Five Reasons you Need a Strategic Account Plan… to Win
Posted by Ron Snyder in Territory planning | 0 comments
Here are the top 5 reasons you need a good territory/strategic account plan. Without it, you will: 1. Miss important opportunities 2. Lose sales you could have won 3. Take longer to win business opportunities 4. Unnecessarily lower your selling price and reduce your profit margins 5. Waste time and resources Good planning enables you to optimize the results from your territory/strategic account. By adopting and implementing good planning and selling methods, one of my clients: • increased Bookings by 43% • boosted Margins by 10% • improved Market Share by 53% • increased Productivity per Salesperson by 50% • grew Win/Loss Ratio by 131% Having a plan enables you to manage a great deal of complexity. This includes understanding the market, focusing on the customer problems you can solve, selecting your best solution, and managing the internal and partner resources necessary to meet your objectives. It enables you to make the best use of your time and resources by connecting strategy to key tasks. Using the plan, you make sure the tasks get implemented the time frame required to win. Through it, you give appropriate attention to the critical path – the steps that have the most impact on producing the result on time. Without a plan, it is easy to omit a key element and dramatically compromise your results. Success Story: Account Management I managed a $20M opportunity for HP, selling to another Fortune 100 company. The sale took 18 months and involved a wide range of internal resources and customer representatives. My detailed strategic account plan enabled me to: 1. Identify our competitive advantages. 2. Articulate our value proposition and clearly describe how it met their needs. 3. Make sure our sales, division people, and executive sponsor were on the same page. 4. Manage meetings between a wide range of people from the customer’s and our organization. 5. Respond effectively to competitive threats. 6. Keep the sale on track. I could never have managed the effort, kept everyone engaged and won the business without a clear plan that I updated on a regular basis. The bottom line is that you need a good plan backed with persistent effort to win a complex, competitive business opportunity. Self-Assessment
- Consider companies you regard as successful, well-managed, high-performing organizations. Can you imagine how they would have performed without a solid business plan?
- Reflect on times when you did not have a plan and/or did not work your plan. What did you miss? What were the consequences?
- Are you a skilled planner? If not, how could you improve your planning abilities?
- Think of the best planner you know. Ask them how they do territory and account planning.
