When looking to instill and follow account planning best practices, a major hurdle enterprises face is the tendency of sales teams to be too entrenched in their own ways of doing things. Another major hurdle in planning for an account with plenty of whitespace is the common misconception that account planning is, at the end of the day, a secondary activity that takes key salespeople away from doing what they do best – selling.
This couldn’t be any farther from the truth. In fact, the best sales leaders will tell you time and time again that account planning activities, like relationship mapping, insight mapping, or collaborative account reviews, for example, are the foundations upon which their success has been built.
Businesses can look to build for long term revenue by following these best practices.
Account planning best practices to grow revenue in key accounts
If you want to maximize revenue from your key accounts, it starts with research. This means slowing down your natural inclination to focus solely on pursuing deals now. Doing your homework on the account and applying your experience from working with other customers will help you share insights with your customer.
If you don’t do the research, you won’t have the knowledge. Which means you can’t share insights – those aha moments – and that is a missed opportunity.
Choose your target
You should select and focus on the account divisions or business units which are in your ‘sweet spot’ – those areas where you can uniquely and competitively deliver true value. But targeting your ‘sweet spot’ isn’t enough. It’s critical to uncover areas that benefit both you and your customer for mutual value. After that, make hard choices about which opportunities to target and focus on in your account plan. Forgo opportunities that don’t deliver mutual value.
Calibrate
Before closing that coveted deal, or growing revenue within an existing account, the opportunity must be closely and effectively calibrated to ensure success. You need the right-sized account plan, the right plan type, and the correct functionality and activities for your revenue team. After all, account planning isn’t just about increasing sales. It’s about bringing insight to the customer to present solutions that benefit them, thereby increasing sales.
Focus on the customer
The impact of a poor buying decision on the customer could be career-limiting or damaging to the business. That’s why you absolutely must align your account planning efforts with the customer’s goals, pressures, initiatives, and obstacles for mutual value and benefit. How? The first step is fact-finding to gain a deep understanding of your customer’s goals and values.
Integrate data, knowledge, and information
A single account is a subset of an overall market. You ought to understand your customer’s market and market dynamics that could affect your customer. A lot of that information and data already exists in your CRM. Naturally, you’ll want to integrate your account plan and customer information with your CRM. A CRM facilitates collaboration and sharing knowledge with everyone on the account team, which can speed up your planning process.
Map people and influence
Companies don’t buy; people buy. The same is true in business. It is vital to understand and map out all the relationships in the organization. Especially inter-relationships – business, professional, and personal – along with lines of power and influence.
Build trust
Trust is the foundation on which you create, develop, pursue, and win business that delivers mutual value for you and your customer. You can only build trust by understanding customer business problems, one truth at a time, and by delivering a solution that solves them.
Identify “whitespace”
Once you understand the people and the problems and have developed a trusted relationship with your customer, you can identify new areas of opportunity – the whitespace in the account – where your solutions can add value to the customer.
Be collaborative and social
At its core, sales is a team sport where you can collaborate with the account team and the customer. Integrating a real-time collaboration tool with your CRM enables the team working on the account plan to easily communicate and keep up to speed on changes as they occur. It also ensures that all information is available to everyone at the same time so that there is no loss of productivity.
Review the account plan regularly
Like any activity worth doing well, account planning is all about consistency. Schedule time to test and improve your portfolio, account plan, and review opportunities. Publish your operational rhythm so that everyone is on the same page.
Communicate and mentor
We’ve talked about how account planning requires a shift away from being “lone wolves” to being a team sport. What better way to model this behavior than by starting with leadership? Effective coaching processes are essential to ensuring success in account planning. Successes, failures, joys and sorrows all need to be celebrated together in order to ensure the success of your team. Turning those stories of whitespace into revenue will be a crucial driver of success both for the seller and the account.
Measure progress
As with any system, if you don’t know how to measure success, there is no way to achieve it. Start by defining a few critical KPIs, such as the number of deals, average deal size, win rate, and sales cycle. Tracking additional metrics as whitespace turned into revenue will turn non-believers of account planning into advocates.
To further emphasize the importance of account planning best practices on a business’s revenue potential, Nigel Cullington, VP of Marketing of Upland Software’s Sales Effectiveness Division, spoke with Alex Gluz on the Revenue Engine Podcast about the vital lessons outlined from real life sellers in his recent book, Not Just Another Vendor.
Account planning best practices – a discussion with Nigel Cullington
Nigel Cullington, VP of Marketing of Upland Software’s Sales Effectiveness Division, spoke with Alex Gluz on the Revenue Engine Podcast about the vital lessons outlined from real life sellers in his recent book, Not Just Another Vendor.
Following effective account planning best practices is essential for B2B sales success. By developing a comprehensive and tailored strategy for each customer, sales teams can identify key decision-makers, understand customer needs and pain points, and position their offerings effectively. This approach not only increases the likelihood of closing deals but also fosters long-term customer relationships and drives sustainable revenue growth.
Account-Based Sales and Account-Based Marketing are the Way of the Future
While the conversation covered a broad range of topics, including Nigel’s illustrious career, rising from Actuary to sales leader turned marketing extraordinaire, when it came to the advice he would give businesses looking to establish an effective account planning practice, he emphasized that the most fundamental of those best practices aren’t really his at all. “The best practices I recommend aren’t from me at all – they’re from real sellers we interviewed when compiling our book, Not Just Another Vendor,” he says.
The Four Most Important Best Practices Inspired by Sales Leaders
Nigel outlines four key areas businesses need to focus on to excel at account planning.
First and foremost, Nigel highlights the importance of knowing who your key buyers are, and deeply understanding them. It’s only through understanding that ideal customer profile and diving deeply into who your customers are and what their biggest motivations are that you can begin to solve their challenges.
Second, sellers need to align their sales processes to their customers’ buying cycles. This means having a defined sales process. In fact, Nigel highlights that those sales teams that have defined sales processes are 3x more likely to win than those that simply wing it.
(If you’re interested in learning more about the importance of having a detailed sales process, take a look at our recent webinar on sales process).
Third, winning sales teams (like those highlighted in the book) have unparalleled deal execution and management. They ask themselves, “is there truly an opportunity here? Can we compete and win that deal? And, if so, is it even worth winning in the first place?”
Time is a seller’s most vital resource. They need to focus on the deals they can win and not waste that precious resource on deals that have no right being in front of them in the first place.
And, finally, Nigel highlights the rise of the revenue team. Sales and marketing teams that align on a common goal are 40% more likely to win and exceed their goals than their peers who don’t take this vital step. Everything from finding white space in accounts, to developing a deeper customer understanding, to tackling buying groups as a team is only possible through a real, revenue team approach to selling
Lone wolf sellers, frankly, are out.
Account-Based Selling Takes a Revenue Team
These account planning best practices shed light on the importance of relationships and collaboration in modern sales motions.
It’s the power of relationships that help sellers stand out in today’s competitive business landscape. Rather than taking a “spray and pray” approach to selling, successful sellers are focusing on a targeted, account-based sales approach to their accounts.
“Marketers need to understand sales in order to be successful, and sellers need to understand marketing,” he says.
In an account-based selling world, sales and marketing, as well as other customer-facing roles, are centered on the same goal.
“We call this the revenue team,” says Nigel. And the revenue team is something highly focused on in Not Just Another Vendor, where entire teams pull together in order to get the deal over the line, and build strong relationships.
AI Will Play An Increasingly Important Role in Business
Of course, like any good, current business discussion, talk turned to AI. “We use it sparingly today, but as time goes on, I expect both sales and marketing teams will continue to rely on AI not to replace what they do, but to augment their daily activities, and make themselves more productive,” says Nigel.
Sales does have a huge application for AI, and it’s becoming more possible for organizations of any size to rely on AI thanks to innovations from Salesforce.
“AI is going to have the next biggest impact over the next several years,” says Nigel. “It’s unclear how companies will bring on AI. But rather than replace marketing teams, it is going to augment their workloads.”
At the end of the day, shiny new martech stacks are only going to deliver value if there is a tight partnership with sales.
Listen to the whole podcast via the link above, and download our recent eBook, The Practice of Account Planning to learn more about the delicate art and science of account planning from Nigel Cullington.