Part 2: Essential Account Planning [Webinar]

Well, hi, everybody. Thanks for joining us. I'm Mark Danolo, managing partner of Sales Globe, and we're glad to have you here today. We do work in sales effectiveness consulting around sales strategy, sales organization design, account planning, sales compensation. And we're right in the middle of our series on the book Essential Account Planning. And we're talking today about thinking big. And we had interviewed Glenn Hogleworth with Erisynt during the book, and he brought up some really cool ideas about how to do aspirations, operational account planning. And they were so interesting. In fact, we made a whole chapter about that in the book. So we want to share some of those ideas today, and we invited Glenn to be our guest today. When I talk with Glenn, he talked about this idea of setting a big goal over a long timeframe and also setting a time parameter to it, and it creates a trajectory or a path that you can follow to get to that goal. So you want to get into that idea today as well. So. So, Glenn, welcome. Glad to have you here today.

Well, thank you, Mark, and I appreciate the opportunity to talk to your audience.

So let's start off with this idea of thinking big. And when people do account planning, usually they want to just get it done with. They want to get it over with, they want to put it in the file cabinet, they want to get back on the business. But when you think big about account planning, you have to do it seems a little bit more to make something happen. So I wanted to ask you, where did you get the idea of thinking big and aspirational account planning, and how does that apply to account planning itself?

Yeah, sure. So what I found when doing account planning with my teams and even myself is you have to envision the end state that you want to get to. And what I found is that people would get captured in their current state what was currently on their table, what they were trying to do, and had a tough time visualizing where they're going. It's like taking a journey, not knowing your destination. And so really try to think about where are we going to end up? And then work backwards from that end state. So that's really where this thinking big came from, is thinking downstream, where do you want to aspirationally be? And then pull that backwards to today.

And is that right for certain types of accounts, or should you think about that for all types of accounts, or how do you figure out which ones are really worth doing that for?

Well, I think with any account you're trying, when you're doing account planning, you're trying to Think about where you're going to take that account over time. So by definition, it would apply to every account. The aspiration as to where you're going to take that account will vary, but in any account plan, you really need to describe that end destination you're trying to get to over some period of time.

So when you're taking the role of a leader of a business like you are, so you're not actually doing the plan per se, how do you get the message across to people of what you want them to do, since it's so different? What's the leadership message? What kind of a role does a leader have in doing something like this?

Well, I think the role of the leader is to inspire, to, to give a viewpoint and some examples, tell some stories of previous opportunities when you look at that, and really inspire people to get out of the today and think about where they want to be with that account, with that relationship. So really painting a picture, and I think the leader can help extract that picture from the team and you know, and put it into context of the company and where the company is trying to go and where you will want to see this account and this client relationship go over time.

So what kind of reaction do you get when you, when you give that message? Because I think a lot of people might go, oh, gosh, okay, I thought we were going to get this over with, but now, you know, we've got it, we've got to dig into something bigger and I've got to start, you know, kind of doing this whole vision thing. True, true.

So I think that two negative things or reactions that come out is first of all, people confuse goals with quota. Right? And so the immediate thing when you're talking about an account plan, people are thinking, what is my quota going to be? What is it going to be next year, next quarter, whatever the next period is. And so they think they're in some kind of quota negotiation process, number one. Second thing is it's hard for people to think big. It's hard to get out of the present relationships that you have, current clients that you have, current business you have, and think outside and extrapolate from that. And so a couple of different things that we do is one, think about the relationship map, think about people that you could have a relationship beyond what you're currently doing. And so one of the elements is to just take the current relationships off the table for a moment and say, outside of where we're working now, where could we be working? Who could we be working with? Just to get those creative juices going and to get away from that kind of incremental view of today's relationship.

So we had done some sessions together. You talked about the idea of putting some of these variables together, talked about the customer, you talked about the offer, you talked about partners. And that was a very different approach to talk about partners, but you were putting some of these pieces together. Talk a bit about that, if you would. Just in terms of how do you set the conversation with people? How do you get them out of that incremental track in terms of pushing their thinking?

Right. I think as you talk about these variables, try to think about very different tangents that you can drive the conversation. So, you know, if you're currently working in two or three divisions or with two or three different groups, what other groups, what other divisions can we work with? If you're thinking about your product or your service offering, think outside that box. Where are competitors working that we're not currently working? Where are there other opportunities for us to look? So these variables that you're talking about is trying to take different parameters and exclude the current and the past relationship and think, what beyond that could we do? One example would be you might be working with a certain class of individual. You might be working with the IT organization and ask, well, what could we have a relationship with the sales organization? Could we have a relationship with engineering organization, with marketing? And then try to stay on that and say, what would that relationship with marketing look like? What value could we deliver to marketing? And that if you're a product company selling into a CIO organization and now you're thinking about, well, what can we do with the marketing organization? It's such a radical different concept that it forces people to think differently than the past.

So we talked a little bit in the interview that we did for the book about visualization. And some of this got into things that I love around the self help. And you think of the Tony Robbins and the Firewalk and all that stuff, and you're going, how does this fit with a cal planning? It's kind of exciting, actually, especially for somebody like me that likes that stuff. But you talked, I think, a little bit about visualization and picturing what it would be like to work with the customer or to be at that level with the customer and describe a little bit about what you mean there. And what I'm getting at is sometimes a person has to get their head around what it'll feel like to be in that position, what their life will be like, what their job will be. Like to get them past, you know, we're going to grow 5% or 10%. And what will it be like a few years out for me, for my team, for my family? How do you get like that with people? Does it get touchy feely at all or how do you get them into that frame of mind?

Yeah, I wouldn't say touchy feely, but try to pick something big to think about. In the book, you talk about this concept of building a hundred million dollar account, right? When you have a $5 million account and you're thinking about building to 100 million, that's orders of magnitude larger, you have to put something out there that is kind of beyond that immediate reality. So it could be picking a number, picking a number that's so big that it forces people to think very differently. It could be when you talk about relationship, if you're trying to be the top partner to a customer, well, who is the current top partner? It's something people can visualize because just make something up. Maybe Accenture is their top partner. It's very easy to now go and think, okay, what does Accenture's relationship look like? How did they operate today? Even though that might be well beyond what you're currently thinking about. And so the more real you can make it, but make it, it's such a leap that it forces different thinking. As I mentioned earlier, once you pick that view, if it's we're going to be 100 million dollar account, now work backwards from that and say, okay, choose a challenging time frame. Don't say, okay, we're going to aspire to be there 10 years from now. Say you're going to be there three years from now, five years from now. Some event horizon that, that forces people to think very differently very quickly because you really want to have those big leaps, those big stair step functions that really change that account relationship. If the length of time is too long and the goal is too small, you will never think about changing that. You'll just incrementally iterate. And so that visualization you're talking about, I said before, pick an end state that you aspire to be. We aspire to be the top partner, or we aspire to be $100 million an account now, then put a time frame on it, say, okay, five years, we're gonna get there, then start building going backwards. Where should we be in year four, where should we be in year three, year two, year one, Then you get back to today and so you can start digesting that big goal into Incremental steps by dividing by five, thinking about, okay, where do I need to be in each of these five years? And so you're thinking big, but then you're working backwards. Today it's the opposite direction that most account plans go, which is today forward. And that's the today forward gets you into a lot of that incremental thinking.

So you're talking about getting it outside of the number. So we want a big number. But the thing is, a number is not necessarily an emotional thing. So you talk about the hundred million dollar account, or it could be the 75 million dollar account. Like, okay, well, wow, that's a big number. Emotionally, I feel like I need to feel something that gets me motivated. When I think of, you know, 75 or $100 million accountant for only like maybe, you know, $10 million right now, the emotion, it invokes me is fear. I'm like, okay, well how are you ever going to pull that off, right? I'm not motivated, I'm scared to do that. But how do you know when you get to that right point where the number is big enough, but then I'm feeling excited about it and I'm feeling emotional and positive about it versus, versus feeling fear or is there a little fear good in that kind of situation?

Well, I think some fear is good. There's some fear that means we're stretching the boundaries, right? It's not something we've done before, but as we described, if you could pick a concrete example of somebody else, you don't want to mimic that. When I talked about earlier about trying to be the top partner, and the current top partner is Accenture. Well, now you can have a meaningful conversation about how do you think Accenture got there, it didn't happen overnight. What were the steps they took? And you can actually go back in their history and you can see these key wins that they had, these key steps or moments in time that got them there. And so that can kind of decompose that scary number into saying, look, somebody else got to that point. You know, here's how they did it. We're going to do it differently. But obviously they were able to achieve that goal. Same thing if you pick this hundred million dollar number. You know, I often with a team, they're like, no, that's way too big. How can I do that? Well, are there competitors of ours that have 100 million dollar relationship with the account? Oh, yes, there are three competitors that have that. Well, wouldn't you aspire to be at their level or beyond their level and how did they get there? Right. And so, once again, when you start walking through this, you actually find out that those competitors got there because they had some key wins, they had some key relationships, they had some, you know, major solution they put on the table. And now it's in the realm of reason. It's still scary, but it's in the achievable.

So the idea of not just visualization, but the idea of modeling. Right. So you're identifying somebody else that's done. It's kind of like athletics, right. You've identified somebody else, has been able to do something that you think you could never do, and you realize, okay, well, there are certain things they did to get there. I mean, some people are superhuman, but they did certain things. So we can follow that path if there are enough similarities, perhaps in the characteristics of our business. Correct. Let's get practical for a second. So I'm all kind of excited on how to do this. And how do you actually get the team started? And we've done a few of these sessions together, and they were different than a lot of account planning sessions that we did because we were asking the teams very different questions. But practically, how do you do this? Do you. Do you have to get everybody in a room? Because I always hear this question, do we have to get everybody together physically, or can we do this kind of stuff virtually? But it seems like you really need to get some cohesion in the team. And when you get people together, what steps do you go through? Do you come up with the idea in the first session, or does it take a little bit of work to get there in terms of just setting the vision and then starting to model out where you want to go?

Well, as you said earlier, this is visualization. So I'm a big fan of whiteboards. You know, you want to get in front of a whiteboard or in some. Some kind of collaborative drawing surface where. Where you can actually lay this end goal out, this end state. Right. It's in decompose it. Right. So think about what it would look like if you're. I'm just going to go back to the $100 million. If we're going to have $100 million relationship, what divisions would we be working with, what relationship we'd have? Relationship with the executive team, will we have? Relationship with the CEO, which divisions would we be working with? Start laying that out piece by piece on a whiteboard. You kind of stack it up of all the elements of that end state that would add up to where you want to be so to your point of getting everyone in a room, I think it has to be interactive discussion. Because what I find is once you put that big goal up there and you now start asking people for their ideas. Okay, so what would be that vision? What do you think our relationships would be? Oh, well, if we were that big of a relationship, we would have a relationship with the CEO, we'd have a relationship with the chief sales officer. Okay, great, let's put that up on the board so you can really involve the whole team in visualizing that end state, coming up with the items that are involved in that. And this has to be captured, right. You want to write this down into the account plan as that end state. Then as I was describing before, now we can start pulling it backwards to today and say, okay, if we need to get into these three divisions, ultimately, how are we going to lay that out over the next three years? Which divisions can we get into this year? Which one should we get into next year? Now we're working backwards from that picture, pulling it through the next three years or the next five years, whatever your time horizon is. And it's great to do visually on a whiteboard, but then you want to capture it into the account plan so that this interactive exercise you're doing with everyone, people feel like they contributed to it and they did. Right. It wasn't just something you put out there that everyone had to march to. And going back to what we were talking about with quotas, very little of that discussion is actually about numbers. A lot of that discussion is about solutions, product ideas that we have to bring to the table, relationships we need to have. And only a small part is what are the financial outcomes? And so I think by the time you get to that point now, you've kind of demystified a lot of that Big hairy goal is now in bite sized chunks that people can consume.

So I can imagine what people are thinking as they're listening to this. They're going, okay, this is going to take a lot of time to do this because this is a big exercise. Is it something that's more time consuming than doing incremental account planning, or is it just a way of thinking, how long does this take to do this? Is it a number of sessions and do you get through it in a month or two?

Well, no, I actually, I've done this with you a couple of times. Right. It's actually to me, much faster than the incremental plan. You could do it in one session. You know, the thought is that you Want to have this great brainstorming session and then you want people to go back and think on it a little bit, come up with more ideas, come back to it and then iterate, you know, do one more effort. But I don't think that this is a protracted month, you know, multiple month long scenario. It really is a couple of sessions. And, you know, if they're interactive enough, you give a little time gap for people to do homework, come back with some new ideas. You know, it really doesn't need to span more than two or three sessions, which actually to me is shorter than the iterative plan. Because the incremental plan is all about research and coming up with numbers and, you know, data and this type of thing, whereas this aspirational one is more, I mean, it's theoretical, but it's more inspirational, if you will. And so it's not about research and it's about picking everyone's brain and their ideas that are right in their mind rather than people having to go off and do months of research.

Yeah, it's almost like the incremental plan is what can we do when we're adding things up? The inspirational or aspirational account plan is, why couldn't we do this? And so you kind of separate from the current state, you separate from reality. So we talked a little bit about quotas, and I always try to separate that discussion as well between the quota setting and the account planning. When you go out five years and you pick that or three years and you pick that aspirational goal and then you back into that and you put a number to each year, the closer you get to current day, it starts to look a little bit more and more like a quota. Do people start to get antsy as it gets out to next year, what we have to do? And if so, do you, how do you separate that from. Well, that's not really going to be your quota because it's almost like, you know, you're opening up the kimono. And whoever's doing the quota setting, maybe it's you, right, or somebody else doing the quota setting. All of a sudden you're giving them all this information about what you think you can do, right?

Well, I think as you've talked about, quotas and goals are two different things. I mean, this is you're trying to set a goal for the account over the next three years, five year, whatever the horizon is. You're then trying to work backwards from that goal to create achievable steps. Each step should have a reasonable quota assigned to it. But I think that if you think about, I'll go back just to that Accenture example and say, okay, if Accenture has this great relationship with this customer, I always ask the team, well, how big is their team? Oh, well, they have 50 people working with the account. They have 10 people in this division, three people working the executive team on strategy. Okay, well, great. If we get to the same place they are, that's what our team is going to look like. And so it also separates that notion that you, as the one account owner, have to do everything, because if you actually can grow down this path, your team is going to grow, the quotas are going to be spread across a much larger set of people. And so it also then helps the internal planning to say, okay, if I can hit these tape marks, then I get more headcount, I get more resources on my team, I can grow my team and my relationship. And now you have a roadmap for that across that account plan as to how you're going to add more resources, how you're going to do that. So to your point, at the end of the day, a quota does need to get set, but it's being set based upon these reasonable incremental steps that now have been established and they should be achievable. If they're not achievable, you're not going anywhere. So you want to decompose to achievable steps. And then you would have a right size quota against that.

Yep. So we kind of turn the lights on and all the potential sandbagging as well. One thing you talked about, Glenn, is you talked about the customer and the customer's perspective. And you made a statement in the interview in the book, which I thought was great, which was that by setting an audacious goal, you get the customer to look at you differently. And you said something like, first thing they may do is look at you in disbelief, but also they pay attention to you, and they may look at you in a different light than they looked at you before. But describe a little bit about just the customer perception and how that changes and the customer involvement in the process.

Absolutely. Well, it's a real interesting phenomenon when you sit there with a customer and you say, you always start these meetings. What is your relationship with my company? If it's a brand new customer you're working with, and if you set that relationship just off of what you're doing today, then you get pigeonholed into that element you're doing today. If you start the conversation actually with this aspirational goal. And you say, look, we are working to be your number one partner. We're working to be in your top 10 partner. Said we're looking to be $100 million, 360 degree relationship with you. The conversation changes very quickly. They now become a part of the process. Right. And they say, wait a second. Well you want, you know, you're aspiring to be 100 million 360. What are you doing today? Well, here's what I'm doing today. Well, how are you going to get to 100 million? Well now you already have the roadmap. You just lay it out for the customer and you involve them in the process. Say, well you know, we're working with this one division today. We plan on working with these other two divisions next year. Can you help us get introduced to those divisions? It's also a feedback loop. If you put something on the table that's not reasonable, the client's going to tell you right away and say look, I don't think you should be focusing there. And they usually follow that up with. But I think you should focus here. So you get a very different reaction when you put that end goal out there. And now they're working with you to get to that end goal versus if I said I'm just one of a hundred partners that you currently have doing $5 million a year worth of business with you, you, you know, they think you're just looking for incremental work because that's what that statement talks about. But if you say, well we actually think that we can be a core strategic partner to you and this is the areas we think we can help you as a company. Now you've changed the whole notion and you've involved them in that end goal and you've involved in their mind in helping you get towards that. That's Steve.

So I know you've done this a lot of times. Give us one example where you went in and you did this aspirational account planning, the thinking big and where it made a big difference for the account. Without naming names.

Sure, sure. Well, we had a very large software company, one of the top enterprise software companies where they were about a million dollar a year account for us. We had done some work over a 10 year period with them, but it was in a very finite area, very focused value proposition to them. And we've made this audacious view that we're going to turn this into a hundred million dollar account. And that seems extreme. Somebody that you've been doing a million dollars worth of business with over a 10 year period. But what happened instantly when we started saying that, we said, well, what kind of engagements would we need to get there? And we, you know, we said we don't want to have a thousand, you know, engagements of 10 million a piece or a million apiece, right? We said we actually to be 100 million, we really need to have five or six engagements where we would be doing 25 million, 20, 25 million dollars a piece in those engagements. And so that process we were talking about was immediately put us into looking at large deals and what kind of large deals we could do took us into a very different part of their business. And, and once again in one of the first meetings with the head of their strategy group, we said this is what we aspire to do. And they were like, well, we've never done business with you, how do you think you can get there? Well, we see that we could do four or five transformational type impact engagements with you and that we would, you know, do one of those, you know, we, because we're new, we'll, we'll do one at a time and we will get there. That account in we actually built to 125 million over nine months. And so, and that was by doing three deals, one per quarter that got us to that point. And you know, it was setting that mindset that we were going to do large deals, impactful deals, working from the top down. That's another difference is we said we're not going to get there by working with their directors and VPs. We need to work with their senior leadership, figure out engagements in which we could deliver value in a large deal construct. And it didn't happen overnight. We went through six, seven, eight different opportunities before we landed our first opportunity. But once we proved that value proposition, now we've already set the stage of how we think that can replicate. And so we ended up doing one deal per quarter. And even to today we're still continuing to do more engagements and this account is growing at very large perspective. The other thing it did was by sending this end state that we said we want to be one of your core partners. The length of engagements was much longer. We were signing deals that were five, ten years in nature versus one or two year typical deals. And so it created longevity in addition to magnitude.

Beautiful. Last question. One piece of advice you would give an executive that wants to start thinking big, wants to start working on aspirational account planning.

So my advice is forget everything about today and just think about where do you aspire to be. Think about that end destination. If, if you are super, super successful, what would that look like? What I find is if you can forget about today and just think only about the end state for a moment, for an hour, two hours with your team, you'll see a radically different conversation evolve. But you have to give everyone permission to not rationalize off of today. That is the one thing that everyone does. They say, oh well, you know, we can't get there. It'll take us 20 years to get there. Forget about today. Just think about where you could be. And going back to your quota statement, you need to tell them, you know, we're not sending quotas here. We're trying to say what is the end goal that we want to get to. This is not a quota setting exercise. So forget about today, forget about quotas, think about where we want to be five years from now and just visualize that. Great.

Well, Glenn, thanks very much. Great insight. Thanks for sharing that with us. I found it inspirational, which is why we wanted to talk again. But thanks for your time today and thanks for joining us.

All right, thank you very much. This was wonderful. Take care.

So Glenn Hogelwarf is President of Enterprise Software and Consumer Business at Erisen. You can see your to do list as we move ahead into the next session. So go ahead and get the book. You can align your team on the book. It's on Amazon.com and you can also host a one day workshop, central Account Planning workshop. And the next session is going to be on April 27 about using the right structure. We're going to have Todd Abbott and Todd's EVP of Global Sales and Services at mitel. So thanks for joining us. Feel free to reach out if we can answer any questions for you.