Conclusion

Advice From Experts

Throughout Essential Account Planning, we’ve looked at account planning in terms of how it fits within the context of the business, how each component functions, and how the many different teams within a company can facilitate the creation of an essential account plan. Use this book as a starting point as you begin your account planning process. It will provide you with the priorities and structures you can use to frame your approach. Refer to this book as a field guide as you work through the process with your team. Reflect upon the examples and stories about how other organizations conduct their planning to give your team ideas. The appendix has templates you can use directly for your plans. Feel free to modify them to meet your needs. Your approach should be based on the requirements of your business and your clients.

Now it’s time to assess the effectiveness of your current account plans and processes. I’ve included an account planning report card in appendix 13; take the assessment to learn about your current account planning processes and where you can improve. Grade your organization according to the description that best matches your performance in each area. You can use the Essential Account Planning Report Card with your team to get consensus on where you stand and where you’ll want to focus to improve, so you can dramatically increase results with your biggest, most important accounts.

Let me know your results at [email protected], or on Twitter @MarkDonnolo #EssentialAccountPlanning.

Finally, here is some essential account planning advice from sales leaders who have taken the lessons in this book to heart.

Happy (well-planned) selling!

Commitment

Brad Kaegi, Senior Director of Marketing, Merial: “Maintain the commitment. As priorities come along and events happen in your marketplace, your willingness to continue on with the process can diminish. Or certain events can cause you to walk away. But, I think the magic has been our ability to not only improve the process, but also continue to execute it—not allowing other events to distract us. We could easily say, ‘Well, we’re going to launch these new products, so we’re going into launch mode and we’re going to pause account planning.’ Events can interrupt your process, but you have to be committed and make sure it’s maintained.”

Camie Shelmire, Chief Client Officer, Aricent: “Make it manageable, especially in the beginning. Make the actions simple and actionable. Make sure you have someone responsible for bringing the team together and reviewing for accountability, and have a senior executive hold them accountable. Stage one is making the team accountable. Stage two is seeing the improvements in growth.”

Sue Holub, Vice President of Enterprise Software Marketing, Lexmark International: “Start with understanding what you want to achieve by going down that path of account planning at all. Commit to it at the most senior levels. Like any other change in an organization, there will be significant resistance to behavioral change, especially among salespeople. It’s as much of a culture change as a process and discipline change. And so, if you go into it halfhearted, that’s exactly what you’ll get out of it.”

Participation

David Long, Vice President of Strategic Sales, LexisNexis: “Devote the time to make the account planning process the best that it can possibly be, and ensure an acceptable level of participation from all the partnering organizations. We’ve got a good process in place; we have a very actionable process in place. But again, it’s only as good as the engagement.”

Robert Dillon, Managing Director, Americas Agency Development, Google: “Set a clear expectation. Make the teams have something at risk. Have in-person reviews. It’s an opportunity to see if it’s working the way we want and for us to celebrate success. Get involved personally. We pull in operating groups of six at a time on the team. I sample the executive summits to see how the conversations are happening with the client once a quarter. And for us, there is long-term compensation at risk in their incentive plans as well.”

Mike Barnes, Executive Vice President, Andrews Distributing: “Enroll your entire team in the account planning process. It’s important to involve your operating team, your brand team, your commercial marketing, marketing services, and all the support teams that serve your sales team as a customer. The sales team has to be the customer of these teams. Make sure that anybody that’s involved in the operations understands how they affect each other. Share the plan, but also share the post-evaluation.”

Scott Taylor, Director of Global Sales Operations and Worldwide Sales, InterContinental Hotels Group: “Align everyone—all the different parts of the organization that are involved in sales and sales enablement—with what you’re trying to accomplish. When we have taken the time to fully socialize our goals and objectives as an organization, and everyone shares the same vision, that’s when we’re successful. When everyone doesn’t have a clear understanding of what that vision is, but they have their interpretation of it, and they’re working very hard to execute their interpretation, that’s when we have not been as successful. Having a clear, well-defined, well-communicated company-wide strategy is what has led us to be successful with account planning.”

Ownership

John Dupree, Partner, Opus Faveo Innovation Development; Former Senior Vice President of Business Sales, Sprint: “If it’s not important to you, don’t pretend it’s important to your team, because it won’t be. And it ruins your credibility. Don’t harp about account planning, and then never ask about it or use it yourself. If account planning is important to you, find a few ways to reinforce its significance during the year. If you go to see two or three accounts with your team and you haven’t asked for an account plan or accessed it in your CRM, they’re pretty certain that you’re not that interested in it.”

Jill Merken, Vice President of Global Sales Operations and Inside Sales, SafeNet: “Believe in the account plan, inspect it, and use it. If you don’t, don’t ask people to do it. Find the medium that you want, whether it’s 20 pages or two pages. Then, hold everyone accountable to do it. Otherwise, don’t bother, because you won’t be successful. And that’s what I think most companies do; they start, and stop, the process. Leaders who use account planning value it a lot. Once it’s in place, account planning should not be an option.”

Buy-In

Cillian O’Grady, Corporate Sales, SMB EMEA Sales Leader, Citrix GetGo: “Companies get this notion that everybody is going to do account planning, and they invest so much in training, and then they mandate it. And people don’t really have the buy-in. They start seeing it as a chore and administrative work. You get better results, and people are more likely to adopt a process if they see other people being successful with it. Whereas, if your colleague asks, ‘How did you grow this account from $12 million to $50 million over two years?’ and the answer is, ‘Well, it started with the company account plan.’ That’s a very powerful story.”

Deborah Wudel, Director of Sales Operations, CSC: “From a sales enablement point of view, it’s clarity of communications around why you’re doing it. Salespeople don’t want to do this. It’s a heck of a lot of time and effort. It’s a lot of formalizing information that’s maybe in someone’s head, but they’re thinking, ‘What’s in it for me?’ You have to articulate that a particular form of an account plan, length of an account plan, and the process itself has really led to wins that would otherwise have been left undiscovered. You need to be able to put that argument together. And what I’ve found in many of the account plans is that it was the conversation that was most important; it was the discussion, the meeting people, the building the team—not the document—that ended up being important.