“To be prepared is half the victory”
In the sales world, nothing can be more accurate than this!
Account plan is the blueprint of the sale; the strongest armor for any sales rep. It helps the sales reach a vantage point to target new accounts and forge stronger relationship with their existing accounts. A well-designed account plan combines all the important information, its financials, competitors, strategic priorities, and newer developments in the account and industry.
Most important: a solid account plan that highlights unique facts about each account crucial for sealing the deal. For sales team, winning new logo has always been an end goal. Backed by the years of experience of delivering crucial intelligence about target account, here is what we have prepared to help you build your own bullet-proof account plan.
Building a bullet-proof account plan
The first step: Truly understand your prospect
Sales team will have to research about their target accounts to understand their priorities. This will help them to align their value proposition with the prospect’s priorities. If the sales team are targeting the CFO or the CMO of an enterprise account, they will have to dig deeper to learn about their priorities both at a business as well as operational level.
So, what elementary research does a sales team needs to do? And, where should they look for information?
- Company Website to find information such as headquarter, regional offices, company size, key decision-makers, business strategy, and so on. It is up to the sales team to turn valuable information found in company website into deep, actionable insight for ABM campaign.
- Annual and quarterly filing to reveal financial and strategic information about target accounts. Past as well as current annual and quarterly filings will assist in understanding the business structure of your target accounts. Having a look at transcripts can uncover business challenges as well as other great deal of information. This will help the sales team to understand a lot more, from the horses’ mouth i.e. from those who are steering target account’s business.
- Executive interviews help to learn from decision-makers about their company and highlight their business priorities and sometimes key challenges that they’re facing.
- Press releases reveals a lot of information. Just go through last 2-3 years and it will easily help to guide to the direction the company is headed towards.
- New websites like BBC, Guardian, Washington Post and sector-specific news portals can also unveil a lot of insightful information. For instance, sites like Supply Chain Dive, SupplyChain 24/7 exclusively provide supply chain news.
- Research papers, survey reports, industry research and market research insight providers are other useful sources that a sales team needs to keep tabs of.
Also, get in touch with marketing to understand what they already know about target accounts. Once you’ve gathered all the information, it is time to convert those into actionable insights. This will help to compare your offering with that of competitors and unveil cross-selling opportunities for the future.
The second step: Gather all relevant information
With the abundance of information available in today’s world, it can be a bit overwhelming. Sales team need to structure everything that they’ve gathered into a digestible chunk of information. Account plan is an extensive document and requires a lot of information to make it comprehensive.
What is the best way to structure gathered information?
- Account overview to reveal information like geographic presence, revenue size, date of incorporation, operating areas, employee size, key competitors, acquisitions and divestitures, and key decision-makers.
- Industry overview to understand the key trends and major undertakings in the sector, the target account is operating in. Sales team can identify major players, challenges, and opportunities in the industry.
- Business priorities to list strategic business priorities including SWOT analysis of the target account.
- Business Challenges to identify both internal and external factor that is affecting the target account and focusing specifically on problems that could potentially be solved through the application of technology.
- Strategic development areas to identify new avenues for growth.
- Case studies to understand previous partnerships, target account’s long-term priorities and possible areas of alliance.
Here’s how we helped a global billion-dollar supply chain build one?
An account plan can make a big difference on the bottom-line results. We can assert from our experience working with a billion-dollar global supply chain company. We worked with the supply chain company’s marketing team in building a detailed account plan on their 75+ high-value target accounts.
What we did?
At first, we tried to truly understand the supply chain company’s value proposition and what they wanted to achieve. We then prepared a tailored checklist that would help them understand their 75+ target accounts in-depth. Once the checklist was approved, we built an actionable account plan for each account.
How we did it?
We did a thorough research on all the target accounts that the supply chain company wanted to win. We went through each account’s website, financials, press releases, case studies, research papers, and various other credible sources. The team of analysts converted all the information into valuable insights for each account.
What was the outcome?
The detailed account plan revealed insight around supply chain initiatives and key supply chain vendors at a Global + Country + Account level right from the ‘account plan’ stage. The result was foreseeable since the account plan aligned both ‘marketing’ and ‘sales’ with knowledge about each named account. The supply chain company is expecting to close 15-20% more deals with the help of our account intelligence.
To conclude
The art of building an account plan has increasingly become important for enterprises. Sales team will have to set milestones for them to achieve regularly. Companies have started building account plans because of the tangible results it brings. Since an account plan is a living document, it must be flexible enough to comply with the target account’s strategic priorities.