Never Say Sell

CHAPTER 11The Secrets of Diamond Account Planning

We have a friend who is a senior partner at one of the strategy firms that spun out of a Big Four accounting firm. She lives in White Rock, just outside of Santa Fe. She and her husband are big fans of Georgia O'Keeffe and she loves to paint the rich hues of Diablo Canyon and the Rio Grande at dusk in watercolors. Between hobbies, volunteering at church, and video chatting with her three grandchildren, she keeps busy. Her consultant days are over, but not so distant that she doesn't remember the annual budget thrash well.

Every summer, we were asked for our numbers as the organization built its budget and worked to reverse engineer earnings projections. Of course, we were asked to project our headcount and expense lines, but we were also asked to project revenues, which is hard.

It was hard because the “answer” came from on high.

We would get a mandate to increase key client accounts by a certain percentage, say 10%. Our job was to build a plan that would achieve that number.

We are talking to our friend by phone on a bluebird February day. She reports the skiing that morning at Taos was excellent and that she made short work of the four inches of new powder the hill had received the night before. She continues her story,

We would fly everyone who touched an account into a meeting space and the client account lead would lead us through an exercise where we would review the work we were doing, look at an organization chart ...