance its reputation, and maintain a competitive edge in the industry.
Generating net new business requires a multi-pronged approach that combines acquiring new customers with expanding existing relationships. Effective strategies focus on targeted outreach and creating new value for both new and current clients.
While both metrics measure sales success, they offer different perspectives on a company's growth trajectory.
Internal structures can create significant roadblocks. Compensation plans may not reward prospecting, leading to sales team complacency and a lack of accountability for generating new opportunities. This focus on existing accounts can dull the skills needed to win new clients.
Market dynamics also present major hurdles. High customer churn can easily outpace new client acquisition, while over-reliance on a few key accounts creates vulnerability. Meanwhile, competitors are always targeting your top clients, making growth a constant challenge.
Measuring net new business success requires tracking specific KPIs that reveal true growth beyond overall revenue. These metrics help gauge the effectiveness of your sales and marketing efforts in expanding your customer base. By monitoring these key indicators, you can ensure your acquisition strategies are outpacing customer churn and contributing to long-term stability.
How does net new business differ from upselling?
Net new business involves selling entirely new products or services to existing clients. Upselling focuses on increasing revenue from a current product by upgrading a plan or adding seats, which is typically considered expansion revenue, not net new.
Is net new business only about acquiring new logos?
Not exclusively. While acquiring new customers ("new logos") is a primary component, net new business also includes revenue from cross-selling entirely new products or services to your existing client base. It's about creating fundamentally new revenue streams.
Why prioritize net new business if it's more expensive to acquire?
While costlier, it's essential for long-term stability and market expansion. It offsets inevitable customer churn and reduces dependency on a few large accounts. This focus prevents stagnation and mitigates risk over time, ensuring sustainable growth.
Contact discovery is the process of finding accurate contact details for potential leads, including names, emails, phone numbers, and job titles.
Workflow automation uses rule-based logic to run a sequence of tasks that would otherwise require manual human effort to complete.
Copyright compliance is adhering to laws that protect creative works. It involves legally using content by obtaining permission or licenses.
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Closed Lost is a sales term for a deal that didn't go through. The prospect decided not to buy, or the sales team disqualified them.
Scrum is an agile framework that helps teams structure and manage their work through a set of values, principles, and practices.
NoSQL ("Not only SQL") databases offer a flexible alternative to relational models, excelling at managing large and unstructured data sets.
Key accounts are a company's most valuable customers, vital due to their significant revenue contribution and strategic importance for growth.
A sales intelligence platform is software that provides sales teams with data and insights about prospects to help them sell more effectively.
A consumer is an individual or entity that buys products or services for personal use, not for resale. They are the final user in a supply chain.
Lead qualification is the process of determining which prospects are most likely to become paying customers based on predefined criteria.
An AI sales script generator is a tool that uses artificial intelligence to create personalized sales scripts for any outreach scenario.
Psychographics categorizes people by their attitudes, interests, and lifestyles, revealing the 'why' behind their purchasing decisions.
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Programmatic advertising uses AI and real-time bidding to automate the buying and selling of digital ad space, targeting specific audiences.
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An account is a company or organization that you're targeting for sales. It can be a prospective, current, or even a past customer.
Outbound lead generation means proactively reaching out to potential customers who haven't yet expressed interest to introduce them to your brand.
Closed opportunities are potential deals that have concluded. They are categorized as either 'closed-won' (a sale was made) or 'closed-lost'.
User interaction is any action a user takes within a digital interface, like clicking a button, scrolling a page, or filling out a form.
An Account Executive (AE) is a sales professional responsible for closing new business deals and managing existing client relationships to drive revenue.
Persona-based marketing uses fictional customer profiles, or personas, to create targeted messaging for specific audience segments.
AI data enrichment uses artificial intelligence to automatically enhance and update raw data, making it more complete, accurate, and valuable.
A Letter of Intent (LOI) is a document declaring the preliminary commitment of one party to do business with another, outlining the chief terms.
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Lead enrichment tools are platforms that automatically add missing data to your leads, like contact info, firmographics, and buying signals.
Retargeting marketing is a digital advertising strategy that targets users who have previously interacted with your website or brand online.
Responsive design is an approach where a website's layout adapts to the user's screen size, providing an optimal experience on any device.
Average Revenue per User (ARPU) is a key performance indicator that calculates the average revenue generated from each user or subscriber.
Hadoop is an open-source framework designed for the distributed storage and processing of extremely large data sets across clusters of computers.
Revenue Operations (RevOps) is a business function that aligns a company's sales, marketing, and customer service teams to drive predictable revenue.
Account mapping is comparing your customer list with a partner's to find common prospects and unlock new sales opportunities.
Cohort analysis is a behavioral analytics tool that groups users with common traits to track their actions and engagement over time.
Trigger marketing uses customer actions or events to automatically send highly relevant, personalized messages at the perfect moment.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is a system of integrated software that businesses use to manage and automate their core day-to-day processes.
De-duping, or data deduplication, is the process of eliminating duplicate copies of data within a dataset to improve accuracy and save space.
The lead qualification process is how you determine which prospects are most likely to become customers by evaluating them against specific criteria.
A System of Record (SoR) is the authoritative data source for a specific type of data. It acts as the single source of truth for an organization.
A sales methodology is the framework that guides how your sales team approaches the entire sales process, from prospecting to closing deals.
Triggers are predefined conditions that, when met, automatically launch a workflow or action, ensuring timely and relevant outreach.
Product recommendations are a marketing strategy that uses customer data to suggest relevant products, boosting sales and customer engagement.
Employee engagement is the emotional commitment an employee has to their organization, motivating them to contribute to the company's success.
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Sales intelligence is technology that gathers and analyzes data to help salespeople find and understand prospects and existing clients.
A qualified lead is a prospect vetted as a good fit for your product. They match your ideal customer profile and show genuine interest.
A marketing play is a repeatable tactic used to achieve a specific marketing goal, like generating leads or driving engagement.
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Programmatic display campaigns use automation to buy and sell digital ad space in real-time, targeting specific audiences across the web.
Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) is the predictable, recurring income a business expects to receive each month from all active subscriptions.
Content Rights Management involves controlling the use and distribution of copyrighted digital media to protect intellectual property.
A performance plan is a formal document outlining an employee's goals, expectations, and metrics for success over a specific period.
Logo retention is a key B2B metric that measures a company's ability to retain its customers, or 'logos,' over a specific period.
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A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is a tool that centralizes customer data to help manage interactions and nurture relationships.
A buying committee is a group of stakeholders within an organization who are jointly responsible for making major purchasing decisions.
An API (Application Programming Interface) is a software intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other and exchange information.
Chatbots are AI-powered programs that simulate human conversation. They interact with users via text or voice, typically for customer support.
Lead routing is the automated process of distributing incoming leads to the right sales reps based on predefined criteria.
SFDC stands for Salesforce Dot Com, a popular cloud-based CRM platform that helps companies manage their customer interactions and data.
An email cadence is a scheduled sequence of emails sent to prospects over a specific period to nurture leads and drive engagement.
Firmographics are descriptive attributes of organizations, used to segment companies by characteristics like industry, size, and location.
Outbound sales is when reps proactively contact potential customers through cold calls or emails to generate leads and build a sales pipeline.
Pipeline coverage is a key sales metric. It's the ratio of your total open pipeline value to your sales quota for a specific period.
A knowledge base is a self-serve online library of information about a product, service, department, or topic.
An enterprise is a large-scale organization, often a corporation, defined by its complex structure and substantial number of employees.
Sales acceleration refers to strategies and technologies designed to speed up the sales cycle, enabling reps to close more deals, faster.
Dynamic pricing is a strategy where businesses set flexible prices for products or services based on current market demands and other factors.
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A Marketing Qualified Opportunity (MQO) is a lead vetted by marketing as a genuine sales opportunity, ready for direct sales follow-up.
Cross-selling is a sales tactic of encouraging customers to purchase products or services that are related to what they're already buying.
A sales coach is a mentor who trains and guides sales reps to enhance their skills, boost performance, and ultimately close more deals effectively.
Account-Based Sales (ABS) is a focused B2B strategy where sales and marketing teams treat high-value accounts as individual markets of one.
Sales Engineers blend deep technical knowledge with sales acumen, demonstrating a product's value and solving customer problems to drive revenue.
Net Revenue Retention (NRR) is the percentage of recurring revenue kept from existing customers, including upsells, downgrades, and churn.
Marketing Operations (MOps) is the engine of a marketing team, managing the technology, processes, and people to run campaigns effectively.
"Smile and dial" is a high-volume sales tactic where reps make numerous cold calls from a list, often with little to no prior research.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the total cost a business spends to gain a new customer. It includes all sales and marketing expenses.
Lookalike audiences are groups of potential customers who share similar characteristics and behaviors with your existing, high-value customers.
Integration testing is a software testing phase where individual modules are combined and tested together to verify their interaction.
Lead scoring is the process of assigning points to leads based on their attributes and actions to determine their sales-readiness.
Contact data is the set of details, like names, emails, and phone numbers, used to get in touch with a person or business for outreach.
CRM integration connects your CRM software with other tools, creating a unified system for all your customer data and business processes.
Technographics is data that outlines a company’s technology stack, helping B2B teams identify prospects based on the software and hardware they use.
Gamification applies game mechanics like points, badges, and leaderboards to non-game activities to boost engagement and motivate users.
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Microservices is an architecture where apps are built as a collection of small, independent services that communicate with each other over APIs.