Strategic account planning is a sales and marketing practice that can help your business boost its sales and revenue. It involves setting goals for each account, analyzing the competition, and generating leads. It also encourages internal collaboration among departments to effectively analyze customer needs. Finally, each customer is strategic in helping you achieve your business goals.
Most multinational companies benefit from strategic account planning. According to data, almost 60% of companies believe that strategic account planning should generate 25% or more of the company’s revenue. It shows the significance of strategic account planning.
What is Strategic Account Planning?
Strategic Account Planning is a process that helps companies identify their most important customers and focus on them. The process helps companies find new ways to grow their business with existing customers. It also helps companies create better customer experiences, which increases customer loyalty. Strategic Account Planning ensures that your sales team has the correct information they need at the right time to successfully sell to clients who are critical to your business’s success.
As a company, you need to focus on your customers. You must know what they need and how you can help them get it. It is why you need to develop a new customer-centric account planning strategy that will solve one of the biggest problems facing customers.
It Helps Increase Up-Selling and Cross-Selling
Up-selling is the process of selling more expensive products to the same customer. Cross-selling is when you sell different products to the same customer. The purpose of both strategies is to increase your company’s revenue, but they differ in their approach.
Strategic account planning is a powerful tool for improving your sales performance. It helps you identify and capitalize on opportunities to increase revenue through up-selling, cross-selling and other strategies that can deliver significant results. Up-selling and cross-selling are two popular marketing tools that benefit e-commerce sales. According to sources, these tools can boost the average e-commerce sale by 10%-30%, while Amazon claims 35% of its revenue from up-selling and cross-selling.
Up-selling involves selling a more expensive version of a product or service that your customer has already purchased from you. Cross-selling refers to selling additional products or services that complement your current offer and appeal to your existing customers.
It Helps Generate Leads
Strategic account planning is a sales strategy that helps you generate leads and identify potential new customers. It also helps you target your marketing efforts and identify new opportunities, which can help you expand your market.
Generating leads begins when you first contact the client or customer by phone or email. This initial contact allows them to get to know who they are speaking with and what their company does, so they can decide whether or not they want to proceed with an actual meeting. If they do meet up, there’s another opportunity for generating leads. During this meeting, find out more about their needs so that when it comes time for recommendations on products or services, these will be tailored specifically toward solving those problems.
It Helps Analyze the Competition
One of the first steps in strategic account planning is analyzing your competition. It helps you understand how they compete with you and what they’re doing right.
It can be done through qualitative research, such as conducting interviews with customers or competitors, or quantitative data analysis, using competitive intelligence tools. Putting together this information on the strengths and weaknesses of competitors can help inform how to position yourself against them in the marketplace. For example: if you find that your competitor has a strong presence in your target market but lacks strong relationships with decision-makers. You can focus on building those relationships before trying to win over other areas where they have an advantage.
It Encourages Internal Collaboration
Strategic Account Planning encourages the collaboration of sales and marketing, sales and product development, and even between sales, marketing, and customer service. It provides a platform for collaboration between these departments since everyone works toward the same goal. The bottom line is that Strategic Account Planning can help you improve your internal communication so that your company can be more effective in serving its clients.
It also improves collaboration between sales, marketing, and finance teams because they all work together to achieve revenue goals. It means that each department will be aware of what the other departments are doing. It makes it easier for them to work together towards common goals instead of working against each other’s goals or agendas.
This Practice Sets Clear Goals and Strategies for Every Account
Your goals should be specific, measurable, and time-bound. It means that you should be able to tell what is needed to achieve the goal and how you will measure it when the goal must happen. If there is more than one goal, how does each one fit into the ultimate objective of achieving your overall business plan?
There are times when clients will insist on setting their own goals. However, those objectives sometimes conflict with your plans for growth within your company or industry.
It Helps in Identifying Customer Needs
Strategic account planning is a systematic process that helps businesses identify the needs of their customers and understand how to meet them. It also helps in identifying pain points and expectations, as well as wants and preferences, which can be used to create a better relationship with the customer.
In addition to identifying customer needs, strategic account planning ensures that these needs are met effectively. It means providing timely information or ensuring that products or services are delivered within an acceptable time frame.
It Makes Each Customer Strategic
Customers are the most crucial asset to your business. They are also the source of your revenue and growth. In addition, your customers know best what they need and can be key sources of referrals or information. In short, customers are everything for your company’s success.
Retaining an old customer is more important than acquiring a new one. Strategic account planning helps you frame strategies to focus on retaining older clients. A study has shown that retaining customers is 6-7 times cheaper than acquiring new ones.
Account Planning is a Win-Win for the Company and Their Clients
Account planning is a win-win for the company and its clients. It helps companies align their sales and marketing teams to focus on the most profitable customers, understand their needs better, keep an eye on competitors’ activities in the market, etc. Also, account planning allows small business owners to develop long-term relationships with their vendors without worrying about being taken advantage of or overpaying for services.
With strategic account planning, you can better understand your client’s needs, business operations, and goals. Then, it will help you better meet those needs in a way that mutually benefits both parties.
