Chapter 4

Create the Habits

Several years ago, I worked with a communications hardware company on its account planning strategy. It was not the company’s first attempt at account planning, nor its second or third. This company had tried and failed to establish an account planning practice for nearly a decade.

This was a company of engineers, and its biggest problem was that they were too smart. Each time the account planning process was announced, individual teams began to tweak the documents, the process, and the communications. Almost everyone offered “improvements,” and the end result was an account plan that was so involved no one had time to complete it. And I heard more than a few complaints from leaders that they couldn’t follow the plans because of their complexity. So, they fell to the wayside.

When I arrived, my questions about a new account planning process were answered with eye rolls or deep groans. I heard, “Here we go again,” and, “This will never last.” The sales organization believed this would be yet another difficult exercise that wouldn’t get off the ground. But it did. We simplified the plan documents and the process, and we made them uniform. That was the value. All the account teams could settle their minds because they had a simple process to follow, and an emphasis was placed on consistency in the plans across teams. The leaders wanted the same components in the same order so they didn’t have to reorient themselves to each plan. And although they hadn’t realized they were burdening themselves by complicating the process at the time, this news came as a relief to the sales teams. They didn’t have to go through all the machinations of trying to come up with a brilliant account plan; in fact, they were asked not to. Just follow the process.

The simpler account planning process allowed sales managers to get a better view of the past, present, and future of each account. They could compare strategies between accounts and make better critiques and recommendations to the teams because they could actually understand the plans. The account plans became easier to coach, and accountability for the actions increased. The organization knew the process was working after about 12 months, when they realized they had been using the process and updating the plans during the year and then actually jumped into the annual cycle again without the typical rethinking and redesigning that had hindered the process in prior years.

The real accomplishment was getting the right people—including people on the marketing, delivery, and sales operations teams—to make account planning part of their regular cadence of activity. They had made it a habit.

This chapter outlines the four critical habits I see in teams that have achieved long-term account planning success: think before you plan, motivate and reward the teams, establish a cycle, and demand accountability. Making habits out of these four concepts is not easy, and will take time and perhaps a change management process. But the point of creating habits is that you don’t have to do the hard work of starting over year after year. Instead, devote that time and energy to building the following habits, and work toward making account planning a respected and vital practice.

Habit 1: Think Before You Plan

At SalesGlobe, we do a lot of work designing sales compensation programs. It happens all the time, but it never fails to surprise me: We’ll go into our first meeting to discuss ideas for new incentive plans, and people have their spreadsheets and calculators set out. They’re ready to jump into the mechanics of the plan—base pay versus incentive pay, threshold levels and upside limits, mechanics and accelerators. They’re like teenagers who want to start altering the transmission and fuel injectors of the car before they even know if they need a car to get where they’re going. It sounds basic but it’s a major point: You have to know what you want the salespeople to do before you can figure out how to motivate them to do it. You need a sales strategy and clearly defined sales roles so salespeople are not running into one another and wasting energy and money doing all the wrong things.

The same is true with account planning. Teams want to dive into the template and open up their CRM system to look at potential deals. But the first habit to master is strategic thinking. Teams have to get out of the habit of jumping into the plan document and into the habit of discussing where they want to go with the account. It’s easy to get caught up in the tools and technology, but those are just support elements. The real account planning is the thinking that happens when a team sits down to discuss how to solve problems for the customer. First and foremost, you’re trying to accomplish a goal: How can you grow 20 percent (or 500 percent if it’s aspirational) in this account? How do you retain your revenue? How do your expand in certain product groups?

“I always told my salespeople that account planning is figuring out how to think critically and how to communicate well,” says John Dupree, partner at investment firm Opus Faveo Innovation Development and former senior vice president of business sales at Sprint. “With account planning, the actual information is going to change from quarter to quarter, year to year. The thinking process is what’s great about account planning.

“What you want at the end of the day,” Dupree continues, “is not someone who knows every bit of information about that customer. You want someone that knows enough about that customer that he can then turn around and look at your company through that customer’s eyes, and see where there’s opportunity. And that’s a hugely different thing.”

During his time at Sprint, Dupree estimates that between 50 and 60 percent of his salespeople knew every bit of information about the customer, but only 10 or 15 percent could see Sprint from their customer’s eyes. But he could immediately identify those sales reps because they spoke confidently about what was going on in the customer’s business, how the customer perceived Sprint, and where the customer sensed value. “It was impressive when someone looked at this as a process of thinking and communicating, not as an accumulation of information,” he says. “It’s a big distinction. It has a lot to do with the habits and discipline, critical thinking, and communication.”

Account planning is not about filling in the boxes, but about problem solving for the account. The account plan becomes the enabler. It’s important for the account teams to understand this: The mindset that the account plan facilitates is what helps the account grow. If you’re jumping into your account planning tools and templates and haven’t gone through the steps of asking the right questions about the account with your team, you’re getting ahead of yourself. Break this habit and replace it with discussions, confirmation of strategy, and innovative thinking.

Habit 2: Motivate and Reward the Teams

One of the biggest reasons companies fail at account planning is that sales teams don’t want to do it. They’re not motivated. So, for account planning to become a habit, you need to include motivating factors and rewards.

“Salespeople are wonderfully efficient economic engines,” says Dupree. “If they don’t consider it a priority, they’re not going to spend the time to do it.” Dupree says that at Sprint, account planning (through its customer-centric Discovery program) was a highly regarded, celebrated activity. “That program was one of our most lauded, and it served as evidence to the rest of the company that only the best people could go through that program.”

In my experience, the biggest motivators for salespeople are:

• Incentive pay. Incentive pay is a direct financial reward for being successful in sales. Typically, it’s a commission or bonus tied to sales results. Sales leaders tend to like sales organizations that are motivated by incentives because they know how to focus them. They’ll follow the money. If a salesperson makes the connection that doing great account planning ultimately results in great incentive pay, she may be motivated to do great account planning.

• Recognition in the organization. The popular view about salespeople is that they’re coin-operated and only motivated by money. But that’s not true. Most salespeople are also highly motivated by recognition, which usually refers to the salesperson’s peers and leadership. Incentive pay is great, but recognition on top of incentive pay can sweeten the deal. President’s Club trips usually wield a lot of power because they’re elite: Everyone knows who’s going and who’s not, and often the rep’s significant other is invited as well, extending the recognition even further to his personal life. Recognizing reps for successful account strategies and plans that produce results can motivate them to establish the habit.

• Winning the deal. Salespeople crave a win. It’s closely related to recognition, but winning the deal also has to do with personal satisfaction. Winning provides a sense of accomplishment, offers bragging rights in the organization, and elevates the salesperson’s position in the company. Think about the last time a rep closed a major deal with a big customer that was highly valued by the organization. It was a great accomplishment and motivator for the rep. It was also a big motivator for the other salespeople because they probably saw the possibility that they could do the same with other high-profile accounts. If winning the deal is a motivator in your organization, connect account planning to increase the odds of landing those big deals.

• Meeting a customer need. Being appreciated by the customer for great work, for solving a difficult problem, or for making life better for the customer is motivational for any rep. We all love to be complimented for a job well done, no matter how much you see it as just doing the right thing. Great account planning is directly related to meeting customer needs and making customers successful. If meeting customer needs is motivational to your reps, it’s a clear link to account planning.

To make account planning a habit, sales leaders and sales enablers have to tie it to one or more of these motivating factors.

Initially, the team can be motivated by its leaders. Leadership sets the expectation that everyone is going to participate in account planning. This type of directive is necessary for the beginning of the account planning program and at certain checkpoints throughout the year. But constant direction from leadership can only last so long. Sales leaders have to find a way to motivate the sales organization to run account planning tactics itself. But by helping to get the program started, sales enablers will create success in the form of increased connections with the customer, increased visibility to the customer’s problems, and eventually, increased wins. Wins are the type of reward that motivates the team to stick with account planning. And once salespeople start to see those rewards, they can then start to create the habit of account planning.

Be forewarned, however, that success creates another risk: complacency. Reps begin to think, “We don’t need to do account planning anymore because we’re doing so well,” and they start to let up on the process. The more success a rep has, often the less desire he has for additional success. Reps tend to reach a point of financial satisfaction in which pushing harder isn’t worth the incremental dollars that come with it. Economists call it the law of marginal utility and often use the example of a chocolate chip cookie. If you’re really hungry for a chocolate chip cookie, you might be willing to pay a lot of money for one—maybe $3. You might be willing to pay a lot of money for the second one, too. But as your cookie craving is satisfied, the amount you’re willing to pay for another diminishes. You probably wouldn’t pay $3 for a third cookie, maybe just $1. You’d be willing to pay even less for a sixth because you’d probably no longer want it.

The same principle applies here. Salespeople who earn plenty of money eventually hit their level of diminishing marginal utility. They don’t want to continue to push harder to get that extra dollar because the extra effort is not worth it. Success at account planning then can dull your desire to continue adhering to the habit because you think you don’t have to. At this point, leadership has to say, “I don’t care how you feel about it; you have to continue the discipline of doing it.”

It’s a dangerous cycle: The pipeline dries up and creates an urgency to get account planning under way. And then, once that works, there’s less urgency to stick to the planning. So sales goes back to business as usual, which does not include a regular account planning process. They start to coast.

“Account planning drives demand and takes some of the pressure off of the pipeline, and then people get busy, and then they’re too busy to plan. It becomes a cycle over the long term—you’re not planning, and then the market turns, and things start to dry up again, and you start going back in that cycle,” says Brad Kaegi, head of marketing for the Pets EMEA region at Merial.

Sprint had account planning meetings twice a year, and it was “an incredible amount of work,” says Dupree. So, they made sure sales teams were presenting to senior leaders, who were also taking a full day to listen to the plans. Involving the valuable time of leadership, he says, sent a message to all 3,000 salespeople that knowing your customer and having a plan was vitally important. “Because we, from John Dupree and down, spent a lot of our time listening to these account plans,” he says.

And it worked. Relatively quickly, account planning became a process that was important culturally. Salespeople began to tell Dupree that they worked hard at account planning because he had asked them to, and because he and other senior leaders took the time to listen to the plans and respond to them: “It elevated the importance of doing account planning.”

In the case of complex accounts, to show that account planning was in their interest, Dupree kept a running quarterly comparison between the accounts that did extensive account planning with the customer and the accounts that did no planning. “We saw that the planning had a huge impact,” he says. The accounts with extensive planning came in multiple tens of percentage points ahead in revenue penetration and revenue growth.

“Account planning just fundamentally makes a difference,” Dupree continues. “You’re always going to have people who just don’t believe it, who think that they’re so good they don’t need it, or they just don’t care. But those people ultimately cycle out of the business—unless they are absolutely so gifted that they can do it without a plan. But I’ve rarely seen those types of people.”

Habit 3: Establish the Cycle

So what’s the right schedule of events to keep the plan alive beyond that first meeting? The answer depends on your sales organization. Typically, sales organizations try to accomplish a lot at the beginning of the year, including sales kickoff meetings, strategy discussions, training, and sales compensation and quota communications. There’s no way to do it all at once.

Ideally, account planning will fit within a company’s strategic planning cycle. For a company in a fiscal year, it probably needs to start in the third quarter so people can work on the plans and continue their day jobs. This staggers the amount of nonselling work that teams have to do. It also ensures those plans are firmly in place at the beginning of the year. (You don’t want account planning to become a fire drill or a process you have to shortcut. The tyranny of the urgent will always overtake account planning, so you have to allow enough time for both.) And, ideally, once the process gets going, the account plans are refreshed each year, rather than started from scratch. After the first year, the account planning process is largely about updating the prior version and ensuring the right people contribute and buy into it.

LexisNexis holds large account planning meetings once a year, with two updates throughout the year. “We try to keep it so that it’s not a one-time event, but it’s a living, breathing document and process that we continue to update and gather feedback, and alter as the year goes on,” says David Long, vice president of strategic sales. Ask for and inspect updates and accountabilities frequently. Plans require adjustment throughout the year as tactics are attempted and conditions evolve.

Much of the plan’s success is driven by the level of participation and engagement from all contributing parties. That can be a challenge, especially for an annual in-person meeting. Kaegi and his team would attempt to get the account team, marketing, product development, and leadership in a room to present and refine the account plan. “But, we quickly found out that trying to find a day to get on everybody’s calendar to do that was simply not feasible,” he says. “We do almost 50 account plans. It takes a lot of time and planning, and the demand on the supporting organizations was pretty significant.”

Getting dozens of key people to an account planning meeting once or twice a year can be a challenge, but keeping the account plan alive and relevant is critical. Maintaining a regular cadence of meetings and touch-points to assess the account’s health and the accuracy of the account plan keeps it alive throughout the year and creates a reliable method of tracking and predicting growth in that account year after year. “I would argue that if you had good adherence to a planning process, and you focused and thought about it, everything could be organized a little better,” says Kaegi.

You should aim for in-person meetings, rather than relying on web conferences or phone calls. The team chemistry and idea-sharing is almost impossible to replicate over the phone. When at all possible, challenges of cost and time should take a backseat to the benefits of in-person meetings, even if they are infinitely more difficult to pull off.

“Everybody knows account planning is important, but our biggest challenge is scheduling,” says David Long. “Everybody wants to be involved, because they want a saddle to success; they want to contribute to our client strategies. But they have day jobs. We would love to block off three weeks where no one did anything other than build and support account planning. But that’s just not reality. Ultimately, we have to do more by telephone, and it just stinks because you know people are multitasking.” In the end, do what needs to be done to get people talking about the account plan and to keep the conversation rolling.

I’ve witnessed many sales organizations run into barriers, such as scheduling, and drop the whole thing rather than work through problems. It’s easier to ignore account planning, and it’s culturally acceptable because so many organizations do. My team and I recently worked with a global marketing firm that struggled to establish a living account planning process. The account leader told me, “There’s zero commitment to this process. Even if we create account plans, we ignore them. In the end, we get business by responding to RFPs, and that keeps us busy enough.” The account leader wasn’t against a new process; he just didn’t have any faith that the leadership would demand follow-through.

What he said was true. The sales leadership in this company didn’t proactively target accounts because there were too many to go after. They didn’t segment or prioritize potential customers (by industry, by product match, by strategic fit), and because of the breadth of their products and services, almost any company was a potential customer. They were overwhelmed and paralyzed. So their “sales process” was to wait for RFPs. It’s a dangerous strategy. While seemingly easier because the opportunity is clearly identified, the odds of winning a deal born from an RFP are lower because it’s competitive. The company was far better off targeting customers and proactively selling to them, with a plan of course. Once they saw the value of proactive plans, the sales organization began the work and saw results. And that inspired new habits.

No matter the exact cadence of meetings, management has to take the time to regularly review the account plans. “The key to making account planning a living process is management review,” says Jill Merken, vice president of global sales operations and inside sales at Gemalto, a global digital services company. “I have seen it done very well. Every quarter, at a quarterly business review, my team of sales vice presidents and I would review eight to 10 account plans. And then, when there was a deal or an opportunity on those, we would look to see how it matched against the quarterly account plan.

“In between management reviews, the account leaders would ask, ‘OK, what are we doing in this account? How well are we doing?’ because they were managed by it,” she continues. “And at the end of the year, each sales manager would have to give the sales VP an update: ‘I have eight accounts in my region; here is the status of those accounts. We’re growing it, we’re not growing it, we’ve got a footprint here, we’re trying to get in here.’ Having these reviews created accountability to keep the team moving, but really it comes down to management thinking this process is important. If it’s not important to management, then why should a rep spend the time doing it?”

One final note about establishing a cycle: Take the time to introduce account planning properly, whether it’s a new or updated program in your company. One of the biggest mistakes I see in a new account planning program is a rushed rollout. Kaegi saw this happen at Merial: “In the early days of account planning at Merial, they wanted to roll it out to everyone without any testing. And it failed, because they hadn’t piloted it. The temptation was to just do the whole thing at once instead of piloting it and making sure that they could roll it out in stages and do it correctly.”

Consider pilot programs with select accounts to find out what works and what doesn’t for your organization, listen to the feedback of the sales teams, and make any adjustments necessary. Once other sales teams see their peers’ success with account planning, they might be less resistant when it’s time for them to add a cycle of account planning to their habits.

Habit 4: Demand Accountability

If no one holds the sales teams accountable for plan presentations or status updates on the action items, the message is clear: Account planning is a one-time exercise that can be ignored for the rest of the year. And the teams will return to their normal activities.

Three factors I’ve found effective for accountability are direction, leadership demonstration, and measurement. First, give clear direction on the account plan strategy and process and set the expectation that the team will follow. Before the annual account planning meeting is finished, make sure team members clearly understand their commitments and have an accountability point (a deliverable at a target date). Hold people responsible for those commitments.

Second, leadership should demonstrate the account planning process in action and make it the system of record. This means the chief sales officer and sales leaders must actually use the account plans in their conversations with the team. When a sales leader visits a salesperson in her city and goes on account visits, the sales leader needs to ask for the account plan and use it to get up to speed on the account. No account plan, no customer visit. Gone are the days of asking about the account on the car ride over. If the reps know the leaders are using the account plans, they will too.

“Our account plans are used by the executives,” says Merken. “If an executive is going to visit a customer, there is an executive briefing document created by the account team. It’s maybe 10 questions.” The rep has to do some research, including calling the client services group or other internal functions, and understand: Have there been any technical issues with this client? Do we have any returns? Are there any products that aren’t working? Is there any kind of news brief? Anything published regarding the company’s financials? Any major executive changes? Then, says Merken, there is always a 30-minute call between that executive, the rep, and their managers to go through the briefing document so that the executive will know what he is walking into. “At first, there was a lot of grumbling,” says Merken, “but it helps everyone.”

Also, while sales leaders run account planning, it can’t be seen as a sales-only program. In a multifunctional team, the accountability must be driven by the leaders of those functions: leaders of the marketing team, finance team, and operations team. These leaders have to see account planning as a critical, cross-functional process in the organization. The CSO has to enlist the leaders into her vision of account planning and why it’s critical for them to be part of it. If she can’t do it, she’ll have to go up to the next level—to the president of the company—to rope everyone in.

Third, measure and recognize performance relative to the account plans. Measure and recognize great account strategies. Measure and recognize sales results by making the connection to how the account plan drove those results. Measure and recognize successful account planning in the employee performance review process. It’s not adequate to measure sales performance alone without measuring how the rep got there. That would be like a basketball coach only measuring the team’s total score without measuring their shooting percentage, turnovers, or assists. The team may have won the game, but it may have won through sloppy play, poor teamwork, and hotdog players making most of the points independently. If you treat account planning the same way, you may win some deals, but you’re not developing a repeatable system and game plan to predictably win over time. Creating accountability is a critical step in making account planning a habit.

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 held accountable for their role in the effectiveness of the account planning process as part of their performance evaluations. Operations and finance people should have the effectiveness of their role in account planning as one of their key performance indicators. This helps reinforce that account planning is everyone’s job.

Implementing accountability sets you up well for when you’re faced with a lack of compliance. It allows you to bring the hammer down. You never want to fire someone for not being part of the account planning process, but if account planning is an important enough part of the company’s business processes, it has to be taken seriously. Determine your policy for lack of compliance around account planning. As I mentioned earlier, sales results alone don’t give sales teams a pass on account planning. If you treat account planning compliance casually, expect casual results. Establish and maintain effective account planning habits to increase the odds of consistent account growth.

1. What motivates your team and how can you connect account planning to those motivators?

2. Is your team too focused on account planning tools and technology to the detriment of thinking and problem solving?

3. Are your account plans and processes overengineered or simple and straightforward?

4. What is your living account planning process and how will you keep it alive?

5. How will you create accountability for account planning, and what actions will you take for noncompliance?