A Copernican shift in our approach to Account Planning

According to the Upland ALTIFY corporation, 70-80% of a company’s annual revenue comes from the portfolio of active customers. Therefore, structuring robust and collaborative account plans seems to be a priority decision for any commercial team. This aims to reduce the churn rate, but particularly to potentiate up- and cross-selling.

??? At the same time, Gartner reports that 4 out of 5 companies reformulate their Account Planning (hereinafter AP) strategies every year because they do not show a clear impact on the performance of key accounts (58% of companies fail to reach their key account quotas).?

In other words, growth (or more precisely, retention) of key accounts seems to be not entirely the consequence of the systematic application of an AP methodology but rather of other factors such as the inherent cost of changing providers, the excellence in service standards (SLAs) or the experience of customers at Customer Success Management level. In fact, an article recently published in Bain shows that promoters have 10% more chances of renewal and a 2% increase in revenue growth (the article claims that these indicators should be proactively included in AP processes).

Though, before dismissing the relevance of AP as a business methodology oriented toward proactively and systematically developing and capturing the growth potential of a key account, we should be certain that we are really assessing the impact of properly applied methodologies.

Revisiting the title of this article and the reference to the famous Polish astronomer, what we observe when zooming in on these AP processes is that they generally put on display two vices or deadly sins: they are self-centered (focused on what we, as providers, want to sell rather than understanding what customers need to achieve their strategic goals); and static (not geared toward generating action plans and movement but to reporting data in forms that no one reads).

Perhaps, these two elements explain why there is no positive correlation between AP Implementation and the organic growth of accounts (we could add a third disfunction: an incorrect selection of accounts for AP implementation, as they are more often assessed based on their purchase history than on their growth potential).

1. Self-centeredness:

As properly stated by George Brontén in his article How to turn Account Planning outside-in to grow faster, most AP processes have an endogenous spirit, focused on analyzing what else we can sell, where we can capture wallet-share or what elements of our own portfolio are not being leveraged at cross-selling level.

When we do this, we end up commoditizing ourselves since we will hardly find ways to quantify the impact of our solutions with an eye on our customers’ business performance indicators. They will see us just as another provider, focused on defending the differentials of our products or services rather than a strategic partner that challenges them to see problems and opportunities they are not perceiving. We will rarely reach to the point of co-designing an RFP with the customer if we keep on working with this mindset.

A symptom of this self-centeredness is CRM registration forms and AP software, which lead us to assess heat maps based on elements of the own portfolio we are not selling. It is not a coincidence that many Account Managers find it difficult to talk about their customers’ business model in detail, using, for example, the 9 elements of the Canvas Business Model. Citing Jeff Thull: “Expected credibility is what we know about our products and services while exceptional credibility is what we know about the customers’ world and their business challenges”

2. Statics:

It does not make much sense to devote time and effort to understand the customers’ business model, their political framework and their key challenges in terms of their current situation if we are not going to do anything with this information. At best, it may be useful to document the collective memory of the account in the event of a change of vendor, but not much more.

? A good Account Planning process should generate movement and action plans that help prioritize internal efforts and define different engagement strategies. What we see in many companies is that it is unclear what this "energizing element" – which gives movement and sense to the AP – is.

We recommend to work with two core elements: actions that generate demand?? to nourish de pipeline of opportunities (the repertoire of strategies to gain ground with a client, either by showing them a problem or opportunity they are not seeing, providing them with information on relevant industry trends, putting them in contact with partners relevant for their business, etc.). And Win plans?? to maximize the chances of closing already qualified opportunities (all the things we do for the customer to choose our proposal, either at the level of POCs, Try & Buy tests, customer NPS using current services, alignment between decision-makers on the customer side, etc.).

It is obvious from the above that both moving away from self-centeredness and dynamization of AP processes require a collective internal work, shifting from a mindset where the sales representative manages this process in isolation toward the Account Team concept, where the pre-sales and post-sales areas converge with the sales representative to achieve a deep understanding of the customers’ business and their main challenges and to ensure feasibility and quality for the action plans that are being defined.

By reviewing these two premises, we can structure AP processes that really place the customer in the center differentiating ourselves from our competitors for having a different agenda no longer focused on taking care of what we have but rather on growing and expanding our account interaction networks.

???? Here are some guiding questions to make a diagnosis of the DNA of our current Account Planning processes and how far they are from the “Copernican shift":

• Based on what criteria are the accounts that apply to AP defined?
• How well do we know the business model of these accounts, the core challenges of the industry and the priorities of the current situation?
• On what basis are the objectives or quotas to be achieved defined??
• What level of actions are periodically triggered as a consequence of AP?
• How are monitoring and impact analyses of these actions made?
• How many people participate actively in this process and what are their roles?
• What meetings and routines support the process?
• What is the dynamic/methodology of these meetings in terms of inputs and outputs?
• What kind of information should be entered in CRM forms?
• What methodologies and tools do sales representatives use when interacting with customers?

Articule written by Tomás Donovan