Share of wallet

Most people define share of wallet as your revenue from a customer divided by what they spend on the category. That is the narrow version, and it already changes conversations: revenue tells you what they paid you, it says nothing about what they spent, and in most account teams nobody in the room can state the gap within twenty points.

We teach the whole wallet, which has four parts. What the customer does with you. What they do with your competitors. What they do themselves, in-house, with their own people. And what they should do but do not: the value they are leaving on the table, always an estimate and usually the biggest number in the room. The first two are the bought wallet. The second two are the unbought wallet, and no competitor is invoicing for it either.

The four parts are four different gaps, and each has a different move. Competitor spend is won with value selling. In-house spend needs a make-versus-buy case that costs what doing it themselves really costs. The should-but-do-not part is where Offer Development and Innovation lives, and where the proposition nobody else can copy comes from. Plotted on two axes, your share of what is bought against how much of the wallet is bought at all, every account lands in one of four boxes with a generic strategy: defend, displace, expand or reframe. The Whole Wallet tool does the arithmetic and the plotting.