Strategize to Monetize: Mastering Account Plans for Revenue Growth
In the high-stakes business arena, every action needs to contribute to your bottom line. Strategic account planning is a pivotal tool in your arsenal for driving revenue growth. This guide aims to show how to develop effective strategic account plans and implement them.
Understanding Strategic Account Planning
Strategic account planning is a methodical approach to managing and growing key business accounts. It requires a deep understanding of the account’s needs, identifying opportunities for growth, connecting the dots to their key goals and a well-thought-out action plan. It can turn major accounts into significant revenue generators and solidify your business relationships.
Steps to Develop Strategic Account Plans
Developing strategic account plans that are effective and yield results necessitates a diligent approach. Here’s a more detailed breakdown of the steps:
Step 1: Define Your Key Accounts
This may sound obvious, but you would be surprised by the number of sales teams who have not defined their key accounts. We often conduct a net profit by customer analysis that includes the cost of sale and quickly identify the 20% of accounts generating over 20% of your profits. This data analysis tool often surprises CROs with accounts they thought were key accounts but deliver little net profit after we account for our cost of sale. Or accounts that we thought were mid-level accounts that deliver great profit to our bottom line. It is not unusual to discover a key account is not contributing as much to our bottom line as we thought, Here, we develop strategic pricing plans and strategies to improve our profits. We also work closely with sales leadership, product management, and marketing and identify accounts we want to be key accounts in the future.
Step 2: Define Goals
Before any strategic planning, setting clear, measurable, and realistic goals for each account is crucial. Goals could range from generating a specific revenue amount, increasing customer retention rates, and expanding your products or services within the client’s organization to strengthening the relationship you share with your client and broadening your relationships in the account. A clearly defined goal sets the tone and direction for your strategy. It acts as a compass guiding your actions and provides a benchmark to measure your progress and success. When we train key account managers, we train them to facilitate this discussion with key accounts and not sell them.
Step 3: Understand Your Client
The importance of understanding your client cannot be overemphasized. Dive into their world and equip yourself with an in-depth understanding of the client’s business model, industry dynamics, specific needs, and objectives. What are some of their key objectives, and how can you help them achieve them? Are there certain challenges they are trying to overcome? What are their expectations from you as a service or product provider? An intimate understanding of your client will allow you to tailor your solutions to their unique needs, thereby positioning your business as a valuable partner rather than a mere supplier. Often we need a strong discovery process to uncover opportunities to serve our accounts, and we must equip our key account managers with strong, insightful questions that demonstrate competence while building trust. What key accounts value is a business consultant helping them to achieve their objectives which is masquerading as a key account salesperson.
Step 4: Identify Opportunities
Armed with a robust understanding of your client, the next step is to identify opportunities for growth within each account. We train salespeople on how to conduct a needs assessment. Look for potential areas where your products or services can add value. Are there opportunities for upselling or cross-selling? Can you expand your services to other departments or segments within the client’s organization? Identifying these opportunities is pivotal for deepening the business relationship and boosting revenue. We must speak the language of our customers. How will solving the identified challenges increase revenue, net income, market share, and customer satisfaction? How will the consultative solutions we recommend decrease quality concerns, time, work in process, inefficiency, costs, time to market, and customer dissatisfaction? How will our plan eliminate confusion, lack of alignment, scrap, non-value-adding costs, and time? We train salespeople on how to turn their features and benefits into the language of their customers.
Step 5: Develop an Action Plan
Identifying opportunities is only half the battle. The other half is seizing these opportunities, and that’s where your action plan comes into play. Develop a specific, detailed plan of action to achieve your goals and capitalize on the identified opportunities. This could include marketing initiatives, personalized customer interactions, or the development of new service offerings. Your action plan should be concrete, actionable, and aligned with your business resources. Most account growth plans fall into four key decisions: People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash.
Step 6: Regular Review and Adaptation
Strategic account planning is not a static process; it’s dynamic. Your account plan should be adaptable as your client’s needs evolve, market conditions change, and business strategies shift. Regularly review your account plan to track progress and gauge whether your approach is still effective. Here we agree on key performance indicators and key thrusts we plan to accomplish each quarter. We make it very clear who owns each initiative. What key trusts will your client own, and what will you own? If required, don’t hesitate to revise your goals, change your strategies, or adapt your action plan to keep it relevant, effective, and in sync with the changing business landscape. After all, the ultimate goal of your strategic account plan is to drive revenue and profit growth in a way that aligns with your and your client’s evolving needs.
Implementation of Strategic Account Plans
After carefully developing your strategic account plan, it’s time to implement it. Effective implementation of strategic account plans is as much about your strategy as it is about your relationships. Here’s how you can effectively implement it:
Stakeholder Engagement
Successful implementation of strategic account plans demands high engagement from all stakeholders. This includes your team members who’ll execute the plan, the decision-makers in your company who need to approve and support the plan, and the clients who are at the heart of the plan. Engage your internal team first, ensuring everyone understands their role and how they contribute to the account’s success. Provide the necessary resources and support for them to execute their roles effectively.
When it comes to the client, engage them in your plans too. Let them know they are a valued partner and that you’re invested in their success. Show them that you understand their needs and are committed to delivering value. Here we develop our relational matrix and target and build strategic relationships with other key account team members.
Key Account Sales Skills
As we assess sales teams, we aim to ensure we have the right person in the right role with the right skills. As we have discussed for years, we often have sales hunters and farmers, and each has unique skills to perform their roles to meet their objectives. We assess our key account managers and ensure they have the right skills for account development. They know how to build and deliver a business case. They create urgency and ask for the order ( strong closing skills). They know how to handle objections and recognize common put-offs. They understand and demonstrate the skills to build strategic account relationships and share the value we deliver.
Effective Communication
Transparency and openness are key to implementing your strategic account plans. This is where effective communication steps in. Keep your internal team informed about the plan’s progress, changes, or challenges. Provide regular updates and encourage feedback.
Just as important is keeping the lines of communication open with your client. Regularly update them about how your products or services deliver value to their business, and promptly address any concerns or queries. This keeps them in the loop and builds trust and reinforces your commitment to their success.
Client Relationship Management
Building and maintaining a strong relationship with your client is integral to successfully implementing your account plan. Remember, at the end of the day, business is all about people. H2H, human-to-human interaction, and acts of service build lifetime customers. Even the best-laid plans can falter if the relationship is not managed well.
Spend time nurturing your client relationships. Go beyond just business talks; get to know them as individuals. We train salespeople to understand the buyer’s and accounts’ goals, passions, and challenges. Show genuine interest in their business challenges and successes. Always be responsive, reliable, and respectful. Invest in building a partnership with your client, not just a client-supplier relationship.
The Impact of Strategic Account Planning
When done well, strategic account planning can have a transformative impact on your business:
Increased Revenue – You can significantly boost your revenues by identifying and seizing growth opportunities within each account. Upselling, cross-selling, and improved client retention all contribute to a healthier bottom line.
Improved Client Relationships – Strategic account planning involves a deep understanding of your client and alignment of your offerings to their needs. This positions you as a valued partner and can strengthen your business relationship.
Customer Loyalty – With a well-executed account plan, you’re not just meeting your client’s needs but anticipating them and delivering impressive service. This can earn you their trust and loyalty, making them less likely to switch to competitors.
Increased Profit – Growing key accounts strategically delivers more profit to your bottom line.
Referrals – When we help our clients solve challenges and drive explosive growth, they share our contact information as trusted advisor in their network.
Relationships with new Decision Makers – Strategic account plans often expand our key relationships at key accounts as we interact with other leaders in other departments. These interactions often expose us to other problems and challenge the account is experiencing.
Conclusion
Developing and implementing strategic account plans is a key aspect of account management and a driver of revenue growth. By defining clear goals, understanding your client, identifying opportunities, developing an action plan, and implementing it effectively, you can leverage your major accounts for significant revenue growth. Remember, in the business world, it’s not just about strategy; it’s about strategizing to monetize.
Let’s schedule a call if you would like to discuss key account plans you have and or develop new ones.
