7 Tips for Effective Strategic Account Planning

7 Tips for Effective Strategic Account Planning

Strategic Account Planning isn’t just about a deal. It’s about holistic and strategic engagement. It’s about building a more collaborative and cooperative relationship with the customer. So how does one build such a relationship; one that continues to generate additional streams of revenue year after year, while driving customer loyalty? What does effective account planning actually look like? Consider these account planning tips to get a better picture:

Choose Wisely, Grasshopper

Salespeople have limited time, so it’s critical to choose the right accounts in addition to working them well. What selection criteria is used for prioritizing accounts? Which accounts offer the greatest value to build customer loyalty and produce the greatest revenue? There are countless questions to consider when ranking your accounts. For this reason, scorecards are excellent tools to use when segmenting and focusing on your best accounts. Use them!

Avoid the Tower of Babel

Again, there is nothing worse than wasting time; and we spend too much of it trying to get on the same page with our customers when it comes to articulating common processes and tools. There needs to be a common language. Client, Customer, Account, Account Plan/Account Roadmap – Are you talking about the same thing? Like the Tower of Babel, strategic account planning begins with a vision predicated on successful communication.

Seek First to Understand

Look at your customer’s strategy. How do they measure success? Straight from Steven Covey’s book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, “Seek first to understand.” Understand your customer’s strategy and the programs they’re already driving. Consider visually mapping this out and most importantly, make sure that you develop this with your customer – or at a minimum – get them to verify.

It Takes a Village

Build an internal team. It may include an industry expert, an executive sponsor, a technical consultant, etc. The team has to be committed, not simply attend the account planning sessions and offer opinions. They have to be putting in equivalent effort at the appropriate place and time, as well as be assigned tasks. Then include the customer on your team, a coach or a mentor – someone willing to invest political capital in you – because they know you are focused on making them successful. Plus, we all have enemies, those who are hard to convert. How do we neutralize these?

Take the Long Way Home

We’ve all heard the saying, “people prefer that you do things with them, not to them.” Collaborate with your customer for success, and work towards becoming a “trusted partner,” even if it means taking the long way home. Account planning is most effective when it simultaneously works to achieve the strategic objectives of both the vendor and the customer. Embark on a journey that is right for both parties.

Don’t Take the Money and Run

Get credit for the value delivered. Let’s say you’re a vendor whose product has saved a customer millions by identifying inefficiencies, but you’ve never engaged with executive management to present the value you delivered. You may get a lot of internal referrals to other BU’s and Geo’s, but you have to re-compete each time for the business. Now let’s say you go in nine months later to show management the value you are delivering. You’ll likely be named a key supplier, negotiate a multi-year enterprise license, and any purchase request for something other than yours will now require approval from the CIO. Plus, you’ve just built a huge barrier-to-entry for your competition. Sounds nice, right? We’ve actually seen this happen…numerous times.

Lather, Rinse Repeat

Make this Strategic Account part of the culture. Then, like it says on the shampoo bottle, keep doing it until it becomes not just part of the culture, but corporate habit.

7 Tips for Effective Strategic Account Planning