Aspirational Account Planning

Well, hey, Michelle.

Hey, Mark.

How's it going? I'm doing good. How are you doing today?

Pretty excited about today.

I know it's a happy Friday and we're going to talk about a happy topic, which is account planning.

I don't know if I'd say that, but we are going to have a really interesting discussion. We are actually talking about. We're going to be really getting down into chapter six. Mark wrote a book for those of you that don't know, on essential account planning. And we're going to talk about aspirational account planning today, aren't we, Mark?

The words aspirational and account planning, they don't usually go together. I usually see like, you know, we talk about account planning in a meeting. You see like these involuntary visceral reactions, flinches, runs, but you don't hear anybody go, hey, that's aspirational.

Do you know how bad it is when we go, you know, we're going in to do aspirational account planning and strategic account planning. And we, and we're meeting with 60, 80 people on the overview. And I gotta tell you something, there's a lot of change management that we gotta go through as we head into those meetings.

I think it's actually like psychology. We just have to like unprogram them from all the account planning incidents that they've had before. And you know what I'm talking about today.

I've had a lot of them. But today is gonna be really great because we're gonna be really getting into how you can look at your accounts very differently. And just a little bit about us at Sales Globe. We are a problem solving firm for sales and what we do is solve the biggest challenges that companies have. And you see, we've written a few books. We've got the innovative sale essential account planning, what your CEO needs to know about sales compensation, and a book on quotas. So today is going to be very engaging. And what do you say, Mark? Let's get into it.

Let's do it. So as you know, we've got the rolling whiteboards all around here at the studio studio and we're thinking about the future of sales. Michelle Post Covid future of sales and what the big drivers are. And as we've been looking at this, gosh, over the past year almost now, we put together 25 predictions for 2021. And this is going to be talking about one of those predictions, which is we had number 11, we had the word strategic, but we replaced it with aspirational, aspirational account Planning will become more important and more intentional as we move ahead. Because this is an environment where you just can't do the same thing. We've got a completely new world. We've got customers that need help, and your best customers are the ones that probably need your help the most. So it's going to become more intentional rather than just kind of repeating what we've always done.

Yeah.

So we're going to get into it and we're going to be talking about the what's going on with aspirational account planning. And Michelle, I'm not a mind reader, but I can kind of tell that you're thinking something here.

How do you know what I'm thinking, Mark?

It's on the slide.

Oh, well, what I expect is that everyone is thinking, what is aspirational account playing? So let's back up and just talk a little bit about that, Mark.

Good. All right. So we had a session, Gosh, it was a few weeks ago, Michelle. And I was thinking about this and it was about account planning. Was a large group of account leaders and they had a certain expectation. They were waiting for the new tool.

Yeah, this was really interesting call that we were on, Mark. I remember that. And I'm thinking they think it's about a tool.

Yeah, yeah. In a structure. They're like, you know, well, our blue sheets and our gold sheets, you know that that works out just fine. We don't need another tool.

And we're like to automate them more than they are.

It's not about a tool. So they were looking for a tool. They were looking for a structure, looking for some process to go through. And what they wanted to do was do what they always do, which is they want to do a recap of history. And they were going to then just kind of project that incrementally forward, but it was about none of those things. And so I think at the end of the session they were like, oh, there was no tool here. This was. This wasn't about a tool at all.

But then we had a follow up call. Right. Remember we talked to the sales leadership and then we talked about it and we're like, guys, this is about a new way of thinking. And wow, this just changed the entire conversation, didn't it?

Yeah. So if you tuned in for a tool, there's no tool here. But if you tuned in for something new, there's something new here. So you're right. It's a way of thinking. So, Michelle, you're, you know, you're the chief cheese mover. Here. And the big thinker. And you know, this is a lot about what you do. Chief Cheese.

Okay with that?

Okay. Yes. Ccm. Yeah. So. So. But it's about thinking big with your customer and thinking big about what you want for your future. And if that doesn't sound like account planning, then that's good because this is a very different approach. And so you can take this and you can put it in any tool you want. You can put in any, any sheets that you want. It doesn't matter. But what we want you to do is to develop some new ways of thinking about your accounts and ways of working with your accounts. So that. That in itself is a big change.

Yeah. And I think so. Point one is going to be of a high level of interest to a lot of sales management leaders out there. And point two, it should be very exciting for all of you that are selling today.

So what is it? What does it look like? Well, here's a little drawing, Michelle. And this probably describes it best. And we were doing interviews for the book Ask Some Essential Account Planning. And there's a chapter on aspirational account planning called Thinking Big. And I was interviewing a fellow, an executive named Glenn. I won't name his last name, but Glenn and Glenn. And I think you're probably on right now. Glenn. Glenn helped really articulate this way of thinking. And he said something really great. He said, as people are looking at account planning, they're looking at their quota, they're looking at their goal, and they kind of see that, and that becomes a wall to their thinking, Right. So they're just thinking about, what can we do next year? And he said, what you have to do is you have to create an aspiration. You have to create something that's much bigger and much further out about what they could ultimately do with the account. You've got to set a vision, right? And when you can set an aspiration or a vision and you can set a time frame, right, Then you create a trajectory. So what that means is that we create that. That line that's going up there, and we know what we have to do at certain points in time to get there. So that was kind of really, I think, thought changing in terms of how you can look at account planning. So that's what this is about, which is changing the way you think. And we're going to talk about some design thinking methods here in a few minutes that will help you with that as well. But it's about ideation around new growth. It's about changing the customer's perception of you and again, changing that trajectory.

Okay, so we're going to talk about three different things we're expecting, which would be setting a vision and then this whole idea of ideation, what that really means, and then changing your customer's perception of you.

Right, okay. Yeah. And that's a big deal, changing how the customer thinks about you. Because in the places where we see this work best, you've made a significant, almost paradigm shift in the way the customer works with you. So I want to. I want to kind of reflect back on it in a minute. Do you.

I just got cold.

Do you see where we are, Michelle?

Yeah.

We're in Iceland.

We're in Iceland.

We're Iceland. We're on the southern coast of Iceland. This is Skogafoss here. And this, like, waterfalls all over Iceland. They're just amazing. They're everywhere. And there's volcanoes, there's all sorts of cool stuff there. But this is what everybody sees when they come to Skogafoss. All the tourists. There are hundreds of them. Not thousands, but hundreds, because there's not that many people. And they're all in the parking lot back here. You can't see them, actually, in the parking lot over there. You can't see them. But they come in, they drive in in their little. Their little cars and. And they get out and they go, oh, very nice. They take pictures and. And then they get off, and then they drive off to, like, the hot springs or something. And you know what? This is all they see. This is all they see is they go, wow, look at that waterfall. But what they don't see is that if you can get on top of that waterfall, what you would see if you were up there and how the perspective would be completely different. And a very small percentage of people actually do that. And you can see here when you climb all the way up, you can see that you've got Skogafoss. There's the waterfall right there. You've got the glacier right here. If you turn around and you look in the other direction, you can see the snow fields and the glacier up there where all this water is coming from. And it's absolutely incredible. And then out here behind you, Michelle, you can see the. The town of Vik on the coast. And then you've got the volcanic coast out here. And out there, it's like all volcanic beaches. And there's this place you can walk for about 40 minutes straight out to the ocean. And there's that DC3 that crashed there years ago. Then they Put on that Justin Bieber album cover, has daughters. Right? And there's my daughter unit right there. But you see the world completely differently up there. And you realize, wow, this is something that very few people do, a very small percentage of people do. But it gives you a totally different perspective. That's what we want to do with our accounts. We want to get to that point where we have a totally different perspective on those accounts.

Think about then, I guess looking at that waterfall is your quota, like what you think you can do. But if you want to really see what the opportunities look like, get a bit aspirationally, you can see so much more, right?

Yeah. But you got to. You got to. You got to be able to see that, the vision to get there. Right. You got to be able to have the motivation to get there. So.

Well, now, I'm guessing if we talk about what it is that people are thinking, why? So people watching us say, why aspirational account planning?

And that's probably the best question, right? Why would you want to do this? Why wouldn't I want to go through the same rote process every year? Why wouldn't I want to put my account plan in the file cabinet at the end of account planning season every year? Why wouldn't I want to get in front of the executive team and present something that I really don't believe in and get beat up for it? I mean, why wouldn't I just want to keep doing that? Right. There's a why about aspirational account planning that you got to really ask yourself. Right? And so if you take a look at the big idea here, like we said before, Michelle in Covid, especially, your best customers need thought partners. They need you to help them think through what's going on right now. And these are the customers that have the best opportunities for growth for you. It's not just about going out and getting new customers, but it's understanding your customers better. And we had that, that phrase we were talking about months ago, start helping and stop selling. Right. So how do you help your customer?

That's right. So even though that started right. With COVID we're like, guys, you need to really. Just because people weren't buying, right. You need to start helping. That's something that we've been telling and consulting with our own customers with for years. And this is really one way to do that. Right? Yeah.

So I think you got to start by getting real. You got to have a CTJ meeting for people who don't know what that means. You can look it up. But you got to have a CTJ meeting with. With yourself about what's holding you back. And we've heard this from some clients recently. They go, well, we're kind of in this incremental growth mode with our customer. They see us as a vendor, right? Yeah, we're a partner to them, but they see us as a vendor.

We've been commoditized.

We've been commoditized, Right. And so we kind of have limited thinking and limited vision, and we're stuck in operations, and we're in a cycle of rebidding. In fact, they keep asking us to bid and bid against ourselves and others to keep, then lowering our price and keep the business. And so we're kind of going in the other direction. So if we do any growth at all, it's kind of a miracle. So we're kind of stuck in this funk. And it's like that frog in the gradually boiling water. It's kind of comfortable for a while, maybe for a long time, but before you know it, it's a rolling boil and things aren't good. So we're kind of get comfortable in the place that we're in with all the stuff that we deal with. And, yeah, I can go through this because I make a decent living. But you got to ask yourself, what do you really want to do? And that's where the aspiration part comes in, Michelle, is what do you really want to do? Looking ahead?

Talk to me about that. Right. So do we know where people are? And we deal with this every single day. It's like, I've been commoditized. You know the product. I am the vendor. And we're like, you don't have to be the vendor. So how do we really get ourselves to just start changing our mindset?

Yeah, Well, I think this comes with. And for me, always in the past, it's come with frustration, Michelle.

Oh, and that mean my frustration with.

You is like, okay, frustration, because if this is good enough for you, you probably just want to continue to go ahead and do that. But you got to ask yourself, what is it that excites you when you think about ahead in the future? What excites you not just for your account, but for what you want to do personally? What excites you for your career? What excites you if you could actually do some significant things with your account, but then it wasn't a fluke, you were able to do it again and again in other accounts, what kind of difference could that make in your life or the life of your team and the kind of things that you'd be able to do, right? The kind of money you'd be able to make, but the satisfaction that you have, the flexibility and the freedom you have, there are a lot of things that come from the other side. And so I think what a lot of people get caught up in is this Limits piece here, where we know what we know, and we're comfortable with what we know, and change scares us, right? So I'd rather just go along with the funk that I'm in and the funk that I know than to go with the unknown change and put myself out there. So what this requires you to do is think differently about what you want to do in the future, translate that to your team, to your accounts, how you could do something for them. And then you want to understand, like we said before, with the point about Glenn, when do you want to do that? Is it three years from now? Is it five years from now? And when you set that. That aspiration and you set that time frame, you create the trajectory, and you create this piece on the bottom, which is critical, which is healthy frustration, right?

Yes.

You got to feel healthy frustration. You got to feel a little scared and a little concerned when you set that aspiration. And if you don't, it means you really haven't set a real aspiration. So you got to put it out there and go, I'm not comfortable with this. I don't know if we could do this. I'm putting myself at risk. And then you got to get to a point where you say, you know what? Why am I still doing what I'm doing? How long is it going to take me to get there? And it starts to build some urgency. So you got to feel that tension point, right? And this does not sound like account planning. I know it does. But this is the root of where you have to start in order to start to get your head together, to be able to do this differently, because the customer who's sitting there on the other side looking at you needs to see something different.

Okay, so this is a really interesting idea that you're putting before everyone right now, Mark, what you're saying is, in order to grow my accounts, it's not just all about growing my accounts and growing the revenue in the account. What you're saying is what excites me professionally with this account and just with my profession. So what is it that I want to achieve? Right? How is it that. When do I want all this to happen? What could it really look like, and then I think you're probably going to get a little bit more into this healthy frustration, too.

Yeah. And I'll give you an example. Right. And the example is an account that we worked with a couple years ago. It was a technology company, and they were working with one of the major telcos in the US One of the very big ones. And every year, they did about $40 million a year with them. Right. And that was about all they did. And they were in certain places. Right?

Yeah.

And after a point of frustration, the company got rid of the account manager because they're like, we know we got to be doing more there than what's there. Right. They brought in a new account manager. First thing the new account manager does is she goes and she sits down and she talks to the lead person at this telco, who was, like, above everybody in terms of the buying process. And they were doing $40 million a year. And she said that the buyer said, well, you know, you really need to be doing at least, like, $200 million a year with us in order to be a partner.

Wow.

And they're. And they're doing $40 million a year, and they think they're knocking it out of the park. They know they're not. Right. It's like they're bench pressing 110 in the basement, and they think they're knocking out of the park, but they're not. Right. And they don't realize what's up there. They don't realize what's at the top of the falls. They don't realize the headroom that's up there, because they're limited by their own thinking. Right. So the point is, you've got to get your head there so that when you go in front of your customer, after you do this aspirational work that we're going to talk about, and you're able to say, you know, we want to do $100 million with you, that you've got something to back it up. And they can see you in a different way. That's critical. So you got to get your head right before you do this.

Okay, that sounds exciting.

We got our head right there.

Yep.

All right. Got our head right. All right.

I think we do. So we just talked about what it is, and then we talked about why. Now let's talk about. Everybody should be asking themselves how we do this thing.

How do I do this?

Yeah, how we do this? And Mark is going to take us through seven different steps. Three steps we're going to go through in detail. But it just. It's not really all that hard, is it, Mark? Oh, no, it's just a mindset change.

All right, so let's take a look at the blueprint here. So first thing you want to do is you want to start to look at the thing, you know, probably everybody does, is you get the team together and you start talking about the account. So what are our insights and our beliefs as a team? So we're going to be looking at ourselves and Michelle, everybody gets together and they all talk and they talk about, well, you know, here's the history of the account. We've had this kind of growth. Here's the profitability. They kind of lay it out, you know, and about halfway through the meeting, and then they start talking about what they might be able to do, and they start talking in incremental ways. Right. What we want to do is you want to change the questioning around a little bit differently here. So we want to start talking about how your team thinks the customer would describe your value. Yeah. Okay, so if we went to the customer, what would they say about us in terms of what value we provide? Well, on time, delivery, quality, cost, blah, blah, blah. The things that we might provide in terms of value. And you'll find out that some of those are going to be blah, blah, blah. Right. But you got to lay those out. How would you quantify that value? That's kind of hard. Okay, well, how do I quantify that? I don't know. How do I quantify on time, delivery? So what's the value that we're going to bring to them? We need to define value. So is it revenue? Is it cost reduction? Is there something else in terms of value that we're providing to them that we could quantify? So we needed to go through this exercise to understand what. Because we're going to ask them that question. To them, that's kind of leading ahead.

So what you're saying is the first thing you want to do is as a team, that account management team on the account owner, I got my team, we want to say, okay, and I would think you'd want your leader in there. Anybody that's creating that vision for your company. What do we think? Why does our customer. To do business with us. Right. Another way of saying that, what value do we offer to the customer? You're going to have to define what value means, whether it's roi, whatever that looks like. And then what's that last part right there?

Where do we want to be? Where do we want to be in three to five years with that customer. Okay, so what's our big vision for what we could do for them? So what we've done is we kind of set the table here for our own understanding of what's going on. But it's really important because it's going to allow us then to have something to match that up to. Right. So then we go to our second step here, which is we're going to do what most. We're going to go where no man has gone before. Most people. We were writing the book Essential account planning. What we found is most people don't go to their customers. Most people don't engage their customers. Account planning, I remember talking to in the interviews, and they're like, oh, no, no, no, we don't do that. We, you know, we know enough about the. We hear that one. We know enough about the customer. We have enough insight, we have enough intelligence. We had a survey that we did, and that survey informed us of what we're going to do, but they don't go to the customer. Okay, so most teams will jump from step number one to further in the process that we'll talk about in a couple of minutes here of writing the account plan. But this is the critical piece because first thing we need to do is we need to figure out who we're going to talk to at the customer. Yeah.

How do you do that, Mark? So if I'm selling something and I've got my buyer, like when we think about. I mean, the first thing that I'm thinking about is if I'm trying to show the value to that company, it might not just be to the person who's buying my product or service.

Right? Yeah. You got to look at what the value chain is. So you've got to look at not just procurement, but you've got to look at what you're selling and what value that provides to whom in the account. So it might be that what you're selling provides value to whom. Marketing, to operations, to finance. These may be people that you never talked to before. So your first task is going to be to identify who they are and then be able to get to them to have some of those conversations. And those conversations are going to start with what their goals are. And everybody goes, oh, yeah, that's. We always ask them about what their goals are. Okay, well, that's a starting point to understand what their priorities are. And you're going to know some of this before you go in because you're going to do your homework. You're going to do your research. And you could probably find out stuff. We do this all the time with clients. We'll start with the account planning and we'll do the third party research and we'll come to them with stuff that's available publicly and they'll go, whoa, we didn't know that.

You just told everybody what our secret is anyway.

Well, if that's the secret, okay, so we want to understand their goals. Okay, so now we're going to do something that, that nobody ever does. We're going to, we're going to ask what their story is. What's their story? That's a little woo woo. That's a little squishy. Yeah. What's their story? So why do you have these goals? How did you get to where you are? Who was involved? When did it happen? What was all behind this? What were the pitfalls? What were the issues that you ran into? And nobody asked to understand the story, but the story is what's going to give us some hints about what we can do for them. And so for everybody that we do workshops with and we get into the story section of the workshop, everybody's like, what I know, especially like if they're in the sports industry or something, it's like, I don't do stories. That's for sissies, right? And then when they walk out of the room, they don't walk out of the room to the end of the session, but when they walk out of the room, eventually, then they're like, man, I learned stuff that I never knew before. And their bosses, their sales managers are saying, how come I didn't know this before about the account? You never told me this. And it's because they never understood the, the story, right? So that's a critical piece, the story. And then you want to understand their aspirations. Where do they want to go ultimately? What are their aspirations? And then here's the point of pain, Michelle, we're going to ask them the last question, which is, what is our value as a partner to you in reaching your aspirations? And they're going to have probably problems with two words. One is value and the other is partner. And so they may not see you as a partner, they may see you as a vendor. And value, you know, where you go, well, it was price, it's quality, et cetera. You may hear different things or you may hear none of those things. So what you're going to run into is a gap, probably most likely a gap, a big gap. And so that's going to be valuable, right?

That can be painful.

So, yeah, right here, if you just did this, you would be a big step ahead of doing these things. And it's not just talking to the customer, doing a survey, but it's. He's asking these specific questions and helping them in understanding how they see your value and how they can quantify your value.

You know, Mark, you just brought up a really great point. And I'd like to bring up an example of where I saw this work really well. So we were consulting with one of the largest and leading in the market, I might say, financial services companies in the United States. And I had the privilege of attending a show with them, like a big convention. And in that. In that industry. And what they did was they did account planning right there, really, with their clients. But their clients were big investment companies, big financial companies, and they brought them in, and there were like six, seven people from the. From the one that was selling the product. Right. That they brought all these people in to talk to their customers. Customer. The customer had their three people there on average, and they started to say to them, so tell us how your year has been. What have your challenges been? We know this has impacted, oh, real estate. I'll just make up that one. You know, how has that impacted your business? And what can we do together, you know, to help you with. With where you want to go to next? So it was very different. There was no survey. It was very personal. It was shaking hands. It was having coffee. It was really. It was a real nice work session at its best.

Yeah. Making that connection.

Yeah.

Right. So we've done that groundwork.

Yes.

And now we're going to start to get aspirational.

All right. So the first step took us through the second step. Now, what's this all about?

Yeah, so what we're doing is we're taking our own understanding. We're matching that up to what the customer is saying. And then we're going back and we're starting to look at our aspirations, ways that we can put ideas together. We usually start with a design session to do this. But the important part is this is not a meeting. This is a process. Because what you're going to do is you're going to engage and involve the customer in this as you start to get your thinking together. So we are not going to do the account plan to them. We are going to do the account plan for them and with them. Right. So that's a big step right there. So a few things we want to understand as we're doing this aspirational Thinking I want to talk about what are the challenges behind the aspirations that the customer has and the story. So we want to kind of recap. Recount what we learned there. So identifying their challenges, their problem statements, and the story behind that. And then we want to create this thing called a solution vision. And we'll simplify that right here. We want to create a solution vision for the customer in each of these areas.

And a solution vision is.

Solution vision is just simply what would great look like that's so simple.

So solution vision. People kind of get hung up on some of the words, but we're just saying what great looks like for your customers.

Yeah. So think about it very simply. You got all the pain and the suffering and the story of how they got there and what they're trying to solve for. And then you've got kind of the sunshine in the meadow, like the solution vision. Like, what would it look like? You know, what would great look like out in the future?

Yeah, right. Yeah, I know that when we.

Pain and pleasure. Right. Yeah. So we want to know what happened, and we want to start to come up with a great vision for where they want to go. And then from that, we want to start to put together some potential ideas. We'll talk about that in just a second. And we want to do this thing called a pipeline build. So we're going to come into putting together the math behind what attaches to each of those areas in terms of the value of those opportunities.

Okay, so hold up three things that you talked about. One, you're going to take the internal view, Right. So it's. It's kind of like internally we're getting some insights. What we believe the value is to the customer, what we believe that they value, what we believe the opportunity looks like. We're going to ask them to do some business insights to what's going on maybe in the economy that may be impacting them. Then, number two, we're going to our customer armed with our information, but then we're going to get the feedback from them on what's important to them. Their pain points, their challenges, opportunities, and what they think of us and that relationship. Right. And then thirdly, we're going to put together this plan based on all that information we have, and we're going to engage the customer and kind of go through with them what we think, what we believe. Yeah.

Yep.

Okay.

So when we're going to start coming back to the customer is after we start to get some of these ideas together. So we're going to do you know, a lot of the stuff in the back room, putting our ideas together, there's going to be a lot of gnashing of teeth, fisticuffs. Things are going to happen. Right. That is fun.

I wish it would be fun. Yeah.

All right, so I want to dive a little bit deeper, Michelle, into what we actually do here. And some people have seen this idea before. It's called sales design thinking. But basically it's a problem solving methodology. It's just a few steps. And what we're trying to do are the things that we just talked about here. And we'll apply it to a situation here in a second. But first of all, we want to start with a problem statement in step number one, which is, what's your problem? The customer's telling us what the problem is. Right. And we want to then understand the story, and we want to then redefine the challenge question. So what that means, basically, is a lot of times when the customer tells you something, tells you it's a challenge, that's not really the thing they're trying to solve for. That's the surface level issue. Like, we want to reduce production waste. Right. That's not the real challenge they're trying to solve for. They want to. But there's stuff behind it. There may be drivers behind that. There may be root causes. So what we want to do is we want to define a better challenge question. So if we just stop right there with the customer and came up with a better question or a better challenge to solve for, we would probably be differentiated from the competition because they're trying to solve the problem statement.

Yeah.

And we're trying to solve something that's behind that. Something that's more evolved. Right.

Okay, so then what's next?

And that's where we then create the solution vision. So we say, okay, we got this challenge, we know the story, and then we're creating the solution vision for where we want to go, and. And we start to do some divergent thinking. So let's go ahead and apply this to this particular situation. And this is looking at reducing production waste.

Yeah. So this is a client, actually, that I worked with not that long ago, and they manufacture packaging for the beauty products industry. I gotta tell you something, just a side note, Mark. Every female in the office wanted to be part of this because we were dealing with all the big beauty brands, and it was pretty incredible. So anyway, we had a lot of fun. I learned all about K Beauty. Anybody wants to know anything about that stuff, just let me know. But their Challenge was they were dealing with a manufacturer. One of, you know, they, like I said, they sell this packaging products. And one of the companies, the beauty companies, a big, large beauty brand that started manufacturing in the US because there was a desire and a need to bring some production back to the US because people can understand more about the controls around the product, how it was made, was there animal testing involved? Those things are really important. The manufacturing facility was in the state of California. What they didn't anticipate were how the laws were going to change so greatly. Federal regulations were changing and state regulations, excuse me, in that state, and they needed to reduce their production waste. And actually what they said was, our carbon footprint, it's bigger than it should be. So we need some help. And we believe that it's in production waste.

Right. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to understand what is that? What does that mean?

What does that mean?

We're redefining that challenge question. We're understanding how they got there. So they had the state of California issue. And there are probably a lot of other things in that story that led to that need. Right. And why those things happened. And we're redefining that. So we're saying, okay, we're trying to sell for production waste reduction, but what's really behind that, what other things are, are X, Y and Z. So we're trying to come out with those ideas and then we want to identify what would great look like. Right. In terms of that. So as we're getting into the thinking, the horizontal thinking, the divergent thinking of ideas, we're going to be bringing up variables like what is production waste? Is it materials? Is it labor? Is it the production process itself or part of the production process? Is it in certain plants? Does it have to do with. With how the machines are operating? So there are a lot of things that we're going to start to explore here. And what we're doing, we're not going to go deep on design thinking here, but we're putting idea combinations together.

Yes.

And that's where the range of ideas are going to come from.

Yeah. So in this situation, you want me to tell them a little bit about what happened? Well, what happened in this situation? You've got a company that sells materials, right. They sell this packaging materials to a large beauty company that's going to stamp it with, oh, call it Chanel or maybe it's l' Oreal product. And they're saying, we've got this production waste. Well, when the team really Went through and understood and they visited the facility, even said, okay, well all right, how do we design this? What do we do a little bit differently? One of the things that this company realized is that they did have a lot of inefficiencies in how they were creating this packaging, how they were putting it together to begin with. And you've got a world class manufacturer that, that discovered this issue and they actually did partner with them on how they could improve the efficiency, the capacity, which actually reduced the carbon footprint right there alone. Now that wasn't the only thing, but that certainly was very different than changing the product that they were selling to them.

And by changing capacity they're changing their cost structure.

Correct.

Which changes profitability.

Yeah, changed a lot.

Perhaps speed to market for them. Right. So a lot of connecting points here. So, so we're not solving for one thing. So where this starts to then get nuts and bolts is we want to start to put together these opportunities and start to look at what are the opportunities that we can start to come back to the customer with. Yes, and the way we're going to do this is we're thinking about account planning is there's another variable we can play with, especially with, specifically with account planning, which is how we create those opportunities. So a lot of times we think of, well, we're going to work with the customer directly, we're going to sell them something directly. What we can do is we can start to look at other variables like, well, how do we work with the customer to co invest in something? So depending on your business, you might be talking about, well, we're going to co invest with you to develop a new capability, to develop a new plant, to develop something that maybe you don't have, but we're going to put something in it in the interest of a long term relationship. Okay, so when you're putting these big aspirational ideas out there, they're just not aspirations to sell you more stuff, Mr. Customer, they're aspirations to help you and we're going to put something up to be able to help you. So right there that changes when you start to change that variable, that changes ideas that you're going to come out with. And the other one, Michelle, I've seen work really well, which is partnering with others. So again, one of the best examples I can think of is a well known social media company in California and you would know the name because you probably use it as a search engine today. But that was the customer. We're working with a technology company that sells to them and provides to them. And we're doing our pipeline build and we're starting to look at, well, how could we potentially pull off some of these ideas? Well, we don't have the capabilities to do that. We can't invest to make those, those. Those kind of capabilities. But we know that the big four is doing things like this. Right. And so they partner with one of the big four, who's actually a competitor of theirs, to be able to provide this capability to that big search engine company. And it created a totally new opportunity. So it was, you know, coopetition. Right. So they're, they're getting together and they're working with a competitor. And, and so it's that kind of creative thinking where you start to put components together. So in the design thinking, you're putting different idea components together. And in here you're saying, okay, well, how could we do that ourselves? How can we do that with the customer? How can we do that with somebody else? That's just, you know, three variables we can look at.

Yeah, it's just a totally different way of thinking, isn't it? And yet what we're finding as we bring this idea to our customers, as they're, as they're doing their own account planning, we're finding that they have opportunities to partner that they didn't expect were available to them before.

Yep. Okay, so you got a few pieces to play with there. So then you bring it back and you say, okay, what does this mean in terms of what we're going to be trying to accomplish? And so this is an aspirational goal build, and this is a fun, yet frustrating, yet fun again exercise. Right. And so what you're doing is as we're doing this thinking with the team, and again, this can happen in a session or over a period of a couple of sessions. You're starting with your revenue goal, because we've got that goal that we've probably been given for the account where we can even estimate what we think the goal is going to be. In this particular case, the goal was $43 million. They had a certain amount of reoccurring revenue and revenue that was already booked. So they had new revenue, needed about $29 million. So they had to find $29 million of new revenue. That's easy, right? So then he said, well, what we're going to do is we're not just going to find 29 million, we're going to find two and a half times that 29 million. And you hear that old adage about you know, three times, two and a half. Three times what. What you need in the pipeline? Well, we're going to start the year out this way. So we're not just going to wait for the salesperson to figure it out, and they'll have a paltry pipeline all year. We're going to start strong with these ideas, and we're going to bring them to the client, to the customer, so they already know about them ahead of time. So $73 million of opportunities, right? We got to find 73 million. And. And everybody in the room's like, okay, all right. How are we going to do this? Okay, so what happens first is you flush the lines. So everybody's got those opportunities they've been thinking about. There's that one thing I told you guys about. You didn't listen to me. We could do that. Okay? This thing Jerry did when he was over whatever company. And so everybody's fleshing the lines of all those bad ideas or good ideas that nobody's heard of before or everybody's heard of before. And we're getting those all out. And so what happens is you get about a third of the way down the list, and the room gets quiet. And then it's like, okay, that's when the real ideation starts. And you start going back to those components we just talked about and start saying, okay, let's go back to each of these problems. Take one at a time. Let's go back to these combinations. And what we're going to do is we're going to play a game. We don't want to see anything that's less than, say, $5 million in terms of an opportunity. And we start adding those in there. And then we start combining. Do it with a partner, do it with a customer, investments. And then all of a sudden, you can start to build that out. But it's kind of a tough little exercise. But you'll come out of there again, like understanding the story. And people are going, man, I never thought we had those kind of opportunities, right? And so you've got a list to.

Go with conversations, right? You know, you just said, in that particular case, I said, we don't want to see anything less than 5 million. Now, Mark's not suggesting that you all say that about every account that you're doing, maybe 10 million could be 10 or 15. But you think about what those parameters might be, right? Those things that. Those aspirational ideas and the things that you say, not more, not less than, you know, what are the things that you don't Even where you don't even want to be.

Right.

Which is. Which can be challenging for some companies. A big shift. When we talk about earlier on account planning is about how much can I get out of the account, how much can I retain of my market share or grow my wallet share at that.

So I want to give everybody one more hint before we leave this idea. Okay, this one's free, everybody. Okay. Which is you're not going to come up with all of your ideas here in the session. You know where you're going to come up with your best ideas, Michelle?

Where?

Mark in the shower. Right. So what you have to do is you have to use a sales design thinking principle, which is you walk away from the problem. So you're going to do this, you're going to grind on it with the team, and that's why you don't want to try to do this all in one session. Because what you're going to do is you're posing these challenges, you're posing these opportunities, and it's really hard to come up with all the ideas sitting in a conference room or sitting in a virtual conference room to come up with all these ideas in one setting like that. You have to walk away from the problem and get mental separation. And then that'll be going on in the back of your mind, you know, the whole look, seek, idea, combination function. And you will start to pop ideas out while you're riding your bike. You'll taking a shower, gardening, whatever you're doing. And then things will start to come back. So this is a process. Then you're going to go back to the, to the customer with that. So that was my one free hint for today.

That's great. Yeah. And it's true.

All right, so then. And we're just going to do a flyover on these. Michelle, what you're doing is you're then getting into your investments, so what investments you're going to make. And we talked about that a little bit. And depending on your company, you're going to have different policies around investments. And, and then you're going to come back to. In step five, come back to your customer and propose these ideas to your customer. So the good news here is you're not going to come back and go, well, we met with you in step number two, and here's what we came up with. And then they're going to sit there and go, oh, boy. Because they're going to know about it already. You're already going to have talked to them. Right. So in step Number three, you're already going to have iterated with them on these ideas. So step number five is a formality because they've already aligned with you and bought in on some of these ideas with you. So you're coming back and that's a formality of your aspirational plan. And then we're going to, in step number six, we're going to join everybody else who is doing their account plans the traditional way. That started with step number one, and they jumped to step number six and they started writing their account plans. Well, we're going to join them and we're going to write our account plan. But again, it's a formality because we're just putting it on paper or on the machine. Right. Because we've done all this homework and we're going to be in a different place. And then finally we're going to be talking with the customer in step number seven about how we're going to team up with them and set accountability points. And this is an important point. We have to make sure that when we're done with this work that the account planning team doesn't just kind of like disappear and go back to their day jobs. We need them to stay and have accountability. So that's up to you and your leadership team about how you put in the measures and the milestones to make sure that your team is staying engaged and. And the executives are staying engaged and also on the customer side, how they're going to work with you and how you're going to have those checkpoints along the way.

So your account plan really does become like a practical action plan. And I would think that part of the accountability becomes very natural because you have already made a commitment to your customer and they've made one back to you.

Right, right. And this is the one year, Michelle, that the account plan is not going into the file cabinet.

Right.

Because it has to stay out because you have to use it in order to do this. Right. So then next year, this time you're not going to dust off the account plan and kind of laugh when you look at what you said you were going to do. And you never even did it because you forgot, because you're going to have done it.

That's right. So it just becomes an ongoing process, doesn't it? It doesn't become a document at all on a shelf. You just keep building and moving and everyone looks at what that goal is.

Yeah. So you'll see that the majority of what we're talking about here is about the thinking Right. It's not about the putting stuff in tools, putting stuff in documents. Those are. Those are just formalities. But the bulk of what we're talking about is how you're thinking getting back to that original idea change. Right. It's a mindset change.

Big mindset change.

Wow. Yep. So let's wind up here so you guys can all get back to your account planning and go back and inspire your team.

Mark, thank you. I mean, I think it was really great. If anyone is interested in Mark's book. Book, you can get mark's book on Amazon.com also, guys, it's actually a great read. And we Talked about Chapter 6. Today. You can read a bit more of the stories that Mark has as well. And any questions you have, talk to us about your biggest sales challenges@infoalesglobe.com and look, there's the image there. Mark, we are launching a podcast.

That's pretty cool.

I know, right?

I didn't know that.

It's going to be so much fun. Yeah, I started without you, but anyway. But I did get a good picture there. But we are very excited to be announcing that. Stay tuned for that. It'll be launching pretty soon. And we thank you for spending your time with us today. We know that your time is very valuable and we look forward to seeing you all the next time, so thank you.