Case Study
Often, your most significant revenue opportunities are within existing accounts.
In the past 7 years, through our research and conversations with more than 100 sales leaders, we’ve learned that more than 60% of organizations list “increasing account growth” as one of their top three priorities. Yet most of these organizations experience underlying challenges that prevent the growth and retention they’re looking for.
Unclear and overlapping team structure, inconsistent process, and inadequate team skills lead to several common, potentially devastating issues:
- Too many people calling on the same client
- Low renewal rates
- Poor customer experience and satisfaction
- High turnover in large accounts
At the same time, when decision makers within large accounts are happy, sales teams can become complacent and miss out on the opportunity to gain competitive advantage and grow revenue through positive relationships.
The Effective Account Strategy
An effective account strategy ensures your teams aren’t driving away ideal customers, or leaving money on the table. It tailors to customer segment, needs, and lifecycle stage:
New
These accounts are still uncertain. Focus is on stabilizing, relationship development, proving value, and building satisfaction.
Grow
These accounts are established, but offer ample opportunity for additional growth. Focus is on strengthening and expanding relationships, and exploring new opportunities.
Nurture
These accounts are also established, but without significant opportunity for additional growth. Focus is on maintaining high levels of service and satisfaction and keeping competition at bay.
Retain
These accounts are on the brink of leaving. They may have just been acquired, be angry, or feel that their needs are not being met. Focus is on determining whether to invest in retention or to let them go.
Our Approach
We apply process discipline and tools that mobilize your team around the right activities for each account, then we identify skills gaps and help you upskill your team to do a better job of:
- Developing account plans and strategies
- Retaining existing business
- Qualifying new opportunities
- Accessing new levels of relationship within the account
- Engaging in the right conversations with account-specific value propositions
Then we identify and implement a management rhythm and oversight structure to ensure account owners are tracking against expectations and goals. This process helps ensure that your teams are making time investments appropriately, managing service levels, and effectively addressing the human issues of account management.
If growing and retaining accounts is on your “to do list,” contact our team to discuss your needs.
Team Member Highlight
Hope Eyre is a seasoned sales performance consultant who has helped numerous organizations apply strategic focus to their largest accounts. She has run countless account planning workshops and worked side by side with sellers to help them prioritize and drive dramatic growth in their most important accounts.
The Chronicles of Account Planning: The Lion, the Whip and the Chair
Everyone agrees that a well-prepared account plan is the key to selling, but they thoroughly loathe doing it. Hear from one of our sales effectiveness experts in this excerpt from the Symmetrics Group Blog.
