3/29/2025-Q2 account planning (YAY)

While it may feel like you have hundreds of things to take care of each week in your role, understand that strategically chasing revenue beats fiddling around in your inbox any day.

"Strategic account planning" should not be intimidating. As Terence’s quote suggests, the process can be simple: assess the issue and figure out how to solve it.

For example, how will you grow Acme Inc. by 20% in Q2?

Your answer is your strategic plan.

The hardest part about account planning is finding time to work on ’em. But once you sequester yourself and think about the challenges of your top accounts, the answers and creative ideas flow naturally.

Q1 is done! Let it go. This weekend, work on your Q2 plan. Keep it simple by translating your strategy into tactics.

Focus your approach on these two areas:

1. Obstacles: Itemize the hurdles you must overcome to move forward on each account. How are you going to tackle them?

2. People: Who do you need to meet with? (Isn’t it interesting how everything comes back to prospecting!?)

An hour of quiet thought this weekend might bring answers and insights to your Q2 plan that you can’t get during the hectic workweek.

Strategic account planning is a dynamic process that should get your attention weekly, not just at the end of every quarter.

If you buy the premise that your best thinking comes out of you when you can sit and think and repeat that process with frequency, then you’ve just seen the light about the keys to figuring out complex issues.

Every day, you’re pushed and pulled in numerous directions, but that work is not as fun as when you can thoughtfully think about each key account from a bird’s eye.

Like anything and everything in the sales game, you must be disciplined and committed to strategic account planning just as you are to prospecting, growing your skills, and all the other issues you must attend to regularly.

And while those other things seem to add up to 89 hours a week, understand that strategically chasing revenue beats fiddling around in your inbox any day.

In this funny YT Short, Key and Peele prove that planning a bank heist is easy…just like account planning.

As you’ll see in the skit, they need help with their planning… and their DOing.

Planning is important. Planning plus execution are better.