New Year Means Whitespacing and Account Planning. Do it right this time!

When it comes to account planning i have yet to see it done right. Unless of course you have worked for me lol!

The first thing to realize is that your account planning template is misleading, and you should not follow it to build your territory or regional plan! The template probably says something like GOALS: OBJECTIVES: STRATEGIES: PLANS: ACTIVITIES: etc. This may be a good way to present your plan, but it is an awful way to build one.

The primary problem with this approach is that it has you setting goals and objectives that you have no idea whether or not they are realistic. The other problem is that it makes you start with assumptions. You are far better off building a plan based on facts than you are building it on assumptions. We all know what happens when we assume now don't, we?

Let me start with giving you the correct process and why it is the correct process.

You begin with facts! These facts are in essence based upon a deep analysis of key characteristics of your assigned territory. and market. You need to whitespace (more on that latter) analyze for the characteristics that make your accounts more or less likely to buy.

The second step is to list all of your opportunities by account and product. However, if you have a large mid-market territory you simply list the accounts without the level of detail around product. You are just looking for companies that are more or less likely to buy. Then you stack rank them into A B and C accounts. The A accounts have the most characteristics of your ideal buyer, the B accounts have some of the characteristics and the C accounts have none or only one. Once you have done this assign a revenue number you might expect out of each. These are you opportunities! You will invariably find that the fact is that you have more opportunity than you can possibly handle. Hopefully that helps to dismiss the fallacy that you cannot make your number.

Once you have your opportunities categorized the next thing you do is you build strategies to exploit your opportunities. Strategies are the things you are going to do and leverage to take advantage of your opportunities. An example would be "I am going to develop pipeline in my A accounts by leveraging my marketing team and specific campaigns targeted at certain accounts and products". You want to more than one strategy but probably no more than five. Remember you must have the time and resources to execute the strategies.

The next thing you do is build the plans and activities that you are going to commit to execute your strategies. When you do this you build them into a calendar. For example if you are going to execute certain campaigns you need to calendar meeting with the marketing resources that are going to provide the campaigns, SDR;s that are going to follow up on those campaigns, and the resources that are going to execute the reach outs.

When you have completed this much of your plan you know how much time and resource you need and have to execute your strategies and what you expect the return from those strategies to be.

This is the point where you are now ready to define objectives. You know within a range of what revenue you can expect based on the strategies you have set because you know how much time and resource is available to execute them. You know by account type, by product category and by channel how much to reasonably expect. An objective is quantifiable and measurable by time. You should be able to say I expect X amount of revenue from my A accounts, B accounts and C accounts. You should be able to estimate the amount of revenue from your efforts, your partners efforts, Your customer base and your prospect base. Your A accounts are your proactive territory. These are the accounts you must get into and the accounts that the majority of your revenue will come from. Your A accounts are where you will spend the majority of your time. Your B and C accounts are your reactive territory. These accounts will be marketed to and you will react to any leads that you generate. You are qualifying those accounts in as to whether or not they are worth your time and out if they are not. You make the prospect justify to you why you should spend your time with them. Remember that these are accounts you have identified as less likely to buy. This does not mean they will not buy. But, it does mean they have to convince you why they are a good fit and why you should spend your time with them!

You are now ready to set objectives. Your objectives should be things such as I will sell X amount of revenue over the next 12 months. I will secure X number of new logos in the next 12 months. I will execute X number of campaigns each quarter and X number of meeting with Y number of stake holders each week, month, quarter, and year. Every strategy must have an associated objective to go along with your overall revenue objectives.

Finally, you can now set your Goals. A goal is qualitative and not quantitative. I will build a repeatable and scalable business within my assigned territory is an example of a goal.

Whenever and wherever I employed this planning process my sales teams crushed their numbers. Almost without exception the salespeople started out not believing they could make their quotas. Yet, when they set their revenue objectives none set an objective lower than twenty percent over quota! In most cases they made their objectives or came very close! In almost all cases they sold higher amounts than their quotas. When we employed this at a large Red tech. company the region grew sixty three percent that first year and eighty six percent the second year while the company was growing a five percent!

The reason was simple. The salespeople not only had a plan on how to hit their objectives, they also knew how they were going to get there. They believed in it because it was realistic and because they built it based on facts! They believed in it!

A fact- based planning process was they key to the entire thing! Prior to doing it this way they built everything on assumption and as such the salespeople did not believe in because they had no idea whether or not the assumptions on which they built their plans were realistic.

I promised you a word about white spacing and it is here where their eyes really opened. I told them that white spacing product opportunities was a very incomplete white space. They knew where they had accounts and prospects that did not have their solution or product. They knew by account type as well. But they were missing a very important part of white spacing I called audience.

I said to them now that you know the accounts, who are the key stakeholders you have to get to in order to sell your solutions and products. I am not talking about the C level i am talking about the titles that report to those C levels that are the key stakeholders with the problems and to whom the benefits accrue most directly. What an eye opener that was for some. of them. The best and more tenured sales people had a good number of contacts in their core products. But, not as many in the non core solutions which they also sold. Others most especially less tenured salespeople had far fewer across the board. They found that they had many names and contacts but they did not have the names and titles of many of the key stakeholders they needed! Then they were asked to mark the names and titles of the ones they did have as to whether they had ever contacted them or had any kind of relationship or interaction with them. They found out that of the neames they did have they had meet with or spoken to about twenty percent. Again much higher in their core but much lower in their non core products.

I simply asked them "what do you suppose would happen if you had one hundred percent of the right names and titles to market to and you doubled or tripled the number of interactions with key stakeholders. Do you think you would sell more? lol!

In the end it comes down to having the right facts upon which to base your plan and then building a realistic plan based on the time and resources you have.

There are a several very inexpensive tools in the market that can help tremendously in getting to the facts you need! Please contact me if you would like to know what they are. Also feel free to reach out if you want some help in learning how to coach and instruct your sales teams in how to do this kind of planning. You will be very happy with the results!