Gut instinct drives a lot of account planning. Sales teams get busy. Suddenly, year-end arrives and management wants to see an account plan. Now.
So what are you going to do?
When you’re laying the groundwork for a major sales initiative with your most important account, yes, you can rely on your gut to tell you where to focus an account plan that will impact your selling success for the year.
And this may be sufficient.
But what if it’s not? What if you and your team outline a very strategic game plan but it’s based on a set of assumptions that turn out only half right? Or not correct at all?
Maybe your customer is looking for a serious business change, but your game plan has them settling for basic maintenance.
If you haven’t identified and validated your customer’s business initiatives, you risk working on issues important to you, but not your customer.
Research First, Plan Second
To avoid such mistakes, when you evaluate account planning, employ Executive Focused Selling skills at the front end.
Developing and maintaining an account plan is a bit like strategic planning for executives; you’ve got a lot of information sources to consider and analysis to conduct before you actually start allocating resources.
Just as a sound strategic plan is an essential foundation for solid shareholder relations, an account plan is a vital engagement roadmap that enables you to maintain value-based relationships with both the client and the account team – ultimately allowing you to leverage your good work to sell more.
So regardless of which planning method you use, the traditional account planning process begins with a sales team identifying a customer’s business priorities. But let’s be honest here; what you often get is a visceral response based on gut feel or opinion rather than qualitative research.
When that’s the case, here’s what can happen:
1. A golden opportunity is overlooked
2. A non-priority is mistakenly identified as a key focal point
In other words, you find yourself trying to sell an upgrade when you could have sold a major enterprise-wide solution – all because your account plan was created without sufficient analysis.
It’s focused on an invalid business initiative, and that means time spent supporting that invalid initiative is unimportant to your customer. One, you’re not going to realize success; and two you’re out a nice chunk of change. Keep in mind your personal ROI is in play here!
Fortunately, there is a better way. And it’s all about really understanding your account through due diligence. But keep this in mind: You’ve got to validate customer business initiatives before you roll up your sleeves and start account planning. That way you have a filter with multiple data sources to help guide the account planning process and ensure your game plan isn’t based on faulty assumptions.
