“To be prepared is half the victory”
In the sales world, nothing could be more accurate!
An account plan is the blueprint of the sale and the strongest armor for any sales rep. It helps sales teams reach a vantage point to target new accounts and forge stronger relationships with their existing ones. A well-designed account plan combines all the important information: financials, competitors, strategic priorities, and newer developments in the account and industry, forming a robust sales strategy.
Most importantly, a solid account plan highlights unique facts about each account, crucial for sealing the deal. For sales teams, winning new logos has always been the ultimate goal. Backed by years of experience delivering crucial sales intelligence about target accounts, here is how you can build your own bullet-proof account plan.
Building a Bullet-Proof Account Plan
The first step: Truly understand your prospect
Sales teams must research their target accounts to understand their priorities. This helps align the value proposition with the prospect’s priorities. If the sales team is targeting the CFO or the CMO of an enterprise account, they must dig deeper to learn about their priorities both at a business and operational level.
Where should sales teams look for information?
- Company Website: Find information such as headquarters, regional offices, company size, key decision-makers, business strategy, and more. Sales teams should turn valuable information from the company website into deep, actionable insights for ABM campaigns.
- Annual and Quarterly Filings: These reveal financial and strategic information about target accounts. Reviewing past and current filings can help understand the business structure. Transcripts can uncover business challenges and other valuable information from those who are steering target account’s business.
- Executive Interviews: Learn directly from decision-makers about their company, business priorities and sometimes key challenges that they’re facing.
- Press Releases: Reviewing the last 2-3 years can easily guide the direction the company is headed towards.
- News Websites: Sources like BBC, Guardian, Washington Post, and sector-specific portals can provide a lot of insightful information. For instance, sites like Supply Chain Dive, SupplyChain 24/7 exclusively provide supply chain news.
- Research Papers and Industry Reports: Research papers, survey reports, industry research and market research insight providers are other useful sources that a sales team needs to monitor.
Also, get in touch with marketing to understand what they already know about target accounts. Once all the information is gathered, it’s time to convert it into actionable insights. This will help to compare your offering with that of competitors through competitive analysis and unveil cross-selling opportunities for the future.
The second step: Gather all relevant information
With the abundance of information available today, it can be overwhelming. Sales team need to structure everything that they’ve gathered into a digestible chunk of information for effective Account-Based Marketing (ABM). 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: Include information like geographic presence, revenue size, date of incorporation, operating areas, employee size, key competitors, acquisitions and divestitures, and key decision-makers.
- Industry Overview: Understand key trends and major undertakings in the target account’s sector. Sales team can identify major players, challenges, and opportunities in the industry.
- Business Priorities: List strategic business priorities including a SWOT analysis of the target account.
- Business Challenges: Identify both internal and external factors affecting the target account, focusing on problems that could potentially be solved through the application of technology.
- Strategic Development Areas: Identify new avenues for growth.
- Case Studies: 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 this from our experience working with a billion-dollar global supply chain company. We collaborated with the supply chain company’s marketing team to build a detailed account plan for 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 conducted 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. Our 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 for optimal sales enablement. The supply chain company closed 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 must set milestones for them to achieve regularly. Companies are building account plans because of the tangible results they bring. Since an account plan is a living document, it must be flexible enough to comply with the target account’s strategic priorities and ensure continuous sales alignment.