5. Five Keys to Effective Account Planning

There are five components of account planning that really make a difference in terms of getting results. The first one is having the right structure. And it's not just about the table of contents of what's in the account plan. It's about that. But it's also about how we structure the account planning process, how the organization plays together. Part two is setting the goal. And setting a goal is about not just the overall goal for the account, but the overall goals for how we're going to do things week to week. It's our milestones along the way. Then we want to create the right habits. So once we create the account plan, it's not going to go in a file cabinet and show up again next year and we'll wonder, did we actually do anything with it? We want the habits along the way of building accountability, building process and checking our progress, coaching our team to make sure we're doing the right things. We want to understand the politics. Whenever we bring an organization together to do account planning, we're pulling together different functions in different groups of the organization. That's going to create politics, it's going to create stress and a little bit of tension. So we need to navigate those politics. And then finally, amid all of this, we need to think big. We can't think incrementally about, I'm going to grow the account 5% next year or 10%. We need to put an audacious goal out there, something that scares us a little bit, and then set that as the vision for the account. So thinking big is a huge key to success with growing the account over time.