There is frequently a contradiction between the importance that sales leaders profess they place on account planning and their actual behavior. While recognizing the tremendous value that can accrue from this important sales discipline, they habitually revert to type and look for the deal they can close quickly. The greatest evidence of this is the lack of account penetration most companies achieve in their existing accounts.
Your goal, as a seller to large accounts, is to find opportunities across all of the divisions in the company where each of your solutions can be applied to solve problems for your customer. Of course it is not always the case that your customer needs everything your company sells, but in most cases, most sellers leave a lot of ‘white space’ in the account.
In the graphic above, you can see a representation of white space analysis for an account. The company divisions are represented in the vertical column on the left, and across the top is an example of a set of solutions the seller can provide. The job of the seller is to identify, and then solve for, the white space in the account; those opportunities to sell to more divisions, or to sell more solutions. According to the participants in the Account Planning Book of Evidence, solution penetration is quite weak. In fact less than 36 percent of companies sell more than half of their solutions to each customer.
This might at first appear to be bad news. The company has invested in developing a set of complementary products, all probably targeted at similar customer profile, to solve related problems – but the seller is only selling a small subset of the solutions. The company is not getting the return from the complete product development effort, but even more critically, if the seller does not solve the problems for their customer, the door is open for competitors to step in and gain a foothold in the account. However, there is a considerable silver lining in this cloud. The opportunity is tremendous.
From other analysis in the Account Planning Book of Evidence, we know that Win Rate, Deal Size and Sales Cycle are all better in existing accounts, and account planning materially improves these metrics. Similarly, examining the white space in an account to find new opportunities materially impacts the last of the sales velocity metrics, the Number of Deals.
For enterprise B2B sales, account planning is proven to grow pipeline by building the number of opportunities more effectively than any other investment in marketing. To illustrate that point, we looked at the responses from the providers of Very Complex solutions. In this case when account planning is fully operationalized, solution penetration goes up by 69 percent.
It is interesting to note that for Very Complex solutions, being only partially committed to account planning doesn’t work. This is likely due to the increased risk buyers perceive when purchasing a solution whose complexity demands a fully trusted partnership with the supplier. There are no shortcuts – and suppliers should fully commit to account planning if they want to maximize their return.
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Donal Daly is Executive Chairman of Altify having founded the company in 2005. He is author of numerous books and ebooks including the Amazon #1 Best-sellers Account Planning in Salesforce and Tomorrow | Today: How AI Impacts How We Work, Live, and Think. Altify is Donal’s fifth global business enterprise.