Foreword

I first encountered Mark Donnolo’s work when I read his book The Innovative Sale. I was impressed with how he applied a step-by-step approach to thinking creatively as a sales professional. His observations about the link between teamwork and sales innovation resonated with my experiences as a practitioner and consultant. When he approached me recently about reviewing his new work, I leapt at the opportunity, and later agreed to write this foreword.

Essential Account Planning: 5 Keys for Helping Your Sales Team Drive Revenue is an important book for sales leaders and contributors because more than ever, strategic accounts are critical to enterprise success and harder than ever to win and keep.

Your most strategic accounts are your marketing department’s best friend when it comes to building a brand as a trusted winner in your market. With so many cloud and niche companies eating away at the midsized and smallest accounts in your market, only the strategic ones serve as a barrier to entry. Moreover, strategic accounts offer your enterprise a volume of transactions, challenges, and insights that enable you to stay one step ahead of your market.

Ten years ago, your strategic account likely had a decision maker or two, in a situation where you sold belly-to-belly against a handful of competitors. Today, the game has changed significantly, as your average high-quality sale involves six or more decision makers, end users, sign-offs, and influencers—many of which you’ll never get face time with! Globalization, cloud computing, and crowdsourcing have created a highly competitive marketplace in which any strategic account can be lured away by a hungry startup looking to work cheap or for free to “win more logos.”

In this book, you’ll discover five imperatives, or strategies, that will help you cut through the rising complexity of the sale, win the account, and keep it—growing it year over year. It’s likely that your current sales methodology was not created with the strategic account in mind, opting instead to “average out” the account mix so the funnel works right at any sales level. Few if any methodologies possess a detailed plan that treats strategic accounts like the unique animals they are. To paraphrase a chief sales officer at a major computer-hardware maker, “When it comes to your most critical accounts, without a process, you get a mess.”

I’m not just a fellow author; I’m also a business-book reader, just like you. I buy books like this one because I want to be on top of my game and solve sales challenges. The best way to approach reading Essential Account Planning is to put yourself inside the many great stories shared in the coming pages. Note how the challenges and organizational issues described are similar to yours. After you finish the book, locate at least three situations where you can apply the imperatives immediately. Use the templates in the appendices as your tools; they will be very helpful in implementation.

Share what you learn with your team and challenge them to think about the existing strategic account planning process (if there is one) and how important it is to master. If you want to make the leap from contributor to sales leader, driving a winning process that moves the needle is a good path to success. If you are a sales leader who wants your team to win in the market consistently and grow in their professional skill set, invest the time to learn and then share Mark’s elegant framework for strategic account management.

There’s an underlying perspective to Essential Account Planning that offers you a chance to dramatically boost your sales performance: Strategic account management is a team sport. Unlike transactional accounts, which buy off-the-shelf products or services based on price, convenience, and reliability, most strategic accounts require customization and compromise. This means that sales must work across departmental lines, with strategic account managers serving the role of quarterback, marshaling political and organizational resources to satisfy the demands of high-value clients.

I believe too many people practice fake strategic account planning these days. They confuse activity management, forecasting, and service-plan review with the type of defined process this book lays out. To them, I quote my old friend, quality guru W. Edward Deming: “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you are doing.”

Tim Sanders, Former Chief Sales Officer at Yahoo!
Author of Dealstorming: The Secret Weapon That Can Solve
Your Toughest Sales Challenges