What is share of wallet?
Share of wallet is the portion of a customer's total spend in your category that comes to you. Harvard Business Review defines it as the percentage of a customer's spending within a category that a given brand, store or firm captures. A property manager who spends $400,000 a year on mechanical services and gives you $100,000 of it represents a 25% share of wallet.
Why it matters to a revenue leader
Most commercial services customers split work across vendors: one for inspections, another for repairs, a third for projects. Share of wallet shows how much growth already sits inside the current customer base, often at lower cost than winning new logos. Timothy Keiningham and colleagues, writing in HBR, report that satisfaction and recommendation scores correlate poorly with share of wallet, because a customer can be very satisfied with you and like a competing vendor just as much. For a revenue leader, a satisfied customer with a low share is a reason to ask what the other vendors do better.
How to calculate it
Share of wallet = your revenue from the customer in a category ÷ the customer's total spend in that category, same period.
Common mistake: guessing the denominator. Estimate total spend from the customer's equipment, sites and stated budgets, and record where the estimate came from.
Example
Fictitious numbersA mechanical services company provides preventive maintenance at a hospital system's eight facilities for $280,000 a year. The system's facility director shares that total HVAC service and repair spend is about $1.1 million. Share of wallet is roughly 25%, and most of the gap is repair and project work going to two other contractors.
"For our top 25 customers, what share of their category spend do we hold, and who holds the rest?"