Are Your Sales Account Plans Too Long?
I'm all for account planning, but some sales organizations demand WAY too much of it. It's not uncommon for sales teams to begin every complex sales opportunity by collecting all the available information about an account, in the hopes that some particular nugget might prove useful.
The resulting account plans may be dozens of pages long. Unfortunately, such hefty tomes are marginally useful because they're too long to read and digest. More importantly, updating such a document in any meaningful way is so daunting, that the tendency is to simply keep adding information, regardless of whether that information is relevant.
Clearly, this kind of planning is wasteful of your valuable time, but the only alternative is to bypass account planning entirely and just wing it, right? Wrong.
A better approach, according to Ryan Kubacki. president of the sales consulting firm Holden International is to create an account plan that's short enough to be easily understood and updated quickly -- usually two pages or less.
Rather than focusing on detailed information, short account plans focus on what's actually likely to be important. Creating such a plan requires a certain amount of intuition and business acumen to understand what to include and what to jettison.
For example, rather that describing the entire organization chart, a short plan might focus on individuals who are outside the management chain but have the power to work in exception to company policy. (Holden International calls this person a "Fox".)
Similarly, rather than providing a list of potential competitors, a short account plan might lay out plan (in one paragraph) to work a key influencer to change the buying criteria so that the RFP, when issued or re-issued, reflects the strengths of the sales team's offering.
An added bonus to writing a short, intuitive account plan is that the effort of condensing and focusing on what's really important continually hones your ability to think clearly and express yourself concisely. And that's something that useful in nearly every phase of your sales career.
If you're interesting in honing your account planning skills, check out these posts: