7/26/2024-Strat. planning hurts me bum

Strategic account planning encompasses a lot of details about your work and your customers. But the focus should always be on your buyers, ideas, and resources that support your selling.

You’re one-third into the quarter, so you know how your revenue is tracking for the term.

Whether you’re ahead or behind, it’s time to rely on your strategic account planners to help you hit your quota this quarter.

Every seller on the planet labors over strategic account planning ("…why am I doing this stupid exercise?").

The reason you create account planners is for this exact moment. This is the time in the quarter you need more focus, more insights, and more thoughts about how your actions should align with your goals.

Today, review your account plans and make them focus your attention on these three areas:

1. Who do you need to see to affect rev for the quarter? (…which KDMs need love?)

2. What have you recently learned about your key accounts that differ from what you recorded weeks ago? …how does that affect your next moves on those accounts?

2a. What new ideas can you present to your key target accounts that will yield rev this quarter?

Strategic account plans are tools designed to help you when you’re trending up in a quarter…or trending down.

If you’re lagging in sales this quarter – but working hard to get meetings – don’t go it alone. Get your manager involved. Your manager can help, but will be more receptive and eager to help only after hearing about your exhaustive efforts to get meetings.

Give your manager a quick synopsis of everything you’ve done to break through to your KDMs, and equip them with key knowledge about your buyers that they can use. At the end of the quarter, you’ll want to co-own your prospecting efforts with your manager, especially if you miss your number.

Besides the obvious point above about how your planners can guide you toward efficient prospecting efforts, consider these other elements of how to think strategically about the rest of the quarter:

1. Ideas. No doubt there are details about ideas and solutions for key accounts buried in your planners that might not have received attention. That means it’s time to get together with your solutions team (or whatever you call the peeps who help you design big mouse traps) and get working on something specific for your top prospects.

2. Resources. It’s summer, people are scattered, and they’re distracted too. A review of your account planners most certainly will prompt actions you need to take to mobilize the resources that support the closing months of this year. Don’t let the other sellers on your team monopolize the time of the magicians inside your org whom you need.

Q3 is not done. There’s always something you can do to drive results in the near term, so let those planners lead the way.

Input the words "strategic account planning" into your search box and you will get crapola. (Try it.)

You’ll get lame vids from all sorts of Joes telling you what you know: "…to project accurate revenue, you have to be good at account planning." (HUH?)

Whisper the words "strategic account planning" towards your MySalesDay True North Star, and you’ll get a Short about a dude who packs an outlandish time capsule to be opened in ten years.

…sometimes, you don’t need a video tied to the daily MSD theme! Enjoy. (You will.)