Key Account Strategy ArchivesPlan to Win Software

Poor Account Management is Costing You Business

Posted by Ron Snyder in Account planning, Best Practices, Key Account Strategy, Sales Management | 0 comments

Poor account management may be costing more than you realize. Some of the critical effects may go unnoticed until it is too late, costing you in many ways, including:

Missing important opportunities in strategic accounts or, even worse
Losing important accounts.

“55% of organizations feel that they’re not maximizing the potential of their existing accounts,” according to a TAS Group (now Altify) survey. So, many sales organizations are leaving tons of money on the table every year! Many opportunities are being missed because new projects are not identified early enough in the process of account management. Research shows that when your sales teams take the process seriously right from the beginning, they’ll have a much better chance of building sales growth because they can identify the client’s needs, begin working with key players in the decision process and have some influence upon their decision criteria. Here are a couple of the stats- according to TARP (Technical Assistance Research Programs) of the Office of the Special Advisor to the President of the United States for Consumer Affairs:

When customers leave, 68% of them do so because they felt poorly treated.
You’ll spend up to 5 times more to win a new customer than it will cost to retain an existing one.

Actively focusing on retaining customers is essential to successful account management.

Opportunity-Account Management; Virtuous or Vicious Cycle?

Posted by Ron Snyder in Account planning, Key Account Strategy, Opportunity Management, Sales Management | 0 comments

By Ron Snyder of Plan2Win Software and Jim Naro of The Naro Group According to Gartner Group, “65% of a company’s business comes from existing customers and it costs 5 times as much to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one satisfied.” This indicates the importance of not only doing a good job of managing opportunities during customer acquisition, but also following up with purposeful customer engagement to grow relationships and drive revenue growth on an ongoing basis. When do you actually cross the finish line? Is it when you win the first deal? The gap between opportunity management and account planning is not new and it’s typically driven by several misconceptions, such as:

Opportunity management is a “won and done” achievement
Account planning is just a once-a-year effort
Account planning and opportunity management are independent efforts that require mutually exclusive skills, processes and vernacular
Building your relationships and sphere of influence is part of account planning only; it’s not part of opportunity management
It’s OK to implement these processes in silos within the organization