“Be customer-ready. Make sure you’ve got a good cadence, keep things simple from your Account Planning perspective, and absolutely use your qualification techniques. ” – Emma Maslen in today’s Tip 1720

How do you maintain Strategic Account plans?

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Transcript

Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Emma Maslen. Emma is the Founder and CEO of award-winning sales consultancy, training, and coaching business inspir’em, helping sales teams and leaders unlock their full potential. She is also the author of The Personal Board of You Inc and a keen angel investor for female-founded businesses through Angel Academe. Here she is:

Emma Maslen: So today we’re going to be talking about Strategic Account Planning and how you can ensure that your strategic account plans are an activity that is delivered throughout the year rather than it just being a post-Christmas activity. So let’s talk about some of the big reasons why we do account planning and also some top tips to keep these plans alive.

So the first thing to consider with strategic account planning is it’s just part of the everyday sales job. If we think about our role as salespeople and sales leaders, we have three goals, really, which is the first one is to generate pipeline, the second one is to close revenue, and the third one is to do that with some level of control. Now, the more control, the better. That’s what our leadership are asking for from us.

The thing about strategic account planning is essentially it’s a plan to the goal. It’s a plan to the number. We’re considering essentially where we’re going to get our key revenue from and where we should be putting our resources. But from a salesperson’s perspective, if we just forget the execution of the plan for a second, it’s really just what we do day in, day out, because it’s all about pipeline generation in the beginning. What strategic account plan gives us? It gives us an overview of the key accounts that we want to drive pipeline in, where we see the biggest opportunity. And also it gives us that daily, weekly, monthly, yearly plan to think about where we’re going to generate that opportunity from.

So some top tips that we have just around strategic account planning and the ways to just make sure that this is something that you keep it going throughout the year and it keeps evolving. So the first thing with a strategic account plan is you need to keep it quite simple and ideally use the sales qualification techniques that you’re using every day. So from an inspiring perspective, we would suggest that you use MEDDIC and strategic account planning is really only about identified pain, metrics, and champion.

So if you think about it at a very basic level, who is the client that you’re trying to sell into? Identified pain. What’s the relevance of your solution against that client. We’re also trying to establish from a metrics perspective if it’s worth our time, if it’s worth the customer’s time, and we would qualify that in metrics and numbers. And then we’re also thinking about who are the personas that we would target? And the personas, ideally, would be targeted champions. They’re the people that we want to get the meetings with. They’re the people that we think are experiencing the pain. They have something to gain, and they would have access to cash through some economic buyer or key stakeholders that they would have.

So my first big tip is to think about how are you going about strategic account planning and just considering it as part of the qualification of the activities that you do every day. Use the qualification techniques that you have. The second thing to think about is how you run a cadence on strategic account planning. Part of the problem with strategic account plans and why they are very active in the beginning of the year and very current at the beginning of the year but they dwindle off and die towards the end of the year, is because we just don’t keep that cadence going.

We tend to write a big plan. We have lots of actions, but we don’t think about updating those actions as time goes on. So you need to have some review cadence that is in the diary with the teams to make sure that everybody is reviewing the information you’re executing on the plan, but also you’re revising the plan as the year goes on. Clients will be doing mergers and acquisitions. They’ll be generating revenue. There’s lots of things that will be going on in their world, which will affect your account plan. So you need to make sure that you’re keeping that strategic account plan as up to date as possible.

And in that review cycle, it brings me on to my third point, which is really around collaboration. It’s absolutely key that when you think about strategic account planning, you’re getting other opinions other than just from the salesperson. We’ve potentially got business development reps that will be calling into our accounts. We need to coordinate their activity But also if we’re lucky enough to have account-based marketers and people who will be surrounding our customer with branding, we need to be giving those people some feedback as well. We need to be talking to them about who are our targets, what are the messages that we need to relay to that customer, and how we keep tweaking that plan, collaborating around tweaking the plan to ensure that we get great success with our marketing and the return on investment around account-based marketing as well.

My final point, actually, around key tips for strategic account planning is also to make sure that the strategic account plan is in some format that is reasonably customer-ready. So maybe 80% of the plan could be something that is very shareable with the customer. So using things like value pyramids on what the customer is challenged with, that executive summary of their goals today, their challenges, and where you think you’re relevant, that’s very useful to have as an internal and external document. Salespeople will keep them more up to date if they’re customer-facing documents. The other item that is absolutely key to strategic account planning is having an org chart. So org chart should also be very customer-ready because, again, we’d like our customers to critique those and correct us if we’re not right. So be thinking about how you create documents with the strategic account planning to think about making them very customer-ready.

So there are our top tips. Be customer-ready. Make sure you’ve got a good cadence, keep things simple from your account planning perspective, and absolutely use your qualification techniques. Ideally, MEDDIC, if you’re using MEDDIC. Thanks.

Scott Ingram: For a link to connect with Emma on LinkedIn, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1720. Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!

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