Selling in a Crisis

48Develop Account Retention Plans

In a volatile market, every account is vulnerable. However, some are more vulnerable to being lost than others.

Because you have limited time, you cannot focus your time and energy on all of your accounts equally. For this reason, you need to immediately rank your accounts from highest retention risk to lowest, and build a retention plan for each high-risk account. A best practice is to color code your account list:

• High risk = Red
• Medium risk = Yellow
• Low risk = Green

To ensure that you are focused on the right accounts, it pays to have a repeatable system to assess risk. I'm a fan of simple and visual. For this reason, I use a 9-box system for retention-risk analysis. This tool creates a snapshot of an account's specific risk profile.

Effective account retention risk analysis exposes weaknesses in your relationships, service, quality, and assumptions. It shows you where the door may be open to your competitors and helps you develop the right approach to retaining high-risk accounts.

The 9-box analysis tool helps you rapidly identify customers that you have the highest risk of losing so that you can develop a plan for mitigating that risk and retaining them.

• Rows: On the 9-box tool, the rows are risk indicators.
  • High risk: You are at a high risk of losing the account.
  • Medium risk: You are at an average risk of losing the account.
  • Low ...