Part 1: Essential Account Planning [Webinar]

Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining us. I'm Mark Danolo, managing partner with Sales Globe, and we've got a great session for you today. We're going to be talking about account planning. We're going to be talking about some of the findings from the book we wrote called Essential Account Planning. We'll get into some areas like developing the right structure. How do you develop a process, how do you deal with thinking big in the organization? So it's going to be a lot of fun. If you have questions, feel free to submit them with the Q and a button on your screen. And, and let's get right into it. A bit of background on Sales Globe. We do sales effectiveness consulting work on areas like sales strategy, sales organization design, account planning, sales compensation. We write books as well. We wrote a book called Essential Account Planning. As we mentioned, the Innovative Sale, which is about problem solving for sales and what your CEO needs to know about sales compensation, which is about how do you connect the corner office to the front line with compensation and incentives. In terms of personal background, I'm what you might call a closet art school mba, meaning I went to art school undergrad and was a designer in New York for a few years. I got interested in going into business, so went off to business school. I was one of the few, what they called dance students back then. I wasn't actually a dancer, but I called all people from the arts dance students, so they wanted diversity in the school. So I was one of the people that came in as a, as a creative person into business school. Well, when I was coming out, trying to get a job, I was interviewing with companies and what I found out is that no real company, no serious company, wanted to hire the art guy. They couldn't quite figure out how that fit and how that was going to work with their organization. So I had to take that whole creative background and I had to put it in the closet, if you will, and be the serious business guy for a few years. What I realized was a lot of the work that we were doing around problem solving and solution development drew upon creative principles. And so I put the left brain and the right brain back together and got into developing new creative, innovative solutions. So you'll see some of those ideas in here today. You'll also see that in the work that we do today. We're going to cover a few topics. We're going to talk about what the problem is with account planning. So why is that so challenging for people and for organizations? We'll talk about how you develop predictable performance. So knowing that you're going to hit your goal or exceed your goal. And then we'll get into those five keys for strategic account planning in order to get those results. Then we'll talk about taking action. So we'll give you an action plan to move ahead. As I was thinking about the session today, I recalled a meeting that we had a couple of years ago in London. It was an account planning meeting. And. And it was with a company that had a team that was working with a very large telecom customer. Their name starts with a vowel, might give you some clues. And they were trying to figure out how to grow this account. So the team came in from the field and it was such an important meeting. They had a lot of the senior executives there. So you had your CSO and you had the chief financial officer and the chief Marketing officer as well. So there was a little bit of pressure on the team and naturally they started asking questions like, what's our current revenue and why haven't we grown? And tell us about the historic results? And what was surprising was that the account team didn't have the answers. Instead, they said, we'll get back to you on that. We've got great relationships. They started talking about all the things they were doing in the account. And then the team asked again. The executives said, well, take us through the plan. You could see things are starting to heat up. At that point, they were getting a little bit frustrated. And the account team came back and told them that we're working on getting ourselves in first position as a vendor and how we're going to do that and how we're selling all these staff augmentation services. And the executive team looked at them and said, well, our primary focus right now is on software, not staff augmentation. Why are we focusing on that? And tell us more about your plan. So it started to go downhill from there. What you found out at the end is this team was not prepared. They weren't ready to go through this kind of exercise, and they would have rather been out in the field. So what's the challenge with account planning? An executive that we talked to when we interviewed for the book described it well. Her name is Sue Hollub, she's VP of Marketing at Lexmark. And she said account planning is foundational. If you don't know where you're going, any road will do. And that pretty much states it that if you want to sell by gut, if you want to sell by feel or go, but with how things are flowing with the customer base and the prospect base you may or may not end up at your plan. So account planning is critical in order to know that you've got an approach to get to those goals. But the problem is a lot of people don't want to do it. So we sat back and we thought, what is it that really makes the challenge or creates the challenge with account planning? And the number one problem is that people would rather be selling and I don't have time to work on the account plan. I'd rather be in front of customers. I'd rather be out in the field. Well, yeah, we'd love the sales organization to be in front of customers. In fact, we don't find that. We find the sales organizations don't spend enough time in front of customers. But you have to have a good plan in order to be successful. Leadership commitment is another big challenge area. So you have to have commitment from the senior most leadership. And we'll talk about that as we go along here as well. If you don't have that, then it's going to be more of a grassroots effort. Weak ownership or the engagement model isn't clear. So who owns the account? We talk in the book about this classic debate that happens between a couple of executives that think they own the account or think their organization owns the account. When in fact account ownership happened to be depending on what types of revenue flows or what types of opportunities that we have in the account. So we didn't have clear ownership or clear rules of engagement politics. That's another thing that comes up as well. So people have vested interests and things may not get done the way they're supposed to get done. So we have battles in the organization or struggles in the organization about how we're going to be pursuing the account, how we're going to be growing the account, and then the document itself. I think this one's kind of interesting because the document to many people is the account planning process. So we work on this document and then we get it done. And then once it's done, it gets put in the file cabinet to the end of the year and we end up not pulling it out till next year. And then we go, okay, well what did we actually do in the account? How did we do? And it becomes, it becomes clear that we're overly document focused. So we want to think about what the barriers are that are preventing us from doing account planning and start to break those down. But I think that first one of just getting people on board is a really big one. I'd rather be rather be selling. So for People that may not be familiar with this, I wanted to just ask this question or answer this question initially. What is account planning? We hear this term a lot. The simplest way I think of account planning is it's an action plan to achieve a sales goal. So it's a plan for us to achieve a goal in an account, and the account planning process is a living process for us to be able to do that. So the account planning process is not create a document, put it in the file cabinet, come back to it next year. The account planning process is a living process where we set goals, we set commitments, and we have a methodical set of checkpoints. We have visibility, we have accountability within the organization. We'll talk about a few of those areas as we go along. So think about it as an action plan, very simple. We're thinking about have we hit our Q1 goals? And my question is, do you know where you are relative to goal right now? So you may be in a position like this where you're actually not where you need to be relative to goal. Maybe you didn't get a fast start to the year, which is really important to get a quick start to the year. Well, what happens when we're not getting close to goal or we're falling behind goal? We start doing things that maybe we shouldn't do. And this brings up a metaphor to me and I'll show you a quick picture here, see if you can guess where this is. So this was actually just a little bit more than a year ago. And this was in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and was at my alma mater, UNC Chapel Hill. And we had just won the national championship. And you can see a few people here, there are about 40,000 people out on Franklin street after we won the national championship. And it was quite a scene, but a lot of work went into that, of course, for the team that won that, which was the Tar Heels. And in fact, we don't talk about the game that happened the year before that when we played that team from Pennsylvania where there was that last second shot that didn't come out so well. But we think about this game, in fact. But this brings up really a metaphor for what happens in sales and what happens in account planning, which is if we're behind, what do we start to do? We start to operate in an emergency mode. We start pursuing opportunities that maybe we shouldn't pursue. We start going after things that maybe or lower probability, you can see this poor Duke player here taking a low probability three point shot. We won't tell you how this ended in the end. But we stop playing the methodical game and we stop making those predictable points in the paint. So we don't have the patience to think strategically, and we stop operating according to our game plan. We want to keep ourselves from getting into this position. So how do you do that? Well, you have to have a method. You have to have an approach to do that. You don't want people selling by gut feel. Right. So I sat back and I thought a bit more, and I said, well, let's look at this basketball metaphor and what's going on here. In NCAA Division 1 men's basketball in the US you have about 350 teams. And then every year, you tend to see the same team start to show up in the NCAA National Tournament. And oddly enough, you see the same team start to show up at the very top of the bracket when they start getting down to the sweet 16 and the elite Eight and the Final Four. Here's a quick graphic to take a look at. Here are the top four teams that show up in those stats. And you can see, of course, Chapel Hill, unc, Chapel Hill, ucla, University of Kentucky and Duke. Great teams, great coaches. And you can see the stats on Final Fours and championship appearances, championships. What's fascinating about this is, out of 350 teams, these are the teams that tend to show up over and over and over. Is it about talent? Well, maybe to some degree. But these teams start to change people out every couple of years. So people come and the players come and they play for four years maximum, or they. Some of them play for one or two years and they're off to the NBA. Well, what these teams have in common is they use a system. They've got great leadership, they've got great coaches. They follow a methodical plan for how they play the game. They motivate and they leverage their talent. So some of these teams have the greatest talent in the country. In fact, they get the top recruits out of high school. Some of these teams don't. Some of these teams don't get the best recruits, but they somehow figure out how to develop those, to develop those recruits. So they have the patience to develop them. They measure them, they make adjustments. And I heard this great term last night in the ACC tournament. I was listening to watching one of the games play the game, not the score. So they know what the score is, but they're focused on their method. So when they're getting behind, they're not getting panicky. They're actually getting into a situation where they can Win that game. So think about that as an analogy. And you know, I kind of think about it. What's your Dean Smith system or what's your Coach K system? Whoever your favorite one is. But by all means have a system, have a way to approach account planning. So let's pick up and look at the bigger picture and get put all this in context before we start going out down into these five areas. We use a model we call revenue roadmap. And it really looks at how sales organizations grow and how they grow revenue. And what we find is when they grow consistently and they grow well, they tend to do four things well. They have good insight on the market and their customers. They know what's going on with their customers, with competitors, the macro market itself. They use that information to then inform a sales strategy, again, an action plan, right. To achieve a sales goal. Sales strategy is comprised of the products and services, what we're offering, who we're offering it to in terms of segmentation, our value proposition, our overall approach to market. Then we get down to the coverage model and how we're going to market in terms of our channels, our roles. And then we get into this area called sales process and account strategy. And then finally enablement are all the supporting disciplines like compensation and recruiting and talent development. So if you look at this, what you'll see is account planning actually falls in the coverage discipline. So we have to think about account planning when the context of the overall strategy and it's got to respond to the sales strategy that we have and the organization that we've designed. But it also has to then be supported by the right talent, by the right incentives. So don't think of account planning in isolation. Think about it within the context of how it fits in all of these other areas. So very important because a lot of times when you're working on the account planning, or you could be working on role design or you could be working on the compensation plan, you'll find that there are issues that come up that are in other disciplines or other areas that affect it. So we might get into account strategy and we go, okay, well we need to grow this account. What's the overall strategy or the priorities for the organization? Okay, we have to go up a layer to sales strategy. We have to know where we want to go as a company, as a business. So we have to know what those C level goals are as an example. So think about that big context. So five keys. Let's get into the areas that produce results. And these are five areas from the book. And what we did is we, in the research we did for the book, started to isolate these different areas that really made a difference in terms of account planning success. And each of these we can go deeper into, but I'm going to give you kind of an overview of each one so that you can get a sense of what's in it. And we'll go deeper in some of the other sessions that we get into. Number one, using the right structure. So you might be thinking, okay, structure of the account plan. What's the table of contents? No, structure starts with what we just talked about, which is we have to look at overall context within the scope of the sales strategy. So first of all, think about your organization, think about your sales strategy and where that's going. So account planning does not start with the account team, as we talked about before. It starts with leadership. So your CSO has to determine what the sales strategy is for the business. And also the vision for account planning, does it even have a role in how we work? And there may be certain types of accounts where we need to put a certain higher level of focus on those accounts in order to be successful. That goes down to the sales leaders who have the authority to mobilize the teams on the account plan. So you've got the sales strategy that's happening at this level. You've got and the vision for what account planning is. Once that's determined, then we can get down to how are we going to do it, how are we going to execute it? So you've got your account leader. So think about the account leader as the person who's heading up the individual account or sets of customer accounts. And they may have one account, if it's a really huge one, or they may have several accounts. But these accounts are usually ones that fit within what you think of that Pareto rule. So they're the ones that are in that top 20% of accounts that produce that 80% or so of revenue or of profitability or perhaps of potential. So that account leader is going to be heading one or more of those accounts. And the account planning is not happening alone with that account leader. The account planning is happening cross functionally. So we've got members of the sales team in the middle there, but we also have members from other functions like operations, marketing, sales operations, which very often helps us to facilitate the account planning process and make sure that it happens. Finance in order to know the numbers right. So all these teams, all these teams and functions have to work together in order to be successful at growing the business. So that's point number one is make sure you have your structure together in terms of how your strategy is going to cascade down to the account plans and the account planning process. And how is this team going to be assembled and how do you give the right amount of authority to get this team mobilized and to work together? Okay. Another structural aspect is where are we going to do account plans? And we think traditionally, well, they're going to be happening just for those global accounts or just for those strategic accounts. Well, very true. You might have strategic account plans for your globals, your strategics, your major accounts. Again I mentioned a second ago the Pareto rule. These are the accounts that are going to be making up that bulk of the revenue. For very few accounts. You also may have pursuit plans for new customers. So you may have accounts that are not doing much business with us or maybe any business at all. And we want to have a pursuit plan for how we're going to capture them and how we're going to grow those accounts. Those pursuit plans require considerable investment by the company because we don't have any revenue to offset all the efforts that we're putting in to those. But that may be an area that you look at for account plans. We also noted aspirational account plans. We'll talk about those in a few minutes under thinking big. But aspirational account plans, plans for accounts where you really want to grow in a very large way. So those are going to set some lofty goals that we may not have in our typical strategic account plans. Then looking a little bit lower in your major accounts or lower end of your major accounts, your small and mid sized accounts, you may have tactical account plans and tactical account plans may be smaller, more abbreviated versions of the plans. And what they do is they give you a shorthand version or a light version of the plan to go out and take to market and still avoid that situation where you have people kind of winging it. So you have, you have tactical plans that people can do very quickly, but they have something that can be, the team can mobilize around. So think about where you're going to have those plans. And then finally within structure, we can get into what does the plan look like. Now when I ask somebody about account planning, what I usually get is they'll recite the table of contents of the account plan. Well, you know, it's going to have our current position and it's going to have our strategy, etc. Etc. Well, that's only a piece of this whole process. And you'll see here on one of our web tools you can see an illustration of the account planning process or the modules that go within the account plan itself. So your current profile, position. So where are you now, your needs mapping and team alignments. So how are we going to align to the customer and what are the needs that they have? And how does our team work with each of those customer touch points, the goals and strategy, where do we want to go with the account? How are we going to get there? What's that action plan? And then the action plan itself gets into the specific steps and the actual work plan of the account plan. So kind of week to week, month to month, month, what are we going to be doing? Team support gets into. How is that whole team going to work together? So I just showed you that cross functional group. So how is that, that whole team going to coordinate? And then the performance dashboard. So performance dashboard is really all those commitments that we made and we're tracking that on a regular basis. This is the piece that provides the visibility, the ongoing visibility for how we're doing according to the plan. So that's one of the components that keeps this whole account planning process alive. Okay, so a few structural ideas for you. I gave you as well a few questions to ask in each of these areas. So checkpoints, if you will. So what's your account planning vision? Have you articulated that clearly? Do you have the right tension between execution and information? So a lot of times when we develop account plans, we just, we capture and create lots of information and lots of data. And you can probably think of some of these account planning meetings that you've been in where it's been just a recital of information. In the end, you're like, okay, so what are we going to do? So we have to have execution as well. Have you properly segmented the accounts and plans? So are we doing them differently for different types of accounts and is that appropriate, appropriately lined up? Do we have clear objectives and visible actions and accountability in each of the plans? And are we committed overall to making this part of our culture? So we don't want to have an account planning process unless the organization and leadership is committed to making this happen. Very, very important. In fact, that's probably the most important thing is to make sure that there's commitment as you do this. So setting the goal is the next major area. So we have to know what we're going to be doing in order to build a plan around that. We got a snapshot here of a typical rep who's just received their major account goal. And you can see it actually is a bit heavy. So he's having trouble getting traction on that. So typically what happens is the account planning is happening after the goal has been received. We also will use account planning as an input to setting quotas or setting the goal as well. But there's some methods you have to use there so you're not too short sighted. You don't think of the fact that you're setting your goals, so you're kind of hesitant about how you're doing the planning. But let's look at it right now from the perspective of you've been given a goal for the account, how are you going to get to that goal? And we'll start to get into some of the granular pieces right here. So let's take a big account. So FY18, we were planning for this particular account, very large technology company, customer, and we have a goal that's been given to us of $43 million. And this is a very basic exercise I want to share with you because it's very useful though in an account planning session, account planning workshop. So we want to look at how much we actually have to find how much we actually have to grow. So we've identified about $13.6 million in revenue in this account already. What is that from? That could be from retention of current revenue streams. It could be from backlog of things that we've already sold. They're going to flow into the next year. So subtracting that out, we've got about $29 million of net revenue that we have to go find. Okay, well that's a big number. And this is a company doing this plan that is not a recurring revenue company. So it's not like say a telecom that has recurring monthly plans is a company that has to go out and sell that revenue each year, which makes it even harder because you've got to go and win new revenue rather than just retaining the bulk of it. So what we do is we take a little technique from the old sales funnel. So you remember having two to three times your goal on the funnel at any point in time. Well, what we want to do is we want to have two to three times our incremental growth goal identified in the account planning session at the very beginning of the year. Right. So think about that. If we can identify this at the beginning of the year, it really ups our odds that we're going to be able to achieve it during the year because more opportunities are going to come along during the Year that we're not even aware of. If we just identify what the, you know, the amount that we have for the goal, we're probably not going to be able to get it because it's going to be too small of a number. So we've got to go for a multiple, some multiple of that revenue that we actually need. So 2.5 times that 29 million is $73 million. Okay, so we've got a working number of $73 million. Everybody on the account team goes, oh my gosh, what are we going to do? We're never going to be able to find that much opportunity in this account. You know, we've only grown incrementally year over year. How are we ever going to do this? Okay, well, here's how you're going to do it. You're going to do this thing called a goal build. And so what we do is we take the $76 million and we start looking for opportunities. And we start with opportunities that we already are aware of or maybe know about. It could be things that we have in the pipeline, could be things that we've been thinking about that may be opportunities that we might be able to close. When you do this with a team, this is a great team exercise to do as a group in a room together. And we'll talk about engaging the team and the value of getting the team together as well as we go along here. But think about it as getting the team together. They will come up with some fraction of this $76 million and then they're going to run out of steam. And then you're going to have to say, okay, where else are we going to find that revenue? And you would start looking at combinations, for example, combinations of what our offers are, who our buyers are and the customer, and perhaps who our partners are, or maybe other people, other companies, other firms that we can work with. So we start looking at combinations to say, what is it the customer is really looking for and what are the things that we can put together that maybe address what they're looking for that maybe are non traditional things that maybe we haven't done before? What things can we do that perhaps require some investment on the part of our firm, our company in order to do that? What are the really big deals? And in this case, we might say, I want to see some more deals that are $10 million and above, not just little stuff. So we start pushing the thinking of the team here to start to come up with some much bigger numbers. And this is really a creative process that you go through with the team and at the end of this you will have found things that you would not have been aware of before. They'll come out of that room with new stuff. Okay, so that's part number one here, is going through the process of identification of opportunities. Part number two as you build it, is then to take those opportunities and start to flesh them out in terms of what we're going to do. Okay, so you can see already that compared to most account planning processes, we're starting to get a little bit more action oriented compared to maybe some of the slideshows that you've seen in leadership team meetings that talk about all the great stuff we're going to do with the account. So $13.7 million, that is one of the opportunities from that prior page that was highlighted. And so we took the $13.7 million that was for new product development support for this particular company. That was the offer that we're going to provide to this particular customer. And so for that we start to go through an exercise for each one of these major opportunities. You're going to go, oh my gosh, this sounds like a lot of work. Well, it is a lot of work. But think about the dollars involved in growing this type of account. What's the customer's top challenge? What are they looking at relative to this type of opportunity? Well, their top challenge is cutting the cost of operations and converting their operating costs to capital expense to CapEx. Okay, well how will this help them do that? Well, we're going to be able to convert the operating cost to CapEx, but we're also going to help them address some of their go to market needs for new product development and implementation support. So we're starting with what the customer problem is and we're starting to build out a solution or a value proposition for each one of these opportunities. And I want to talk for a second as well about the importance of getting customer input and understanding the real problem statement here from the customer. What we're doing is we're coming up with things that we know are going to be valuable to the customer, but we can't do that in isolation. So one warning I'll give you is don't go into account planning sessions and try to do big idea development without customer input. You should do the customer forensics works beforehand or do an initial session and then go out and start to validate those ideas with the customer as well. But trying to develop that in isolation is usually not a successful process. Flushing it out further. Okay, what's the strategy of how we're going to get that $13.7 million and what's the action plan down at the bottom? So we're going to strengthen our relationships. We've got certain descriptions of what we're going to do specifically and who's going to do that in terms of our team members that are going to align to the customer and the timing. So this action plan down here starts to become part of that dashboard that I referenced earlier. So that's the thing that's going to keep this whole process alive. I heard a great comment the other day when I was in a team meeting around account planning and it came up because so much of what happens in these account planning meetings is happy talk and so much of what happens in your sales review meetings is happy talk or positive talk about, well, we've got great relationships, we're going to be able to expand this account, etc, etc. And somebody asked this one question that cut through it all. They asked the question, what evidence do you have to support this? Which I thought was so clarifying because it just brought to bear the idea that you've got to have something solid behind it. So when you say, okay, we're building relationships in this area, okay, what have you actually done? If you ask a powerful question like this as part of the process, that'll start to really highlight, it'll start to illuminate what's going on within the process. So what evidence do you have to support each of these things that we're actually going to do? When you're going through your dashboard and you're doing this during the year, okay, well, we've been building these relationships. What evidence do you have to support that? So think about these powerful types of questions that you can leverage. So on setting the goal, where are your opportunities to improve your retention, your penetration, your acquisition, separating the conversation about quota and the growth aspiration? As we talked about, are our growth expectations high enough? Are we pushing it enough? Have we found the opportunities enough to be two and a half to three times a multiple of our incremental growth goal? And do you have some big deals as part of your growth goal as well? Number three, creating the habits. Okay, this is the thing that brings account planning alive, which is habits and practices. It's not about the document. Again, I'll give you a few hints on here in terms of some of these habits. Thinking before you plan. And that means not getting into the planning process, but thinking strategically about where you want to go, not getting caught up in the Technology and the templates. This major telecom company we interviewed as part of the book, this leader said it was impressive when someone looked at this as a process of thinking and communicating, not as an accumulation of information. What he said is, we have all these tools for account planning and for CRM, and people just start to go through and check the boxes and dump the information in. And the problem with that is that it becomes a road exercise and you start to lose the creative thinking. So you got to think strategically, motivating, rewarding the team. Okay, so how do you get people motivated to do this kind of hard work? Well, of course you're going to pay incentives for the direct financial results. Right? Which we always do in the incentive plan. But you have to recognize for the success of those strategies and those tactics in process, that could be through other types of rewards and recognition. It could be through other types of spiffs. It could be simply showing people or demonstrating how we've been successful in an account. So you've got to have demonstration and acknowledgement of success even before you get to the goal. And I thought this one was really big. This also came up in the book Avoiding the Cycle of Planning Success, then Complacency. This one executive said that when the account team is in good shape and they're doing well, they get complacent about planning. And then what happens is there's a lagged effect and that lack of planning then results in lower results. Right. And so then we start to scramble. So don't get too comfortable. Always be planning, always be making sure that you're planning and then establishing the cycle. So if you think about the structures that we've been talking about, these have to happen on a cycle throughout the year. And within the tool here, you can see some of the major steps and you really develop them for your organization. Of course, from assembling your team to kicking off the process, to going through the account planning sessions, to executing the plan and having that recurring process to be able to achieve your goals. So very important to have that cycle that you're following and then finally demanding accountability. So this one is easy to let go, this one's easy to let become a real problem, which is if you're too complacent about the account planning and you don't hold the team accountable for doing the things they need to do, they can fall behind and the account planning can just kind of fade away. So we have to have this dashboard, we have to have these accountability points, and you have to call people out if they're not doing this on the teams because it becomes a dangerous practice of complacency. Okay, so again, accountability, accountability, accountability on the account plans and then a few points here on habits, connecting the account planning to team motivators. So are you motivating your team to do these? Do the things you need them to do? Are you too focused on the technology and the tools versus the problem solving? So think about problem solving and being creative. Have you over engineered your plans or have you kept them simple? So with all this, the simple solution is really going to be the best solution. At the end, are you keeping the process alive? Meaning that we have reoccurring planning sessions, we have visibility so that the process remains central to what we're doing with the account. And have you dealt with dealing with non compliance? So the renegades, the people are going to go, well, I don't need to do this for my account. What are you going to do about those people? Okay, so before we get into the last couple of points, we had a few questions come in here and I wanted to take these real quickly and I'll just take two of these here. First one, we've never actually engaged our customers in the account planning process. What kind of feedback do you have from companies that have engaged their customers? How does it work? Okay, great point. So when we did the interviews for the book, we actually found a mix of companies that said we sit down in front of the customer and they actually are part of the process versus companies that said, well, we have enough information about the customer that we can do the account planning effectively. What we found is that the companies that are engaging the customer, not surprisingly are, are more successful in how they're growing with the customer than the companies that are doing it themselves and using their own information or their own understanding of the account. In fact, what they're doing is they're creating some initial hypothesis in terms of what the customer's needs are and what they might be able to do meet those needs and then they're sitting down with the customer talking through that before. The plan is highly structured. And what they're doing also is getting the customer's buy in to how that plan is going to help the customer be successful. Right, because the customer doesn't want to help you do an account plan just to sell more stuff. They want success for themselves. So yeah, I think very important in that process. How long does the process typically take per account and how does it work best in person? Remote? Our sales team is pretty dispersed. Well, the per account, if this is something that's going on all year. It's going to be going on all the time. I think what the question is asking here is the time that it takes to actually build the plan. And in terms of duration and usually that can be, it could be a couple weeks or a couple of month process depending on the size of the account. And some of that depends on logistics as well, which is getting people to collaborate. So if you've got a more complex organization, it's going to take more to get that account plan done. The question about in person and remote, again we saw a mix of those in the book research. What we found was that the in person tends to work better. The companies that are making the investment. And again, this sounds like work and it is companies that are making the investment to get people on a plane and come sit in a location and work together, they get focus and concentration and they get a better result. And they usually will bunch those together. So they may do several half day or one day sessions and they may be. The teams may be collaborating on several different accounts. Okay, so good questions. So let's get into the final two points here. Number four, understanding the politics. Right. So we've all got this going on in the organization in terms of competing interests in the organization. And what's better to illustrate politics than Boss Tweed? I'm a student of history and I love Boss Tweed for the stories that come for that. So what creates politics? I think this is probably a question you need to look at because in order to deal with the politics you need to know what's causing it. Scarcity or perceived scarcity? If the company or the business is not growing well, then there's perceived scarcity. People are scrambling after the opportunities that exist versus a time of abundance or perceived abundance. Then politics starts to go away. Lack of leadership. So leadership will sometimes permit these behaviors to happen. In fact, leadership sometimes likes the political behavior, oddly enough. So leadership is also an issue. Culture, which is affected by leadership and culture usually has three pressure points. It's got leadership about the vision of the culture. It's got what we're motivating and rewarding that drives culture. And it's got in the middle what you see in terms of practice, what people do that drives culture. So culture is an important area that, that can drive politics and hyper accountability. Think about this one. This is an era now where we talk about innovation, we talk about creativity. We're always saying, hey, we want to innovate, we want to come up with new ideas. But what do we do as companies, very often we punish failure, we're overly accountable. Why didn't that work? We may need to revisit this and try something else because we're not convinced this is successful. So if we're overly accountable and we're finding cause and blame for everything, that kills creativity, that kills risk taking. Okay, so think about these four points. So if we're going to take a look at how we counter the politics, well, let's just map it to those. So abundance through planning. If we're doing a better job of planning, by definition we have abundance because we can see our future exercising control. So finding common ground with people to be able to work together, communicating, being able to share, seek input, publish, credit others so we're not taking credit ourselves and then leading the culture. We talked about those pressure points. I talked about three of the pressure points. The fourth one I really love because I was talking about three pressure points a while back and this one executive said, well, there's actually a fourth one which is courage. Because you can't do anything, these things without courage because you will have resistance in the organization if you're trying to move the culture and you don't have the courage to push through. I thought, great point. So we four pressure points of culture and think about those as you think about your organization, how to move that. So questions to ask around politics, the role of leadership. Has leadership done the right things? Do we have clear roles and responsibilities for the account planning process? How do you address political behavior when you're working on plans for customers? Do you move decisively to deal with these type of things? Are you collaborating with your peers? Are you identifying abundance through the planning process? Are you taking control? Are you communicating? Are you leading? Okay, so this whole point number four is a big one. We could spend a lot more time on this and we will in a later session, but healing this can make a big difference in terms of your success with the organization and your success with account planning. Then I want to end on one of my favorites here, which is thinking big. And as we were doing the book research and the book writing, this one came up through the interviews. And I'm an old self help motivational junkie. I love this stuff. And as it came up, I'm like, wow, there's really something special in this. Thinking big. It's not just about account planning and how we grow the account. It's not about incremental growth, it's about aspirational growth. And that became a really important point. So thinking big requires Vision in the account. So let's go back to that $43 million account. Could be a $10 million account, could be a hundred million dollar account, but it's big enough that there are opportunities to do something significant in that account. The best visual I could find here was a waterfall called Skogafoss. And this is in Iceland. And I took a trip with my family to Iceland a couple of summers ago in July. And you can see it's. It's not winter here. It's. It's actually a beautiful setting. But this is what Skogafoss looks like. Iceland's like the land of waterfalls and mountains and glaciers and all those. Those wonderful things. So this is what it looks like from everybody's view. And this is what you get when you drive up in the car and you go, wow, isn't that fantastic? Where are we going to go get lunch? Can we get a glass of wine with lunch? But then you go, wait a second, there's a lot more to be seen here because I'm not thinking big enough. And one of my daughters said to me, hey, we need to really explore more of this. Okay, so let's apply this to sales. You have to have vision in order to think big. And so if we think about that quota we talked about before, that becomes really the wall or the goal. That's the thing that can kind of slow us down. So I need to get to that quota. I'm not really thinking beyond that. I was given that goal. I need to get to that this year. I'm not thinking beyond that, but you can actually go much bigger. So if you look at the overall big goal or the summit, your aspiration can unlock some of these possibilities. So if we think about the idea of a aspiration over time that creates a trajectory that you can follow to get to that big goal. And I'll be more specific about that in just a second here. But when we get to that big goal, things look a whole lot different. So here's Skogafoss from the top. So if you hike all the way up the side of it, you get this tremendous view. And you can see Skogafoss on the right. And then you can see all the way across the panorama out to the ocean, and you can see this town called Vik off to the left with these tremendous rock formations, but totally different experience. So you had thousands of people at the bottom of the waterfall, and you had just a few people at the top of the waterfall. And if you look off to the right, you can Even see where the waterfall comes from, from the glaciers. So it's just amazing. So I thought, what a great metaphor for what you could actually do with an account. So let's talk about this from an account standpoint. So I talked about time, and I talked about the trajectory. And so what happens is we take time, we put a goal to it that creates a trajectory. So if I said I want this account in five years to be a $70 million account, all of a sudden that creates a path for how we're going to get from a $10 million account to a $70 million account. Now, one of the executives who interviewed in the book said, okay, the great thing about this is when you take this idea to your customer and you say, Mr. Customer, we're doing $10 million of revenue with you right now, but we would like to be a $70 million partner with you. He said, what will usually happen with the customer is they'll look at you if you haven't done that kind of thing before, and they'll look at you in disbelief. And I go, what? And then when you reinforce that, and you go, yes, this is what we'd like to do, and you start to explain why, then the customer starts to look at you differently, and they go, oh, well, we hadn't thought about you as a strategic partner, platinum partner, whatever it might be. And that customer will start to change their view of you when you start to put those big, audacious goals in front of them. Okay, so there's a very important thing that happens here, psychologically and strategically with the customer about putting a big number out there. We're not just going from 10 million to 11 million or 12 million. We want to go from 10 million to 70 million in five years. Huge statement. Okay, so then you have to back that up with the capability. It starts telling you what you need to do in order to hit those goals along the way. In terms of resources, talent, offers, your value proposition, support from your partners, your delivery capacity. So I would say as you start your account planning, I would actually start with something in this area in terms of, okay, let's think big about what we really can do in this account. And the reason you need to get out five years or more is because if you say, what are we going to do next year? Everybody starts thinking of that word quota, and it holds them back. And they go, well, I don't really want to push too hard, because that means my goal is going to go up. And if we don't hit it, then I'm not going to make the income I need to make, but when you start to stretch that time frame out, it becomes aspirational. The other thing you need to do with your team is you need to visualize with them what their life's going to be like if you could actually do that. So if you can grow some of these major accounts, they're going to make a lot of lot more money, they're going to have a better life, they're going to be able to send their kids to better colleges, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Right. So we're getting obviously beyond customers, but we're getting into what this can do for your life. Very important motivationally for your team. So some tools for thinking big, working backwards from the future. One executive I talked with talked about it as going out and standing in the meadow and then looking back and visualizing how you got there. Okay? So working backwards from the the future, going beyond the incremental to the audacious. So your aspirations and this is a good litmus test should make you and the team a little uncomfortable. So if what you put out, there you go, yeah, we could do that. It's not high enough. I mean, it may be high enough to hit your quota, but it's not high enough to really do something significant with that account or with your business. Think about your business this way as well. Does it make me uncomfortable? And if it's not making me uncomfortable, I'm not looking far enough ahead and I'm not looking big enough. Question, short term decisions. I thought this is a great point that came out of the book research. Without aspirations, you'll make different short term decisions. Think about that for a second. So if I think about just what I need to do this year or this quarter, I'm going to make different decisions about who I hire, how much I pay them, what I invest in, what I spend my time doing, than if I have a big long term goal, my decision timeframe is going to change and I'm going to start going, okay, I am going to hire those people, I am going to pay at that level because I need to get people that are going to get me to that aspirational level. So the whole short term, long term decision paradigm shifts when you start looking long term and engaging the customer. We talked about that before. The customer has to be your partner in this. You cannot grow exponentially like that without customer engagement. So very important to pull them in on this process. So I get really kind of lathered up about this whole thinking Big thing because it can be so impactful to the organization. So five questions. What accounts warrant aspirational account plans? Not all of these. Right. So we talked about that at the very beginning. The different types of account plans, there may be just a handful of these accounts that really you should be looking at in this way. Goals and time frames that are in the realm of possibility. Okay, so we want to stretch and make ourselves a little uncomfortable, but we have to be somewhat realistic. What does it look like? Or visualization when you reach that goal, have you engaged your customer in the conversation? And then how will you work with your customer to get there? So a few questions you can ask about aspirations. Okay, so summing it up, five points here, these are all points that we're going to go into in some follow up sessions. So structure, setting the goal, creating the habits, understanding the politics and addressing those politics and thinking big. And I have a couple of another question or two here we can take before we wind up. Okay, great. Yeah, this is a good. I love this one. Our salespeople complain already that they spend too much time in CRM and it takes time away from the customer. So what are we going to do about account planning? Wanted to spend more time in account planning. Okay. So I think a lot of this is positioning in terms of investment and what it's going to get you. So if you think about anything that you put resources into, whether it's money or time, you have to know what you're going to get out of it. And if you approach account planning from a perspective of, okay, we've got to do the account plans for this year, they've got to be done by January 1st or whatever your date is, March 1st, whatever that date is. If you approach it that way, people are going to go, oh my God. Okay, well, do I have a template for the last one I did? Can I just cut and paste? Can I give it to my assistant to help me put together? So they're not going to give it the attention that they need to. If you embed in your culture and in your vision that this is a critical priority and you are going to get returns from doing this, that is going to allow them to spend time. In fact, I would argue we do time allocation studies with our sales time optimizer software and find people don't spend enough time in front of the customer. In fact, we find people spend less than 30% of their time in front of customer, which is not enough. But what should you be doing with that other time? You should be planning for what you're doing in front of the customer. So when it's game time, you're going to be more successful. So you've got to get the right message and right mind frame about that. And then one more question. The difficulty of knowing this is working. Is this a way to quantify impact that is not anecdotal. Our reps don't want to go just see somebody, right? So with the steps that you have in the account plan, with your action plans within the account plan, you've got to be able to see the results that are coming out of those. So you've got to actually be seeing new sales that are happening. I would say you have to be. You have to find milestones that are significant enough and meaningful enough that if they don't result in sales, that they're getting you to those sales. And you've got to be able to identify the difference between the results you're getting from doing that now versus the results you got, say, last year by not doing it. So we're getting more at bats, we're getting visibility at the sea level that we weren't getting before. These are very impactful things. So again, thinking about this as investment is a really, really important thing to do. Okay, so we can follow up with other questions offline, but that's all we have time for at the moment. But what I will leave you with is a few next steps. You can read the book to align your team. The Essential Account Planning is available on Amazon.com and it is a great investment. Great investment. Have an account planning workshop. An Essential Account planning workshop with salesglobe. We host these workshops. We can do a half day, we can do a full day to help you think through the process and help you structure your plan. If you have a plan that you want to review or an approach to account planning that you want to review, we can give you some pointers on how to make that even better. And then the next webinar we're going to have is on using the right structure. That's going to be on March 29th. And we're going to get into detail on that first section. So what we want to do through this series is give you some really good, usable tools. And you can see we've been highlighting methods, we've been highlighting software tools that we have, but we want to start to give you some pieces that you can apply. What I would like to see in this with the people that are attending and the people that are listening to this on the, on the recordings as well is I would like you to start to see some changes in your organization from using these as well. So this account planning process think will help you to do some better things. I'd love to hear back from you about how you're applying that. So thank you for joining us today. It's been great connecting with everybody. If you have other questions you want to email them to us, My email is down below mdanoloalesglobe.com and there's a phone number there as well. So feel free to reach out to us. We'd love to talk to you and we're always happy to give you ideas, give you information and answer questions. So until next time, have a great weekend and thanks for joining us.