Defense may win championships, but offense feels more exciting. The crowd will always cheer harder for a touchdown than they will for successful defense.
That’s not logical, but it’s human nature. And that’s a big, big problem for a lot of sales departments.
If your company is like most, it’s focused on winning new clients. Not a lot of fuss is made about keeping an old one—but there should be. Retaining existing clients is far more cost-effective than acquiring new ones. The exact math will depend on the company and its processes, but it’s estimated to cost five to eight times more to win a new client than it does to keep an existing client happy.
If your company wants to grow, you need to focus on both retention and acquisition. That’s no easy feat in a highly competitive market, but in 2025, it’s the only way to stay in the game.
How Marco Plays Defense
There’s no such thing as a perfect company. Yours, just like mine, will have strengths and weaknesses. And if you don’t know what your weaknesses are, your customers probably do.
For example, one of Marco’s biggest competitive advantages is its size, which allows us to build close relationships with manufacturers, support more specialized teams and provide sophisticated tools and resources for our clients. However, size can be a double-edged sword. We understand our size could be a significant disadvantage if we start behaving like the typical big company where personalized service and responsiveness turn into long phone queues, rigid processes and clients falling through the cracks.
One proven way to strengthen defense is to regionalize service teams, ensuring clients know their reps personally. At Marco, we’ve adopted this approach, and it’s helped us deliver a more personalized experience at scale. Eliminating common pain points reduces the likelihood of clients exploring other options. Switching providers is a hassle, and we try not to provide easy reasons to do so.
We’ve also devoted a lot of resources to creating tools and offers that always provide our clients with more value— free online cybersecurity assessments, tools that make it easy to submit and track tickets and other unique perks. We also give our clients the ability to track our own performance for them. A lot of companies have the resources to do that but wouldn’t want to do it. We do because we find that the data works overwhelmingly in our favor. Business leaders want simplicity. They want clear decision-making. And when they have the data to know exactly what we’re doing for them, it makes it harder for our competitors to sow doubt.
Finally, our sales team intentionally connects with our customers long before their lease or contract is up to ensure that we’re making them happy. If we’re not, we get the opportunity to fix it (and back it up with data) before the competition heats up. Of course, a strong defense is only half the equation. Winning in today’s sales environment also requires a disciplined, coordinated offense.
How Marco Goes on Offense
Good offense isn’t only about having star players. It’s about developing highly coordinated attacks that take full advantage of each team member’s strengths. Some of our sales reps are at their best at networking events. Others are highly effective cold-callers. Not only is that okay, but at Marco, we love that! We match people to their strengths. Those who excel at working a room are out networking while our best cold-callers are dialing.
And perhaps most importantly, we never ever make our sales team do all the work.
Here’s another illogical human behavior that tends to get a lot of companies in trouble: their marketing department and their sales team don’t work together. Instead, they view each other as competitors for company resources and attention. And that’s the logical outcome of the illogical human behavior that only rewards a sales department for a closed deal and not the marketing department that delivered the hot lead.
Our marketing department and our sales department work closely together. For example, sales wanted to do a huge blitz in a specific region, so marketing immediately went to work creating billboards, sales enablement materials, gift boxes and online advertising to support their efforts. Sales walked in with impressive gifts and helpful materials that were precisely designed to appeal to small- to mid-size businesses’ pain points. That single blitz generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in new business.
Our marketing department has also created training materials for new sales reps so they can start delivering more targeted messaging faster. They also create email templates our sales reps can use so less time is spent writing emails and more time is spent talking with people one on one.
As competition keeps heating up in our industry, these efforts and others like it help us cut through the noise and deliver something memorable and different to decision-makers within our current territory. But our expansion plans require something even better.
Expanding Our Territory
Our expansion plans are taking us into 10 new states. Although acquisitions are part of our broader growth strategy, this expansion was achieved differently.
We made a targeted effort to land just a few key clients in each area, and we threw everything we could at winning them over. That meant getting our people on-site at every location, talking to every stakeholder and finding ways to make their lives easier. We were also willing to adjust the way we worked to cater exclusively to their needs. It was a big gamble requiring massive effort, but it paid off. And we plan to do it again in 10 more states soon.
The Takeaway
Great football teams don’t show up only on game day. They prepare year-round, they study films and they perfect their fundamentals.
For sales leaders, that preparation means putting equal rigor into client retention and acquisition strategies, aligning marketing and sales as one team and building systems that scale personalization as you grow. It’s not the easiest playbook, but it’s the one that consistently delivers wins season after season.
