How many accounts do you look after? How many of these require a strategic account plan? Are you based in the office or at the client’s office? What are you looking to achieve from developing a strategic account plan? In my experience, many If not all of, the books on strategic account planning go in to far too much detail for most sales people. In a previous job I had to design and deliver strategic account planning to a number of sales people in a large telecommunication company. My client had read up on the matter and wanted to jointly develop a SAM plan for the company. They saw the implementation of SAM plans as key to getting more out their customer base.

Even with desperately trying to get them to reduce the content of the plan, the resultant program was overkill, the plan was too big and everyone had too many customers to deal with to find the time or inclination for strategic account planning. If you have one account and you are based at the client’s site along with a whole team of people from your company then you probably have the relationship and the account to make strategic account planning worthwhile. Otherwise you need a scaled down version of the strategic account plan. You need something light and manageable and something that is going to add value to both you and your client.

We see account planning as a process of proactively identifying areas of the client’s business that you can add value. The client reads the plan and should be impressed with what you are looking to do for them. Therefore, it needs to be written with that in mind. Our Account Plan template is as light as we could have got – 4 pages plus the relationship analysis map – more detail can always be added. In addition, depending on the number of accounts you look after and what you are looking to achieve you may also need to move above account planning and look at territory planning. Again we have simple tools for this, ones that sales people find easy to use and they provide great benefit to them.

In summary, my experience says be careful that strategic account management is not overkill. The lighter, simpler and easier you can make it the more benefit it will deliver.

If you want a copy of our Account Plan template or Territory Analysis then feel free to contact me and I’ll email you a copy.

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