by Jeanne Buchanan
In a time of global competition, rightsizing, and demands for predictable quarterly performance, executive teams cannot afford to waste critical resources, investments, or time. It is imperative to ?manage up? the accurate and timely information needed to make the best decisions. An account review is an ideal vehicle for this communication, and a critical part of effective sales management execution.
A valuable source of perspective for sales leaders, account reviews help you identify both opportunities and sales gaps, assign critical resources, and create investment needs for your sales organization. It can also be an effective communication tool for you to share best practices with your teams, and develop your sales bench through mentoring and coaching.
Why Do Account Reviews?
How are you going to achieve your sales plan? Or more important, can you achieve your plan with the resources you have, directed to the customers you know, with the products and services you have?
If the answer is no, the account review sparks the process to assess gaps and brainstorm options to close them. If the answer is yes, the review can be used to define extraordinary objectives for the individual, the team and the company. A review of a single account (or set of accounts) focuses attention on critical areas of customer relationships, and your company?s ability to add value, to advance both objectives.
Account reviews are also an efficient tool to communicate information to those not directly involved day-to-day in the territory. In this case, you focus on the customer gap assessment, potential changes in the current state that may affect the customer?s planned initiatives, and how you position your company to impact your customer.
- What is the vision for this account?
- What gap is your customer challenged with, and what key initiatives are they undertaking?
- What relationships do you need to be successful, to add value to your customer?
Moving forward with consistent targeted actions results in a tight cycle of value with key customers who bring continued and ever-greater rewards for both parties.
Now let?s take a look at the elements of an effective account review.
Opportunity Assessment
A review of the top opportunities can offer critical insight into your account and your company. It provides perspective to current investment and yield. It tells you what?s working.
Then, it?s on to the pivotal value dialogue with your team to discuss top unforecasted opportunities.
- What is necessary to move these to the next pipeline stages and a win?
- What resources, investments, terms and conditions are needed?
Ideally, the total of forecasted sales opportunities plus the top unforecasted opportunities exceeds your stretch goal. If it doesn?t, you may need to revisit the plan and tweak the objectives.
There are some key questions to answer as you look at each sales opportunity or solution.
- In what ways are your solutions supported by value metrics?
- How are your solutions connected to your customer?s initiatives?
- What other services could you add to these solutions that would make them more compelling and further differentiate your company?
- What can you do to improve the odds of achieving your extraordinary goal?
Relationship Alignment
It is essential that you be aligned with key customers.
- Who are the sponsors for each of your opportunities?the key approver, decision-maker, user and influencers?
- How do they rate your company or solution, and what key message will have the most impact on each of these individuals?
The objective is to create a relationship goal, which is achievable and strong enough to ensure that you have covered the key people.
Your relationship strategy is critical to achieving extraordinary objectives. You need to invest your time to gain maximum leverage in the decision-making process.
- What relationships can you leverage in this situation?
- Have you validated the lines of influence?
A good test of your relationship strategy is to ask, ?Is it strong enough to win??
Leverage Resources
During the account review, you will want to focus on key leverage points. For this to be successful, the sales teams will want to pinpoint the most important customer pains and the competition?s weakest links. This will help you identify critical strengths to highlight in your sales pursuit that demonstrate your company?s differentiation while exposing competitor weaknesses. A well-targeted strategy most effectively uses resources, lowers cost and time spent while increasing your win percentage, which means more dollars to you.
Account Review Outcomes
The account review process is an excellent tool for uncovering information you don?t know or have not validated. It is acceptable to not know some of the critical information?with a little research, you can remedy this. What is not acceptable is to make important decisions lacking good, valid information.
Consistent attention to elements of strong account management, including account reviews, will have significant positive effects on account success. Account reviews work well to assess where your abilities to fulfill the needs of your customers line up. They help you look at complex processes required for strategic customer relationships and demystify them into sustainable, win-win, business-to-business relationships that, if nurtured, will yield extraordinary results.
Jeanne Buchanan
Jeanne Buchanan is a sales and marketing consultant with Critical Path Strategies, Inc. (www.criticalpathstrategies.com), a sales training and consulting company that specializes in sales strategies and sales and sales management training.? The company?s portfolio of services addresses the strategic, organizational, and relationship issues that impact selling performance.
Jeanne?s professional career includes senior management positions in marketing, investor relations, corporate communications and media relations with Fortune 500 companies.? She is the editor of the how-to primer for sales leaders, Building a Successful Selling Organization:? The Critical Path to Extraordinary Results, which illustrates a systematic framework for activating a customer-focused selling organization.
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