4 Critical Steps for Long-Term Sales Account Planning
Recognition within the organization usually refers to the salesperson’s peers and leadership. President’s Club trips typically wield a lot of power because they’re elite and everyone knows who is going and who’s not. Recognizing reps for successful account strategies and plans that produce results can be very motivating.
Winning the deal. Sales people crave a win. It’s closely related to recognition, above, but winning the deal also has to do with personal satisfaction.
Sales leaders and sales enablers have to tie account planning to one or more motivating factors. Salespeople have to see that their success—whether it’s their own financial success, recognition as a leader, or becoming a trusted adviser to the client—is connected to account planning in one or more of these areas.
3. Establish the account planning cycle. When account planning is new, you have to have top-level support from the heads of sales and marketing and organizational buy-in to your process, or it’s not going to get adopted. Ideally, account planning will fit within a company’s strategic planning cycle. Such planning probably needs to start in the third quarter of the fiscal year to allow enough cycle time to develop the plan while people continue their day jobs. You don’t want account planning to become a fire drill or a process you have to short-cut. The tyranny of the urgent will always overtake account planning. Allow enough time for both.
Below are steps to get the account planning cycle off the ground.
- Assemble the team.
- Conduct a kick-off meeting.
- Assign homework.
- Conduct an account planning meeting.
- Finalize the plan and present to leadership.
4. Demand accountability. While motivation is usually driven by the carrot, accountability tends to require a stick. The leaders of functions involved in account planning beyond sales may have to be measured or evaluated on their role in the process through their performance evaluations. You can’t manage what you can’t measure. One of the key performance indicators of operations and finance people should be the effectiveness of their role in account planning. Account planning is everyone’s job.
What happens if you really have a lack of compliance? Then the hammer has to come down. You never want to fire someone for not being part of the account planning process, but strategic account planning is an important enough part of the company’s business processes that it has to be taken seriously. Determine your policy for lack of compliance around account planning. Sales results alone don’t give sales teams a pass on account planning. Consistently effective account planning will increase the odds of consistent growth, a goal in which everyone should be invested.
Mark Donnolo is managing partner of SalesGlobe, a sales effectiveness consulting firm, and author of Essential Account Planning: Five Keys for Helping Your Sales Team Drive Revenue.