Tag: Account Planning

Envisaging the Future of Account Planning and the Role of Analytics and AI

Every account or customer is like a fingerprint – unique and having a distinct persona and behavior. Developing an account-centric culture is among the top mandates for every company, but not every company has an effective way to track its progress. Initially, companies relied on CRM for opportunity management, but still lacked in processes to handle large account management. Account Planning Tools were created to help firms provide the required intelligence into their key accounts. As the environment has changed, account planning tools also have had to evolve to handle new opportunities and help enterprises resolve their existing challenges. Enterprises must carefully create shorter, bite-sized data and content in appropriate formats for 30/45/60-minute virtual meetings to ensure comprehension and respect time commitments. It is also important to prioritize information that is critical to educate customers and provide buying help and requires stakeholder inputs and/or approval to move conversations forward. Learn More: The Future of Key Account Management Report – A Global CSO study by DemandFarm Leveraging Analytics for Key Account Planning Analytics is another powerful arsenal in account planning tools. Analytics can play a precise role in account centricity. Armed with detailed insights, you could prepare detailed proposals/quotes depending on each key account requirement. Enterprises can review target achievements and create reports which facilitate the creation of apprised account management decision-making and strategy formulation. This will help to prepare pricing documentation for the business’s products/services prior to sending financial proposals to key accounts. Analytics can also help in identifying the future trends and opportunities in the industry as enterprises can not only understand what their customers are trying to tell them but also their future plans and concerns. Most importantly, analytics can help in throwing insights on the non-captured value of a customer such as referrals and learning and innovation benefits, which may add to the economic value derived from Customer Profitability Analysis and Customer Lifetime Value. Watch Now: The Shifting Landscape of Strategic Account Management / Key Account Management (featuring SAMA)  Leveraging AI for Key Account Planning AI is definitely going to impact almost every field, and it’s only a matter of time before it starts impacting the account planning process too. Currently, most of the key processes in the account planning or management space involve a level of cognitive ability and thinking to create a unique value proposition for specific clients. Though these are early days, AI can and will probably evolve to a stage where AI tools embedded within the account planning tools are able to guide which parts of a client’s engagement can grow further in engagement and which are the ones at risk. Watch Now: The Changing Role of Technology in Key Account Management (featuring Forrester) By 2025, Gartner expects 80% of B2B sales interactions between buyers and suppliers to happen in digital channels. The future of account planning will hence see a huge transformation in strategy, processes, and resource allocation that moves the process from being seller-centric to buyer-centric and from analog to hyper-automated, digital-first engagement with customers. Account Planning Tools will also have features where it will be possible for enterprises to collaborate in real-time with their clients. It will increasingly be common to co-create solutions by inviting clients to collaborate using whiteboarding tools. Increasingly, decision-making will be based on data, analytics, and AI, not on intuition and experience. Organizations must be ready to engage the “everywhere customer”. A shift to buyer-oriented, not product-oriented integrated commercial channels will be hence critical to meet customers’ changing expectations and preferences for digital and self-service channels.

Stakeholder Mapping for Key Accounts- How Digital Account Planning Tools can make an Impact?

Stakeholder management is gaining more and more traction in recent years with ever-evolving customer needs and the advent of technological solutions for integrating relationship-building channels and capabilities. The expectations from both external and internal stakeholders are getting increasingly higher and pushing the envelope of stakeholder relationship management. Fred Reichheld, the Bain Fellow and Management Consultant at Bain & Company says that “For every customer that complains, there are 26 who don’t say anything. And instead of vocalizing their frustrations to your team, they simply stop buying from you and cancel their subscription.” This might not seem like much in traditional low-value sales where sellers have a large number of customers to cater to but it makes a massive difference in your bottom line when you are dealing with high-value key accounts. In fact, a study by Bain & Company states that by improving customer retention merely by 5%, the company’s profits can go up by as much as 95%. When you look at these two facts in tandem, it becomes critical to focus on the key stakeholder relationships not only for their sake but for yours as well. Who are the Stakeholders? Stakeholders in its general sense is a very broad term that can go on to include any individual or group whose decisions can either affect you and your business or be affected by the decisions you take for your business. These could be your customers, employees, partners, consultants, investors, and so on. In the context of key account management, the stakeholders are the people within your key accounts that have a say in the buying process, also known as external stakeholders, and the people within your organization that are overlooking and ensuring the buying process is not only a success but as smooth as possible are the internal stakeholders or the relationship owners. The unfolding of the modern B2B sales process has given rise to buying groups that consist of a group of people that increasingly possess more product knowledge and technical awareness that not only require their expectations to be met but need to be wowed too. This places the onus on your key account management team to step up their game and craft and execute an account-centric stakeholder relationship building and management strategy. Gartner Research reports that your customer is no longer relying on your sales and support team for attaining the information about your product or solution, they are conducting independent research and relying on both offline and online channels to make up their mind. A report by UserIQ states that 87% of respondents from SaaS organizations that have a churn rate of less than 1% report that, they are fully or somewhat aligned on key customer relationship management. To keep the churn rate at its minimum, you will need to keep your communication with your key accounts authentic, targeted, and relevant to keep your account engaged which is made possible by data-backed stakeholder mapping. What is Customer Stakeholder Mapping? 1. Definition of the Stakeholders’ Goals Stakeholder Mapping begins with defining the interests and goals of the buying centers in your key accounts. Knowing what they need and want can not only enable you to assess if the account is a good fit but will also help you provide a tailored offering that the stakeholders won’t be able to refuse. The key account buyer not only demands convenience in terms of accessing the information they might need but also want the communication and the expert consulting services to be authentic, targeted, relevant, and timely. 2. Segmentation of Stakeholders The next step in the stakeholder mapping process is to segment the individuals or buying groups with respect to their roles, attitude, influence, and the amount of budget they control. This Relationship attribution is the key to stakeholder analysis as it provides data-backed insights into understanding your stakeholders’ interests and goals. When analyzed properly it could also help you comprehend who is on your side and who is against, what pressure they are under with respect to meeting certain goals, and what are the internal dynamics of the organization so that you can strategize accordingly. Your key account managers need to know how to strategically map these individuals within accounts with respect to their role, their stances, and the amount of budget they control. All this stakeholder intelligence needs to be actioned upon and monetized to expand and grow that account.‍ 3. Mapping of Stakeholder Relationships The next step in stakeholder mapping is to dissect the relationships that your internal stakeholder team has with the external team and also the ones that the individuals within their team have within themselves. This would help you learn who can positively or negatively influence who and to what extent? We all know that the account-based selling scenario can get very complex with multiple buying centers and buying committees that are responsible for these buying jobs. Individuals within these committees not only hold the power to influence the buying decisions (for example, by just delaying the purchase process and preventing it from progressing to the next stage) but can also influence other decision-makers within the committee to rule in their favor. Your key account managers need to know how to strategically map these individuals within accounts with respect to their role, their stances, and the amount of budget they control. 4. Nurturing the Stakeholder Relationships Stakeholder management does not end once the deal is closed but is an ongoing process that lasts throughout the customers’ lifetime which needs to be extended as long as the mutual business interests are sustained. Developing these long-lasting relationships turns recent adopters into loyal long-term customers. Once you have the above attributes of your stakeholders mapped out, you will have clarity on what communication needs to be directed at whom and when. Maintaining an Engagement cadence with the key contacts is as important as the level of engagement. Maintaining an Engagement cadence with the key contacts is as important as the level of engagement. e.g

Account Planning Template – Step by Step Guide to Strategic Account Planning

Account Planning Template Existing customers are a critical revenue source for every organization. Meeting growth targets requires sales leaders to build robust strategic account plans and establish well-defined account management processes in the organization and this is where account planning templates come into the picture. Having a customizable template for account planning not only helps retain customers but also enables account teams to identify, develop, and execute growth opportunities within their account base. KAM Glossary: Crucial Account Management Terms Explained What is Account Planning? Account planning is a process of building strategic plans to improve value-driven relationships with key customers that can help in long-term development and retention, thereby maximizing the revenue potential. Effective account plans and templates help account managers gain a more in-depth understanding of the client. The Account Planning Book of Evidence study surveyed 1034 people from 62 countries to determine why organizations undertake the account planning exercise. Most of the results were unsurprising: Better Win rate (75%) Increased understanding of customers’ business (72%) Shorter sales cycles (58%) Better customer loyalty (55%) Increased deal size (49%) Better executive access (47%) Identify non-competitive deals (27%) The Account plan contains critical information about the prospect that every sales rep should know before even thinking about making the initial phone call. Capturing this information down in a concise, structured way helps the salesperson to focus on what is important about the account and how it aligns with your company’s offering. Having a plan can help you go one step further, give you the edge over a competitor, or deliver the crucial piece of data that can close the deal. Simply put, the Strategic Account Plan is the blueprint of the sale. Here, is a template to create quick and effective account plans that help account managers win the game. Account Planning Template 1. Account Overview Documenting the Client’s landscape is important to give a bird’s eye view of their business and general information to the account managers for them to dive deeper. Also, this information must answer all the basic questions about the client like What the client sells, who are their clients, what size are they, where are they located, and much more. 2. Account Segmentation Account Segmentation will help the sales team segment the client accounts into different buckets. This enables the salespeople to come up with the right strategic action planning based on the account positions. You can segment accounts based on the account health score to understand them objectively. 3. Account Financials Understanding the basic financials of the client organization will help identify your potential revenue sources. Also, listing the specific business units and geographic regions of the clients will enable you to know the areas to which you can cater and estimate the Total Annual Revenue potential from the client. 4. Whitespace analysis Whitespace mapping is the virtual representation of data to uncover hidden white space opportunities to target. It helps you to identify the gap between the products/services your customers require vs the products/services you offer. Understanding the pain points at different levels and offering the right solution helps increase revenue from the existing customers. The Sales team can understand current engagements with accounts and explore possible opportunities & whitespaces with the white space analysis. Learn More: Opportunity Planner by DemandFarm boosts tracking capabilities in 65+ opportunities for Dairy MAX 5. Relationship mapping Relationship mapping helps to visualize all the key stakeholders in one place. This mapping tool – org chart software also helps salespeople to explore detailed information about the contacts of the accounts on the budget control, influences they have on each other, etc., You can Know the organizational hierarchy of the accounts to better understand the relationships and the influences between the contacts. 6. Competitor Analysis Competitor Analysis allows you to better understand the market, potential, and behavior of the customers. This analysis with a bunch of data gives a company an advantage over the competitors to grow by developing new market strategies. With competitor analysis, the sales team can also understand the strengths and weaknesses of competitors along with the analysis of customer spend vs wallet share. 7. Communication Planning Capturing all the past interactions between the client and the team will help to sketch the communication pattern that can add value in planning the overall communication strategy. It gives you a year-wise verdict on whether you are in super touch or you need to work more on the volume of meetings. It’s an extremely important exercise to improve your communication strategy to maximize ROI. 8. Account Management KPIs Defining the Account management KPIs is critical to measure the progress of accounts over time, make adjustments in the process & stay on track, solve problems that are in the way, and tackle new opportunities in the accounts. It also helps in analyzing account planning patterns over time. Learn More: 11 Crucial Account Management KPIs that dictate Success Why do you need a Sales Account Planning template? Creating a Strategic Account Management template is not an easy exercise. It can’t be done in an hour before a meeting. So there is a need for a template that can help account managers build quick and effective plans. Most importantly, it gives you a better framework of the data needed to understand the customer. Knowing more about your target and being equipped with insider account knowledge of the account is one of the biggest advantages a salesperson can have. DemandFarm’s Account Management Software DemandFarm’s Key Account Management Software enables dynamic account planning capability natively inside Salesforce CRM and integrates to all other leading CRMS to make account planning ridiculously easy. It helps in achieving a deeper understanding of your Key accounts through improved data visualization and qualitative analysis. Our key account management software empowers companies to visualize, plan, and drive growth in Key Account Sales. Our digital account management experts will be more than happy to guide you. Book a demo today.

Sales Account Planning – A Step by Step Guide

Sales Account Planning What is a Sales account plan? A Sales account plan is sort of like a guide with all the critical information a sales team wants to close each of their crucial accounts and keep them for the long run. It is more often used to establish sales objectives for the team and develop strategies necessary to achieve them. Companies of all sizes may use variants of account programs based on the industry, type of client, and sales team structure. ‍ If you have ever been to a restaurant where the host includes all the detailed information concerning their valued guests about the interests, relationship, and buying habits that an add-on to the experience, then you’ve seen a sales account plan in action. Think of your account as guests along with sales account planning as a way that you show how much you understand and value your guests. Sales account plans may include a range of information, including company size, key decision-makers, timelines, and also a listing of the company’s competitors and the business’s market share relative to their competitors, as well as their strategic decision-making process. Steps to prepare a Sales account plan Successful sales account planning requires more than just filling out a form. It requires strategic thinking and a clear understanding of what your client needs. Outline the business objective The First step is to outline the objectives by understanding the organization’s current mission and vision, the industry trends, the market potential. Mapping these data with the sales acceleration goals and the product/service offerings of the company can help a sales team set up their objective. Define the target clients The next important step is to analyze the clients with the necessary tools to find the most profitable and lucrative prospects and customers defined by industry, region, product, etc. This analysis can help the sales team know the challenges and hunt for profound growth opportunities to grow the revenue. Build your strategies and tactics List your overall objectives for the accounts and plan how you will get to your goal. It must answer the questions like, “What are our objectives, and what’s our overall direction to achieve them?”. It must include the goal build that takes the overall growth objective into account and builds up the components of how the team’s going to reach that objective. Select the necessary tools for account analysis Understanding the accounts, analyzing, planning, and delivering the right solution for the right customer requires rigorous efforts at the backend. But this can be simplified by employing proper account planning tools with advanced features. Assign the KPIs Build a Performance Dashboard that sets milestones and tracks the progress to those milestones; it also helps identify any adjustments that need to be made. It must answer the questions, “How have we performed? How should we adjust?” Key components of the Account analysis It’s getting increasingly difficult and complex to understand the client business to answer this question: How much will the client be ready to spend on our product? Successful salespeople must dig deeper into the complexities to solve the puzzle. A list of analyses over the client’s business with the previous year’s data can help not only answer this but also can track new opportunities within the accounts. Learn More: Opportunity Planner by DemandFarm boosts tracking capabilities in 65+ opportunities for Dairy MAX Account Segmentation Account Segmentation will help the sales team segment the client accounts into different buckets. This enables the salespeople to come up with the right strategic action plan based on the account positions. You can segment accounts based on the account health score to understand them objectively. Relationship mapping Relationship mapping helps to visualize all the key stakeholders in one place. This mapping tool – org chart software also helps salespeople to explore detailed information about the contacts of the accounts on the budget control, influences they have on each other, etc., You can Know the organizational hierarchy of the accounts to better understand the relationships and the influences between the contacts. Competition Stacking Competitor Analysis allows you to better understand the market, potential, and behavior of the customers. This analysis with a bunch of data gives a company an advantage over the competitors to grow by developing new market strategies. With competitor analysis, the sales team can also understand the strength and weakness of competitors along with the analysis of customer spend vs wallet share White space analysis Whitespace mapping is the virtual representation of data to uncover hidden white space opportunities to target. It helps you to identify the gap between the products/services your customers require vs the products/services you offer. Understanding the pain points at different levels and offering the right solution helps increase revenue from the existing customers. The Sales team can understand current engagements with accounts and explore possible opportunities & whitespaces with the whitespace analysis Benefits of Sales account planning Better Win rate Increased understanding of customers’ business Shorter sales cycles Better customer loyalty Increased deal size Better executive access Identify non-competitive deals DemandFarm’s Account Planner DemandFarm’s Account planner offers integrated account planning inside CRMs that makes sales account planning ridiculously easy. It helps in achieving a deeper understanding of your Key accounts through improved data visualization and qualitative analysis. Salesforce is one of the most popular customer relationship management tools in the world and our products are Salesforce native which means Salesforce Account Planning becomes a breeze.

Account Planning Tool- A Strategic Investment

Account Planning tools that help you grow revenue Digital transformation has prompted many businesses to invest in account planning tools. Retention, understandably, is a big reason. But, underlying that is also the desire to systematize and institutionalize account planning. Increasing customer retention by just five percent increases profits by 25 to 95 percent – Harvard Business Study. Account Planning is a basic framework for every organization to have a customer-centric approach to increasing customer retention. An Account Planning Template helps in understanding the accounts, analyzing, planning, and delivering the right solution for the right customer. It substitutes the rigorous effort required at the backend and helps you with proper strategic account planning that can be simplified by employing proper account planning tools with advanced features. Is your account planning software missing out on any basic features? Is it causing you to lose any major revenue opportunities? No worries! Account Planning does not have to be stressful! Eliminate account data silos with easy bi-directional sync Explore the essential features below to examine your account planning tool. Account Planning tool within your CRM- To Analyze your Key Accounts 1. Whitespace Analysis Understand current engagements with accounts and explore possible opportunities & whitespaces with the whitespace analysis. Whitespace mapping is the virtual representation of data to uncover hidden white space opportunities to target. It helps you to identify the gap between the products/services your customers require vs the products/services you offer. Understanding the pain points at different levels and offering the right solution helps increase revenue from the existing customers. 2. Relationship Mapping Know the organizational hierarchy of the accounts to better understand the relationships and the influences between the contacts. Relationship mapping helps you visualize all the key stakeholders in one place. This tool enables effortless stakeholder mapping for your key accounts- org chart software also helps salespeople to explore detailed information about the contacts of the accounts on the budget control, influences they have on each other, etc., 3. Communication Matrix Capture all your interactions to sketch the communication pattern which can help in planning a communication strategy. The communication matrix helps you optimize the time for salespeople by giving a trend analysis of the interactions made with the clients. Finding a successful communication pattern and following the same will help close more deals in less time. Account Planning tool within your CRM- To Develop your Business Strategy 1. Account Segmentation Segment accounts based on the account health score to understand them objectively. Account Segmentation will help you segment the client accounts into different buckets based on various attribute scores marked in a graph with account attractiveness across relationship scores. This enables the salespeople to come up with the right strategic account management action plan based on the account positions like Star, Strategic, Streamline and ignore. 2. Competitor Stacking With competitor analysis, understand the strengths and weaknesses of competitors along with the analysis of customer spend vs wallet share. Competitor Analysis allows you to better understand the market, potential, and behavior of the customers. This analysis with a bunch of data gives a company an advantage over the competitors to grow by developing new market strategies. 3. Annual Account Plans Build your account plan with the growth strategy for Buying centers, Engagements, Financials, and Revenue. Annual account plans provide directions for every function in the company to plan their objectives and strategies for the year. Though these strategic account plans are not so elaborated, they help you with insights into the changes to be made in the current structure to drive future growth. Though most companies follow yearly strategic account planning, it must be a continuous process throughout the year to be more effective. Would you like to understand how Account Planning can transform your business? We have cracked the code! Account Planning tool within your CRM- To Track and Govern your Key Accounts Know your progress against yearly plans with a comprehensive account planning tool. ‍ A Key Account Management Software gathers real-time data from the CRM and helps you to track multiple parameters to check progress against the plans. Mapping dynamic goals and priorities of the Client to ongoing plans will enable you to make the right strategic calls at the right time. Using Account Planning Tools, Powerful actionable insights can be derived to avoid deviations from the goals. These three account planning & strategy best practices can turn potential clients into key revenue-generating clients. Though Key Account planning is a tough journey, a technology-driven approach with data insights can transform account planning as a whole. So, it’s time to take stock and use the right Account Planning Tools to have a pain-free Account Planning experience.

Key Account Planning Simplified

If you are a key account manager, I understand what you go through every year during the account planning process. You want the key account planning simplified. Jacob is responsible for building the key account management strategy and executing the plan to achieve annual targets. Bridging the gap between planning and execution is a challenge, always. The even bigger pain point is getting started on and building the plan itself. He is required to spot the real opportunities for value creation and growth across the length and breadth of his Key Accounts. All this tends to become very overwhelming. Typically, this situation reaches a crescendo towards the end of the year when key account managers end up spending a month or two, preparing account plans for the next year. This is thanks to complex methodologies and visually appealing PPT templates that most of the times make the simple; complex. I am dumbstruck. I strongly believe that key account planning can be simple, and exciting. I encourage all key account managers to peruse the following checklist. DemandFarm has done its best to simplify. You will find this simplicity also reflected in the Account Planner. Do give Salesforce Account planning and MS Dynamics Account planning a shot when you are logged into your Salesforce or MS Dynamics instance. Key Account Planning Checklist The As-Is Account managers simply jump into the key account planning process. Investing time and focus to understand the current state of key accounts is a valuable intervention capable of giving the key accounts a much-needed direction. Knowing win/loss areas, active opportunities, the orientation of the contacts in the accounts, and the accounts’ market position with respect to the competition are valuable markers to establish the As-Is. Identify whitespace opportunities Once the as-is is done, key account managers have a clear sense of where the current growth opportunities lie. Juxtaposing those opportunities with competition and mapping them with internal capabilities opens up the ‘whitespace’. Simple. Align the sales process to the buying process B2B buying has changed. CEB had a data point which said, “57% of the purchase decision is complete before a customer even calls a supplier.” On similar lines, SiriusDecisions says, “67% of the buyer’s journey is now done digitally.” Therefore, Strategic account management Plan has to build strategies that proactively seek out opportunities. Getting an account landscape which identifies buying centers in the account and the ability to map them with internal products/solutions can align sales to the buying process. Learn More: Opportunity Planner by DemandFarm boosts tracking capabilities in 65+ opportunities for Dairy MAX Align the Plan to the annual account targets Account targets count. At the end of the year, it is the only thing that counts. Ironically, during sales account planning and execution there emerges a tendency to do more. This often distracts the account managers from the targets. Account planning and execution-only have to ensure strict adherence to strategies and initiatives that are directly linked to account targets. Nothing else matters. Not even a Metallica concert. Use a real-time tool The problem of making account plans in a PPT is this – it is passive and remains passive through the life of the account plan. It is only seldom that the KAMs revisit the PPTs to align their align and adjust their annual account plans. And it isn’t that the KAMs don’t want to. Updating account plans becomes an operational problem in an ever-changing environment. Dynamic, responsive and real-time updating account planning tools like the ‘Account Planner’ can support account managers by saving them from operational grunt work. How would you rate the account planning template& process of your organization? Simple or complex? What initiatives have you taken to simplify? What worked? What did not? What technology tools were leveraged to simplify and improve the process? If you’re interested in transforming your sales post the pandemic, explore our blog on Sales Acceleration in Account Management and how it can help you grow your business in 2021.

Strategic Account Planning – Process, Challenges, Solutions

What is Strategic Account Planning? Account Planning for Strategic Accounts or Strategic Account Management is building value-driven relationships with your key customers that can help in long-term development and retention, thereby maximizing the revenue potential. It is a synonym for Key Account Planning. The account management process has always been complex. The complexities exist at all levels – thinking, documenting, presenting, planning, training, and reviewing. According to a CSO Insights 2016 Sales Enablement Optimization Study, 90.6% of those surveyed said that strategic account planning was relevant to them and, therefore they would do it. Therefore, key account managers must know how to build strategic account plans with the best practices. Using account planning software like DemandFarm’s Key Account Management Software can substantially streamline operations. Taking you through the entire process and strategies may be a bit too long for a blog. But in this one let me make the ‘thinking’ part a little easier with frameworks, directions, and principles for a phenomenal strategic account planning exercise. Why is strategic account planning important? Strategic account planning enables sales professionals to understand their customers better – know their needs, goals, and challenges enabling them to create customized solutions and address specific customer requirements. Account planning also pushes businesses to take proactive measures to address potential customer issues.  Important Processes of Strategic Account Planning 1. Decoding the present scenario Understand account information in terms of revenue/profitability/growth, products/services, geographic spread, and the account’s initiatives and plan for the year. This is publicly available data that can be easily found, so it makes no sense to use this to analyze your client’s financial position and organizational structure. The most relevant questions and the ones that will be unique from your competitors are questions like: Which areas of your business are most important to you? Where do you see yourself in two to four years? Are there areas of interest that you might either reduce or grow? What kinds of obstacles do you worry about? What would you like to see from a prime supplier? 2. Understanding the Voice of Customer (VOC) Ask any strategic account manager, and they will tell you that the days are gone when the client account landscape was represented by a one-way dialogue for engaging prospects. Today, account heads are shifting their listening and response mechanisms quicker as VoC represents a huge chance for driving loyalty and increased sales. What challenges, concerns, and problems have clients been discussing? How can you address those problems with the products/services of your company? This kind of insight is usually not available publicly. It involves having an in-depth discussion with customers to understand their plan and pain points which can help in new product development or even tweaking the current product to suit their strategy and requirements. The success of this depends on the quality of relationships between the client and their customers and the knowledge of both customers and your business. 3. Building Strategic Connections Through Relationship Management With Accounts  You can have multiple types of relationships with clients, and they can be either Tactical, Cooperative, Interdependent, or Strategic. You can use a simple weighted attribute method to arrive at one of the four. A skilled account manager uses the best practices and strategies to plan and create the account management organizational structure with an account plan and process in place. Having the right training and using certain principles increases the skill set of the manager to deal with strategic accounts. With People Sketch an organization chart with hierarchies, titles, and roles of all the contacts that matter. What is also helpful is to identify your supporters/detractors/champions among those contacts. Who controls what budgets? Who influences whom, both positively/negatively? Why? To convert deals and present your customers with a high-grade experience, you need to be informed of the positions your contacts hold within their business and their level of influence in the decision-making process. Mapping their level of influence and their relationships within the organization can help you to concentrate your efforts on the plan appropriately. Relationship mapping helps the sales and marketing units of the business to optimize their lead generation plans and increase revenue from existing accounts. Modern technology keeps the method of creating relation maps automated. Gathering insights using modern technology can automatically keep your relationship mapping efforts up-to-date. ‍4. Growth Opportunities Based on the above 4 data points, identify the buying centers in the account and map which of your products/services is consumed in which buying centers. Understanding Buying Centers can help key account managers in account planning and innovation. The Buying Center is a 40-year-old concept associated with Webster and Wind and can be hugely useful. The Buying Center is a part of the organization that involves a bunch of executives who have varying influence on the B2B buy decision. Performing a complete buying center analysis is an essential first step to help key account planning managers understand which messages and tactics best convey the value of their products. That can give you an idea of two types of growth areas: Mining Growth Finding out which of the existing projects/contracts/businesses can grow this year is where mining can happen. Farming Growth What new opportunities can be explored this year in your strategic account management process? That’s where farming growth comes in! All this can allow you to set a revenue goal for the year. Download Now: The Most Comprehensive White Space Analysis Template for Strategic Key Account Growth     Build a Strategic Action Plan – A Strategic Account Plan Template  You need to analyze a few categories to build an action plan for your accounts. You can start off by listing down action items, specific activities, monthly plans, and the support required, along with timelines. We are a firm believer in keeping the key account management process simple yet powerful. Over-analysis can lead to paralysis, so keep it short and simple. I would emphasize more action items and numbers and less on theory. In today’s dynamic business

The 7 Biggest Challenges Account Managers face while making Account Plans

Strategic Account Management may be accepted by the organization and the leadership as a good Account Management practice, but it is not devoid of challenges. Once the managers start practicing it, they realize the real-world problems or rather, challenges that they must face while creating strategic account plans. Let’s take a good look at the 7 Big Challenges faced while creating strategic account plans. Where did we get this top secret information? Straight from the managers themselves and their organizations, of course! KAM Glossary: Crucial Account Management Terms Explained 1. The eternal tug-of-war between short-term and long-term Even when the organization has made a policy decision of having a Strategic Account Management cell for Key Accounts or Strategic Accounts, some managers may find it difficult to choose between the short term and long term. Many times, the short-term wins as it is more achievable and managers often feel a quick sense of accomplishment. That’s exactly where the challenge lies; to choose the long-term over the short term when the situation so demands. It isn’t enough for managers to hit short-term goals and give themselves the pat on the back, it is integral to concentrate on strategic account plan goals like maximization of customer lifetime value too! Guide: Comprehensive Career Path for a Key Account Manager 2. Having access to an effective strategic planning tool Strategic account management needs more work than normal accounts and hence better tools. Although strategic account plans are about building key relationships and nurturing them, this process does need to be automated. There are various strategic account planning softwares and tools available that help the managers in planning and managing their strategic accounts well. But having access to a suitable tool may be a challenge, to begin with. Challenges of strategic account management can be overcome by ensuring the planning tool is made a part of the responsibility of the strategic management team and the leadership. 3. Having a good relationship with all key customers (other than that one key customer) within each Strategic Account It’s not enough to have a good relationship with just one key person within one Strategic Account. People move from one organization to another. Strategic Account Managers cannot afford to put all their eggs in one basket and need to form good relationships with other key people within the Strategic Account. This ensures that a great account isn’t lost, simply because the biggest influencer left the organization. A dynamic OrgChart can be extremely helpful to ensure that Strategic Account Managers know exactly where the influencers and detractors lie in an organizational hierarchy. 4. Interacting with enterprise-level organizations and key buyers at the top level Strategic Account Planning requires a CXO-level management involvement in any client. This bottleneck may arise due to a lack of training. This is very easily rectified with proper recruitment, training and a top-down approach to Strategic Account Management. 5. The actual implementation of the Strategic Account Plans Strategic Account Plans will remain so unless they’re put into action by a motivated Strategic Account Manager. The biggest detriment of a Strategic Account Plan is actually its implementation and thus it must be taken into account while creation. 6. Formulating a fair and comprehensive compensation policy for Strategic Account Managers Since the conversion in a Strategic Account happens over a period, incentive planning and compensation for Strategic Account Managers cannot be the same as your Salesforce, yet needs to be fair. Proper metrics need to be defined and implemented, which is a major HR challenge. It will keep evolving over time and will vary from organization to organization. 7. Training and skills in strategic account management What kind of training and skill sets do Strategic Account Managers need to acquire and how frequently do they need to be trained, is often the question. It’s a crucial decision that leadership needs to take, as it is not a good idea to take chances with the capabilities and delivery of the Strategic Account Managers. We are certain there are many more such challenges and that we can list more than the seven mentioned here. What is essential to this subject is the fact that the Top Challenges for high performers do differ from the Top Challenges of the average performer. Average performers are more concerned about the most fundamental challenges that are lower in the challenges hierarchy, such as ‘having access to an effective strategic planning tool’ and ‘the tussle between short term and long term goals’. On the other hand, high performers would be more concerned about challenges such as ‘fair compensation policy for strategic account managers based on sales results’ and ‘effective ways of building and communicating value’. Do share with me, your top Challenges of Effective Strategic Key Account Plans/Management!

Meet Jack : The Account Planner

Meet our muse, Jack. Key Account Manager. Account Planner. Data Interpreter. Relationship Builder. You. You know Jack. He is just like one of us. Surrounded by data, information, statistics, and revenue numbers. Clients who demand the world. Internal stakeholders that need convincing. Jack wears many hats. But that just works. With a family to look after and a life full of interests and hobbies, work-life balance stretches Jack the most. And Jack inspires us to stretch ourselves here at DemandFarm. Here’s why. Let’s talk about Jack in his Account Planner avatar. Jack is accountable for one of the most critical Key Account processes – building the strategy and executing the plan to achieve annual targets. While bridging the gap between planning and execution is a huge challenge, an even bigger pain point is getting started on and building the plan itself. You may identify with Jack’s life around Annual Planning Season. Let’s look at everything that occupies him in the run-up to and during the account planning process. Gathering business insights The most part of Strategic Account Planning involves gathering data from several sources, collating it into a standard format and mining that data for actionable insights to help build the annual plan. A comprehensive white space analysis, competitor analysis and a long hard look at the state of the relationship are other indispensable activities at this stage. This is where he is able to spot the real opportunities for value creation and growth across the length and breadth of his Key Accounts. Collaboration with internal stakeholders Account Planning is one thing and achieving the planned goals is another. It just cannot happen without the engagement of key internal stakeholders, all of whom probably have their own drivers and constraints. An effective annual plan would not only build the business case behind the goals and create buy-in; it also sets targets and expectations from team members. This helps him put everyone on the same page and coordinate the internal effort to achieve the plan. Governing the plan Tracking the plan, measuring performance, quantifying the qualitative indicators effectively – Jack needs to seamlessly bridge the gap between planning and execution. And he needs to check deviations, course-correct and stay flexible enough to grow with the Clients needs and goals. Handling the many aspects of Annual Account Planning can be overwhelming! So here it is. For all the Jacks out there, I get it. Having been a Key Account Manager in my time, I understand how crucial this time of the year is for you. Like I said, we are inspired by the work you do. So we build technology that helps you win. And this Annual Account Planning Season, we want you to try it for yourself. Imagine… An Account Planning technology that: Works from inside Salesforce, using data already in the system Integrates all the data at one place, in one format Creates action plans that you can easily share, leading to specific goals, activities, support required Generates Insights, metrics, and measures for Key Accounts Easily tracks whitespace, people, and actions, seamlessly governs progress And it is yours FREE until the 31st of December 2016. Sign up here and get started on the best Account Planning experience you will ever have. I guarantee it. PS: It’s an all-access pass to our best planning module ever, no questions asked. Sign up today, and unlock the true potential of your Key Accounts.

Annual Planning Pains

It’s that time of year again folks. Yes. Holiday time, Thanksgiving time, Fall time…but also account planning time! Holiday plans, travel plans…and of course, Annual Key Account Plans! You know that adage- if you fail to prepare, prepare to fail! I had that in big bold letters up in my schoolroom back in high school. While it’s 100% true, it doesn’t change the fact that planning time is a big pain. KAM in simpler days and times Before I turned entrepreneur, I was a Key Account Manager with a large automotive giant. And this time of the year, usually meant taking stock of a lot of data from around the company- all on paper in those days- and trying to pore over all the numbers from all the sources and making sense of them, mobilizing my sources to see what the Client was planning for their year to come, strategizing with the leadership to develop my path for the year and of course, bracing myself for the internal sell, in case some major initiatives were needed to remain competitive. The more things change, the more they remain the same. Today, the very definition of key Accounts has gone from large companies to ultra-global matrix organizations, connected digitally across a complex network of relationships, tracking people’s movements across the globe, mountains of data across myriad formats- from PowerPoints to emails to the cloud…everywhere! In real-time…how simple my Key Accounts of yours seem in comparison…with easier lines of command, few verticals, and even fewer geographies. Shaking off the nagging doubt that ‘somethings been missed’… My compatriots in contemporary Strategic Account Management tell me that the sheer complexity of large Accounts today is not the real challenge- the challenge is managing all the data that is generated, and interpreting that to create strategic action points or annual plans. It’s simply not feasible for one individual to manage it manually – even with the help of software and a laptop. It’s amazing how many productive hours are wasted- yes, wasted– in simply collating the data required to start the process of annual planning – so many formats, so many sources. And even then, one can’t be sure if an opportunity to expand or grow has simply been missed or fallen through the gaps because one entity or buying unit or geography or vertical of the Key Account was missed out, or a certain connection wasn’t established with the right person at the right time in the client organization, or a new business vertical was recorded as an independent entity in the CRM system and didn’t show up in the Account data at all… Over to #painfreeplanning So obviously, technology can help track and collate everything better, and overall plan better, and there are lots of tools to make that happen…but the real secret sauce to shift the focus from managing to growing is to spend productive hours on data interpretation and strategic action, not on joining the dots and collating data from various sources, figuring out version control of the many PPTs floating around or cutting and pasting financial data from excel sheets. At DemandFarm, our inspiration is to create #painfreeplanning for KAMs everywhere. Our technology joins the dots and collates all the data in one format, in one place, right inside your CRM. You won’t believe how pain-free it can be till you try it yourself. And, all this month, we are giving you that opportunity. Experience the DemandFarm Salesforce Account Planning module – free for two months; no questions asked – and see if it works for you.  More than a thousand Account Managers across verticals have already made the switch…it’s time you experience why. Happy Thanksgiving, Fall, and the upcoming festive season. Most of all, happy #painfreeplanning!