Essential Account Planning: 5 Keys for Helping Your Sales Team Drive Revenue

Chapter 4

Create the Habits

Several years ago, I worked with a communications hardware company on its account planning strategy. It was not the company’s first attempt at account planning, nor its second or third. This company had tried and failed to establish an account planning practice for nearly a decade.

This was a company of engineers, and its biggest problem was that they were too smart. Each time the account planning process was announced, individual teams began to tweak the documents, the process, and the communications. Almost everyone offered “improvements,” and the end result was an account plan that was so involved no one had time to complete it. And I heard more than a few complaints from leaders that they couldn’t follow the plans ...