Do Account Planning WITH Your Customers, Not TO Your Customers

I often hear from sales leaders that it is more important than ever to drive account planning across the sales force to help allocate scarce resources, identify the right opportunities, and build deeper customer relationships. But what does good account planning actually look like? It starts with choosing the right preposition.

Fundamentally, account planning is setting and executing your strategy for engaging the customer. Here at the Council, we believe a successful account plan should do three things:

1) Create long-term customer and firm value– Map selling strategies to customer needs and manage the complexity of solutions-selling

2) Streamline internal processes– Focus account teams on defined objectives and coordinate cross-silo communication

3) Create stakeholder accountability– Create accountability for achieving goals and set metrics to evaluate rep and internal stakeholder performance

Account planning is most effective when it simultaneously works to achieve the strategic objectives of both the supplier organization and its customers. We want to make sure that we're embarking on a commercial journey that is right for our firm and for the customer

And the first step you need to take?…Qualify!  Determine whether this account, this opportunity and this person is worth the effort in the first place. (SEC Members, visit our newly updated page on Selecting and Prioritizing Accounts).

Avoid wasting the most valuable resources (including field-rep time, product specialist support) on unprofitable accounts and overlooking potentially high-growth accounts.

At an institutional level, determine the right tiering of resources by objectively assessing account/ customer value. Weigh up cost-to-serve criteria against strategic fit, emerging demand, and future growth potential. See our new Opportunity Fit Scorecard for more on how to do this.
At an opportunity level, teach reps to screen for emerging demand – is this customer in established demand 'fulfillment, lowest-bidder-wins mode' or can we influence a larger emerging need?


At an individual customer stakeholder level, screen for a stakeholder's ability to mobilize their organization for internal consensus. Teach sales not to get stuck with 'talkers' — use these contacts for information, but don't expect them to close the deal for you!

Another crucial step of account planning is communicating your expectations to the customer and verifying their expectations. (SEC Members, visit our newly updated page on Communicating and Monitoring Account Progress).

All too often, sales reps create an account plan that gets put in the drawer until next year – and they review it superficially, or not at all, with the customer.

The key to effective account planning (and successful execution) is to do it WITH your customer, not TO your customer. A 'don't ask, don't tell policy' keeps your organization in the dark about what the customer values most – and how they see you as a supplier. So much so that, customer transparency about their intentions is one of the key drivers to effective Key Account Management.

So don't seek compromise – seek transparency.

For your top 10-20% of accounts, consider taking an approach similar to Cargill's joint expectation setting process: get your account executives and the customer's executive stakeholders in separate rooms – and have each write out their most self-centered expectations from this relationship.

Are you looking to tap into and leverage their distribution access to emerging markets? Maybe all they really want is access to guaranteed supply. Come back together and put the cards on the table – then you can review areas of alignment and misalignment and adjust service levels accordingly.

You'll want to do this at least annually, if not semi-annually, for your top accounts. Knowing that expectations misalign is good to know — it's better than betting on hope!

For your other accounts, a scaled-down version of this process is sufficient. Caremark and Baker Hughes both sit down with customers on a quarterly basis to define specific metrics, prioritize what's important to them and give the supplier a score on how well they're doing.

We've reviewed two of the most important elements of account planning – to learn about more of the keys to effective account planning, visit our newly updated Account Planning topic center.

I'm curious how you qualify and verify expectations with your customers? What works – what doesn't work?