To recognize opportunities, enhance client relationships, increase income, provide value, and lower risk, a key account plan is necessary. However, we fail to realize its importance due to the other challenges that come with business. Account planning is one such tool that may help you tackle these challenges with much more structure and also save time to focus on other work.
What is Account Planning?
Sales, marketing, and account management professionals utilize account planning as a marketing approach to target their existing clientele. To better comprehend the demands and motivations of their clients and build enduring relationships with them, they develop account plans. They frequently carry out research on their target market for this purpose and include it into their marketing strategy.
How is the Account Planning Process beneficial?
Account planning can be beneficial in various ways to your business. Here are a few of them.
1. Account planning is an action plan that generally focuses on developing connections with your clients that are advantageous to both sides and deciding on a goal that meets their needs. The demands of your current accounts and the best way to meet those needs are a major focus of the study on account planning. You may boost customer loyalty and retention by providing valuable value through a relationship between the customer and account manager.
2. Account planning may lead to quicker sales and more efficiency since it concentrates on producing income from your current accounts. Professionals may concentrate more of their time and attention on closing high-value sales with current clients.
3. It may be costly and time-consuming to find and convert new accounts through marketing initiatives, advertising, and client outreach. Account planning could enable you to concentrate more of your efforts on growing revenue from current accounts rather than on trying to draw in new ones. This may enable you to lower acquisition expenses and concentrate more of your energy on enhancing your connections with current clients.
4. Strategic account management ought to contribute to boosting customers’ value over the course of the interaction. If you’re successful, you’ll become a customer-indispensible expert since account planning is simply an organized method for learning how to make your product or service necessary.
How to CREATE a strategic Account Plan? (+ Free Account Plan Template)
1. Overview of your Account.
Get a sense of what already has been achieved, attempted, and the tactics that have been effective or unsuccessful before attempting to grasp the company needs. Have your cross-selling, up-selling, or renewals proven effective thus far? What items did you close, and who served as your main contact in that transaction? Take note of any failed attempts at account expansion as well as any information you have that can shed light on why the transaction didn’t work out.
2. About your Company.
The company overview offers a chance to learn about the organization’s origins, development, history, and mission. It’s a fantastic spot for anyone new to the account to rapidly understand what the client performs on a high level. If applicable, you may use this area to include any recent or significant news, whether favorable or unfavorable, as well as any other indications that might point to their present metric or the direction the company will eventually go.
3. Account Strategy.
Prospects aren’t very forthcoming with information in sales and particularly during negotiations, just providing what is absolutely essential to close the transaction. Your counterparts won’t be honest about the genuine status of the company, even if there is a non-disclosure agreement, and it’s conceivable that they themselves are not completely informed. You are responsible for determining the metric for customers as the relationship develops and how you can assist them in achieving it. It’s also important to keep in mind that the metrics in business may change as the company develops. As a result, your key account management strategy will need to be modified.
4. Competitors.
You can benefit from knowing the important players in your customer’s industry and how they fit within it. One option is to keep tabs on what is and isn’t working for rivals and other stakeholders and incorporate that into your own strategy or, for extra value, suggest a strategy to the consumer. You can evaluate for yourself where they fit into the market and align yourself by completing a competitive analysis, analysis of b2b sales, regular transactions and so on, which will help you better comprehend their growth potential and opportunity size and measure success rates.
5. Planning.
You have a solid understanding of the factors, such as the foundations of the business, the competitors, and relationships, and you are aware of the objective; now you need to come up with a plan for attaining it. Your strategy should be comprehensive, but it doesn’t have to be. All of your plans should be in service of the company’s goal of increasing profitability month over month. Recognize that including someone’s name or title as details in the plan might not be necessary because, more often than not, team restructuring will be a byproduct of optimizing for profitability. Additionally, it’s critical that you coordinate your objective of growing your clientele to help them achieve their objectives in order to avoid sacrificing one for the other or vice versa. In keeping with our previous example, up-selling is probably not in your account plan if the customer’s main aim is to boost profit margins, but cross-selling should be a cornerstone of the strategy if you can optimize the company’s procedures.
For your convenience, we have created a sample template. Click here to access it!
Your main account strategy need not be flawless. Start with the very minimum necessary and make adjustments as you go. The most crucial thing to remember is to have fun with it. Your actions are an effort to improve the lives of your clients, remember that.
We hope you enjoyed reading this article and found it helpful. Please don’t forget to leave a comment. All the best!
