Grow Your Key Accounts Checklist
By RAIN Group
Mike’s Note: I am on holiday through May and will reduce my workload by giving you sales blogs from authors that I have found to provide good solid sales productivity research. This blog by Rain Group is a comprehensive checklist to prepare you for advancing your key accounts. I have added my input to make this checklist more effective.
Use this menu of questions to drive your strategy and planning around growing key accounts.
WHAT DOES OUR SALES TEAM LOOK LIKE?
□ Do we have right people/resources on our team?
□ Do we have right people that can build relationships in key accounts?
WHO IS ON THE KEY ACCOUNT TEAM?
□ Who do we know? What’s our relationship strength for each key account stakeholder?
□ Who don’t we know that we need to?
□ Have we mapped out all account stakeholders across groups, departments, geographies, and personalities?
□ Do we know the decision making process? Do we have internal coaches to guide us?
□ Who are the decision makers, influencers and budget holders?
□ Do we have relationships high enough, at a senior, director level?
WHAT ARE THE TRENDS AFFECTING THIS ACCOUNT?
□ Who are their customers, markets and competitors?
□ What are the regulatory/political, economic, social, competitive, and technological changes taking place?
□ Are they about to face any changes that will alter the course of their organization?
□ What is this customer’s market dominance strategy in their market?
WHAT OTHER INSIGHTS DO WE KNOW ABOUT THIS ACCOUNT?
□ Major are changes in their strategy agenda, key staff?
□ What does our historical business with them look like?
□ What new strategies are they considering/adopting?
□ Have they bought or sold any other organizations?
□ Major product/service launches?
□ Changes with their competitors?
□ Their strengths, weaknesses?
□ Their opportunities, threats?
□ Root causes of major challenges?
□ What does our CRM tell us about the history of this account?
WHAT NEEDS DOES THE ACCOUNT HAVE?
□ Know their current explicit, stated needs? Unstated implied needs? Afflictions and aspirations?
□ What are their needs behind the need, or motivations to purchase?
□ What is the impact, ROI, and otherwise, of leaving needs unsolved compared to solving them? Before and after?
□ What is their agenda/strategy?
□ What are the agendas and needs across the organization’s divisions, geographies, and decision-making centers?
WHAT ELSE DO WE NEED TO KNOW?
□ What is the addressable revenue available to us in this account?
□ Do we think we could change their current vision of how to achieve their agenda? Or the agenda itself?
□ Are we thinking broadly enough about the account as a whole, and not just a series of opportunities? Do we have a three-year vision for the account?
□ Should we be working at enterprise-level? How?
□ Are there strategies we should stop pursuing?
□ Are we thinking too small?
□ Are we being honest with ourselves in our assessment of the account and growth possibilities?
□ If we implement our plan, will it achieve our goals and our account’s goals?
□ What should our pursuit intensity be for this account?
□ When we build our account plans, do we have challenges of implementation and accountability? If so, why? How can we solve them?
□ How are you and your sales manager collaborating and strategizing to win key accounts?
□ How could we bring our organization’s resources or collaborate with our other departments to bear for winning the account with added value?
WHO ARE OUR COMPETITORS?
□ What value are they delivering now?
□ Where are they trying to win business away from us?
□ Where do they have advantages over our offerings?
□ What are our exclusive features and benefits when selling against the competitors?
□ Do you have a probing strategy to guide the stakeholders to accept your exclusive feature/benefits?
□ Can we beat them? Win business away from them? How?
WHAT VALUE OR EXCLUSIVE BENEFITS CAN WE OFFER?
□ What value have we offered similar organizations?
□ How can we support their agenda with probing strategies that lead to our offerings?
□ Have we reverse-engineered our offerings to see if we can add value? Have we considered all offerings?
□ What value could we create or co-create over and above what we offer as existing products and services that meet needs of finance, productivity, image, order, service or safety?
□ Before we propose ideas, have we made a big-picture value case across resonate, differentiate, and substantiate? Is it strong enough, including ROI case?
□ How would the account measure our value to them now? Is it good enough? Any areas where we are not living up?
□ Beyond products and services, what could they value?
o The salesperson relationships with stakeholders?
o Customer service
o Insight/knowledge/perspective/strategic clarity
o Our brand, partnerships, network, technology
o Stability
o Locations/geographies
o Our commitments to specific principles (lean, innovation, quality, global, etc.)
o Other?
If you want to read the original Rain blog on their key account checklist, click here.