Sales departments with effective account planning strategies have 15 percent greater win rates and 14 percent more quota attainment than businesses without, according to CSO Insights.
Account planning is a strategy that’s rooted in the working relationships reps have. These links are important for salespeople to have with stakeholders at client companies, but they’re also essential ties between reps and employees on other teams within their own org, working together on behalf of customers.
Katie Gallo and Alicia Felicelli, experienced account professionals, said it’s important to develop relationships with a small handful of key decision-makers at client companies, who can be split across multiple departments. Then, they identify the high-level business-goals that unify this cross-departmental team of decision-makers.
Once a plan of action is set, account managers need to collaborate with internal stakeholders across product, finance, customer success, marketing and engineering. Teamwork creates wins not only for clients and sales teams, but also for internal product development.
Though client stakeholders have goals for their respective teams, Gallo said account planners should focus on their larger cross-departmental goals. Acting on strategic business goals rather than team-specific ones helps maintain customer and vendor alignment.
How do you work with the client and their stakeholders to create an account plan that helps them meet their goals?
I have found one of the most important things to do is to ensure alignment. We often find key stakeholders across various departments within an organization. While these departments may have different deliverables, day-to-day tasks and KPIs, they almost always have one to three company-wide goals they are all working toward. If the main goals are always kept in mind when developing project plans or account initiatives, it’s hard to veer from the road to mutual success.
We often find key stakeholders across various departments within an organization.”
How do you leverage the unique perspectives of stakeholders to create an account plan that supports your business and the client’s?
I am the liaison between my client and the rest of the Syndigo organization. For example, when working with operations, we focus on ensuring that the content created by Syndigo and our many manufacturer clients meets the unique needs of each retail recipient, and is delivered as expected. Additionally, the product team constantly takes client feedback and technology wish-lists and turns them into reality, while also providing perspective on what else our company and the clients should be thinking about. These are two of many examples of setting everyone up for success by building relationships with clients and cross-functionally within an organization.
Share a brief success story from this type of collaborative account planning.
A client I work with has a company-wide goal to grow their e-commerce platforms in the quantity as well as quality of product content. We work with at least three different teams at this company, and our people serve different roles, but we are all working toward the main goal.
New technology needed to be implemented to support the growth of e-commerce content. So the dedicated program manager and I brought in and collaborated with folks from our taxonomy, product, delivery and software engineering teams to align our work to the technology that the client needed. We’re executing on a plan to better support a key client and assist in helping them achieve one of their main goals for this year.
Felicelli’s team needed to collaborate with Evive’s product and services teams to create a new product integration that a client requested. The result? A feature that not only met the customer’s goals and improved their relationship, but also created value that other customers could take advantage of as well.
How do you work with the client and their stakeholders to create an account plan that helps them meet their goals?
Our customers’ strategic goals can be broken down into two main themes: cost containment and employee experience. Before creating a cohesive plan for the year, we engage in an open dialogue with our customers regarding a number of strategies that can support whichever of those two goals they’re prioritizing. These conversations are held with a variety of stakeholders; they include the customer’s key decision-makers who are accountable for their organization’s goals and the functional stakeholders who will partner with us to drive the supporting tactics. Once aligned on supporting strategies, our account team then brainstorms and develops the appropriate tactics to achieve those goals.
The account team closely aligned with our business intelligence group.”
How do you leverage the unique perspectives of stakeholders to create an account plan that supports your business and the client’s?
Our account team works closely with customer success to ensure our efforts are supporting customers’ goals. Our professional services team ensures day-to-day delivery is effectively meeting customer expectations, while the product team makes sure that the business needs of our customers are incorporated into the evolution of our solutions. And the account team closely aligned with our business intelligence group who provides unique insights into the effectiveness of our account plan in support of customer goals.
Share a brief success story from this type of collaborative account planning.
We specialize in using data to create a personalized benefits experience for each user. During a recent strategic planning session, one of our customers expressed interest in expanding upon our financial integrations in order to engage new audiences. In partnership with our product and services teams, we developed an enhancement to support these integrations and allow for new types of data to be accessible within our solution. This initiative resulted in an improved employee experience and amplified support of the customer’s strategic goals. It also produced a new feature for us to deploy to all customers, allowing them to holistically support their populations.
