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For Sales Pros:
“You Can Always Sell More, If You Can Get a Jump on Your 2008 Account
Plans”
Listen
It’s January…the beginning of 2008! Even if your business is on a fiscal
year and this isn’t the official beginning of your selling year, it’s still
the beginning of what your customers and prospects are going to be expecting
from you over the next 12 months. How organized and structured are your
selling plans and processes for this coming year?
The sad reality is the vast majority of sales people have no significant
plans or processes thought out and organized for their coming year, even for
their best accounts! How much of 2008 do you have planned out, organized and
ready to implement?
How many moves ahead are your toughest competitors thinking? Is there any
potential that out-thinking and out-planning your competitors could help
increase both your competitive advantage and selling success in 2008?
Suggestions to Out-think and Out-plan
Your Competition.
If this is the first time you’ve worked on full year account planning then
you might want to start off only developing detailed plans for your top
three to five accounts. If that planning goes well, you can always expand
your planning to include more accounts later.
The first suggestion is to keep it simple. We’re not talking about 20
page detailed plans for each account. We want to focus on the “big stuff”
for these top customers or prospects. You can develop an effective plan for
the entire year on just a single page.
Using one page per customer, draw five vertical columns on a sheet of paper.
The first column on the left side of the page will be the categories of
support efforts you’ve planned for this customer. Label the next four
vertical columns “Quarters" one through four. Developing a plan for each of
this year’s four quarters can still allow you to develop a comprehensive,
multi-stepped support and selling plan for the entire year while still
giving you some implementation flexibility as your year progresses.
Draw eight to 10 horizontal rows down the page so you can list and organize
your various account support and selling plans. Each industry has support
categories that are unique to their business. But general support categories
to list into these horizontal rows (one category per row) might include
things such as “Increasing usage of products already being purchased (from
us),” “Plans to improve my profit margins,” and “Social/relationship
building efforts.” Another horizontal row could be “New products to
introduce.”
Selling today involves more than just the efforts of the sales rep. So how
about adding a row for “Engineering and technical support services”? What
about “How to get ‘Higher, wider and deeper (within the account)”?
This is a great time to utilize the expertise of the rest of your team to
identify all the major support efforts your best customers should frankly
already be receiving.
Once you’ve organized your one page account planning form you now want to
organize your plans to support and grow each of your top accounts.
Developing a solid plan for the year…and then actually following it can put
you ahead of most competitors going after the same business.
Share your full year support plans for your top accounts with your manager
and the rest of your sales team so all can benefit from the planning and
creativity of your entire team. Your sales manager can also help gain the
support and involvement of the rest of your company to your new level of
ongoing support and selling.
Having an organized plan for your most important accounts will help you
think and plan more moves ahead than either your competition or your
customer.
Out-thinking and out-planning your competitors can also help you become more
proactive in your selling efforts. Customers tend to be more impressed and
satisfied with your involvement and their relationship with your company
when they see your ongoing support spread across the entire year.
Look how ineffective it would be if you did significant support efforts for
the first quarter, but then did nothing else for the rest of the year.
Thinking, planning and implementing an organized full year plan can provide
the structure and the presence for you to increase your competitive
uniqueness and market differential. So is now the time for you to start
developing your plan to out-support and out-sell your competition?
For Sales Managers:
“Increasing Your Sales Leadership Skills, Is Your Team Ready To Out-Sell
Your Competition in 2008?”
Listen
Is your sales team
ready for 2008?
How much planning and organizing has each sales rep already completed for
their entire territory, or at least their top three to five accounts?
This month’s sales article talks about how to develop a simple full year
organization account plan for your rep’s most important customers. A
critical job for you as their sales coach is to help lead them through these
support planning efforts.
The majority of sales people, even the more experienced ones still tend to
think and plan only one move or call ahead. Your job as their coach is to
now get them thinking and seeing their territory as a multiple stepped full
year selling process.
How Consistent Are Your Customer Support Efforts?
You have two important goals this time of year as the leader of a sales
team. Your first goal is to make sure each sales rep develops a realistic
full year support and growth plan for their most important accounts.
Having a thought-out full year support and growth plan can help contribute
to a stronger competitive advantage and differentiation in your markets. A
sales rep implementing a full year’s multiple stepped account plan appears
to customers to be more organized and more proactive in their support
efforts. An organized sales pro following a thought-out plan also tends to
be perceived as being more interested and committed in their customer’s
business and to be more caring and professional.
An additional goal this time of year is to insure your sales team’s efforts
are consistent and effective. You’ll most likely see a wide variance in both
the completeness and quality of the planning done by each rep if they all go
off to individually develop their support and growth plans.
Your job as their leader is to make sure all the developed plans are
reasonable, complete and balanced. How much support and service does a
customer deserve to receive? Consider organizing your top customers into a
few categories based on either gross sales or profitability. Also identify
how much support a customer at each major level should be receiving. How
many days of technical training or how many visits from a senior manager
does a customer deserve in a year if they’re annually purchasing a million
dollars from your company?
You need to make sure your team is maximizing their offers of support to
their best accounts, but still offered so that customers at a similar sales
level will also receive similar support. If you allow each individual to
decide support levels for their accounts then fairly quickly you’ll notice
some favored customers will be receiving twice the support for the profits
they contribute while other, more profitable, accounts are being
under-supported.
Suggestions To Help Lead Your Team.
Meet with your team to develop your plans for your most important accounts
in 2008. Start off by helping your team develop the full year support form
discussed in the sales article.
Identify several sales volume or profitability levels for your larger
accounts and discuss what types and how much support each level should be
receiving.
Next take an inventory of the support volumes your company can actually
provide. No company has unlimited resources available to support and grow
their customers. It doesn’t make sense for everyone to be including days of
technical training for all their accounts if you don’t have the technical
personnel in place or available to actively work and train your customers.
Have your reps share their account plans with the rest of your team so all
can learn as well as offer additional ideas and suggestions to help improve
their fellow rep’s account plans.
Once these plans are finalized consider summarizing all of the support
requests into a single list so you can discuss your team’s support
requirements with the individuals responsible to ensure they can and will
support you to the levels your team needs.
Your job as a sales leader is not to do this critical account planning for
them. They need to own their plans if you want them to actually follow them
to success. Your job is to help them organize, standardize and then focus
the support available from your company so your entire team maximizes their
sales volumes and profitability over the full year.
We know you're good as the leader of your team. Now the question for this
month is..are you good enough to lead them through the development and
implementation of a plan to out-think and out sell your competition?
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