The Second B2B Account Planning Stage

November 18, 2016 //

In the first B2B account planning stage, we covered the research you need to do to update the picture on all your important accounts.

The second B2B account planning stage is grouping.

You’ve profiled your key accounts, now you need to put them in the right groups. To do this, plot how much they mean to your business, now and in the future. Draw a 2-by-2 matrix on a whiteboard. The bottom side represents the relative level of current work you get from the account. The left side is the relative level of future work you can see coming from that account. This future work is a judgement call for where you see the relationship going, and based on your work in the first stage.

Where current work meets future work for a particular account is the place where that account sits on your 2-by-2 matrix. When you’ve done all the accounts, you’ll have 4 groups of accounts. Bottom left is your low current work, low future work grouping (hopefully not too many in there, especially if you’re looking at your main accounts…). The top right quadrant houses your jewels, accounts with a great current supply of work and great potential. The next most attractive group is the top-left section of accounts with lower current work but good potential, leaving your bottom right accounts which give you good work right now but where you see not much coming thereafter.

Two B2B account planning stages down, a bunch to go, but you’re making progress. Now it’s time to narrow your focus and place your bets.

Tags Account Planning, B2B, B2B Marketing, B2B Sales

Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

The First B2B Account Planning Stage

November 16, 2016 //

Where to start with theB2B account planning process? Well, at the beginning of course.

The first B2B account planning stage is the research. You need to do the homework on your accounts. You don’t want to do this kind of work on all your accounts. You need to pick the accounts which are strategically important, either because they are large, or because they could get large, or because their name carries weight and helps you market your business.

Once you have got your account list together, you need to update your knowledge in a number of areas:

Who are the key people in the account, and what are the reporting lines and lines of influence among them?
What have been their high level activities in the past year? Which industries, products, and do they have leadership or follower positions in those categories?
What revenue and profit figures have they done over the last 12 months? How are they faring as a business?

It takes time and effort to do your homework, but there’s no substitute for doing it. You have to get it done and it will pay dividends for you.

Don’t do all this yourself. Account planning is all about the team effort, so make sure you mine the information of all the people who work the account, both those in front of the customer and behind the scenes. This is where the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts.

Tags Account Planning, B2B, B2B Marketing, B2B Sales

Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

The B2B Account Planning Stages

November 14, 2016 //

I’m going to do a series of posts on the B2B account planning stages. It seems a good time to do the series. Any time’s a good time to do account planning, but it’s most commonly done in the final quarter of the current year, to make a plan for the following year.

Proper account planning is an underperformed and vastly undervalued facet of the B2B selling game. Statistics abound of the increased growth and revenues for companies that do account panning, against those that don’t. It makes brutal sense of course. If you fail to plan, and so on. Yet still companies don’t get round to doing it properly, or even at all. Amazing but true.

I’ve identified 8 discrete stages to the B2B account planning process, and I’ll devote a post to each stage. None of the stages is rocket science. You can devote many resources to each stage, or you can devote a few resources. What you put in, you’ll get back, if you do it right.

It’s very important that you follow a defined process. It’s nearly as important that you use software to help you plan and execute on your plan. Account planning is a team sport and software brings obvious collaborative and productivity benefits.

I hope you enjoy the series.

Tags Account Planning, B2B, B2B Marketing, B2B Sales

Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales

Get it Out There

November 11, 2016 //

When is a product ready? When is a project done? When is the document finished?

It never is of course. Nothing’s perfect in the B2B world. It can always be improved upon. It can always receive another iteration. We can always go round again.

Back in the heady dot com days of the late 1990’s, it was all about ‘ready, fire, aim.’ Look where that got us. In many cases it generated false hopes, over-inflated intentions and a lot of failed businesses.

But there’s still an important philosophical argument to be waged between the ‘it’s ready enough, get it out there and see how it goes’ and the ‘no, it needs more work, let’s put the brakes on and get it out late but better’. This inevitably creates tensions within the business.

The younger and more junior you tend to be in an organisation, the more you favour the former camp. Customers will tell us what they think. It’s time to ask them and then we can iterate accordingly, or so runs the argument. ‘Pick a point and go,’ as I’ve said before. The older and more senior you are, with more at stake, and more experience to back it up, the more you side with the latter camp. It’s not going out like this. I’m not happy. We can do better and we should wait, get it right, and offer customers a better experience, you might say.

Hmm, get it right, versus get it out there. When is a product right?

Tags Business, time

Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

500 Blog Posts

November 9, 2016 //

Hello. It’s Wednesday 9th November 2016. I know there’s been an important election, but I’m not focused on it right now.

This is my 500th blog post.

500. It’s a decent soccer or rugby win rate, a great test cricket score, a phenomenal baseball batting average. It’s a long book if you sew it together. I’m very pleased.

For the last 3-and-a-bit years, I’ve been sharing my ‘musings on stuff I come into contact with’, not caring that I finish my statements with a preposition. I’d like to think it’s a symbol of what I’m about; not quite iconoclastic, but certainly calling things and writing them the way I see them, without any sugar coating.

When I started this blog it was early September 2013. I had a little time and wanted to get into the discipline of writing regularly. I didn’t know how long it would last. I didn’t set myself a goal; maybe I should have. I’m surprised and delighted that I continue my Monday-Wednesday-Friday thing into a fourth year. I’m not quite in the Seth Godin league of 7-day-a-week pronouncements to the marketing masses for the last 7-plus years, but I’m still very pleased. My posts are generally longer than his short ones, and shorter than his long ones. I’ve always tried to go for consistency and occupy your attention for about 1-2 minutes, 3 times a week. I think that’s about the right level of intrusion for blog posts.

I’m conscious that this post has been almost all about me, which is something I always try to avoid, especially in the advice I dispense about marketing, sales, business and life. I think, however, that it’s OK to give yourself a pat on the back when it’s deserved, so I trust you will forgive this minute or 2 of self indulgence.

Tags Blog, Blogging

Categories Communication, Marketing, Sales

What Type of Account Manager Are You?

November 7, 2016 //

Account Management Coverage

What type of account manager are you? Is it something you’ve thought about? Account management coverage is a bit like a pyramid. Very large and important customer accounts are few and far between. Each account might have a number of people, a whole team in fact – looking after it, each of whom may take a specialist role. This is the n:1 approach, where the left side of the colon is the vendor or supplier, and the right side is the customer or buyer.

When I worked in sales effectiveness and sales training, I heard of one lady who was responsible for a team managing an account in the US pharma industry worth $10bn per year. That account was twice the size of the US sales effectiveness and sales training industry.

Some businesses work with large accounts, but they’re of a size where one dedicated account manager can serve that account himself or herself, full time. This is the 1:1 relationship.

Then there’s the other accounts which make up the vast majority of business. These accounts are sufficiently small that 1 person can manage them as a portfolio of multiple accounts. Sometimes this means 5 accounts, and sometimes it can be as high as 500. It depends on how strategic or tactical the accounts are, and how proactive or reactive your approach is. This, as you might have guessed, is 1:n account management and it probably accounts for most of the account management roles that people fulfil.

It’s important to think abut account management coverage this way because it helps identify the priorities that govern your company’s business, your time and your focus.

Tags account management

Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Account Based Marketing without the Right Tech

November 4, 2016 //

In a previous post, I covered how Account Based Marketing, with the right technology like web personalisation software at your fingertips, threatens to become new ‘truth’ in demand generation. When you know who a visitor is as they come to your website, you can dynamically serve them up relevant, timely content, which is cool. You also improve your engagement and conversion rates, which is cooler still.

But how do you do this if you don’t have or can’t afford the right technology?

Account based marketing without the right tech becomes low tech, or old school. You have to go back to basics. First, you need to select the target accounts that you want to win. These accounts should be with a specific segment or segments, rather than the product of a scattergun approach. You’re not going to win them all. In fact, you should target maybe 5 to 10 times as many as you’re looking to win. Then you need to do some basic research into all of them, as follows:

Who’s the decision maker and budget holder?
What’s their email address, and social media handles if you can find them?
Who else is on their team?
What are they trying to do with their business? What are their goals?
What’s stopping them from achieving their goals?
How can you help them overcome this barrier?
How can you demonstrate you’ve done it for other businesses that they can relate to?

Armed with this information, you can design tailored information for them based on their circumstances, industry, personality and stage in the buying process.

Where the right tech enables you to go to war in an automated fashion, on this traditional battlefield your weapon is the trusty email. People will open emails and act on them if they present actionable content that’s relevant and compelling. Then you need to nurture their interest with further, well-timed emails that guide them through the buying process and the starting point of getting where they want their business to be.

Tags Account Based Marketing

Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy, Technology

Account Based Marketing with the Right Tech

November 2, 2016 //

Account Based Marketing is like a cross between Account Planning and marketing. Instead of marketing to everyone and then qualifying the leads in your funnel to focus on the target leads, you do the qualifying up front, selecting the companies you want to work with, strategising on where and how they might need your help and targeting them with personalised messages.

Thanks to something called web personalisation, you can take a lot of the leg work out of your in-funnel marketing. You can automate the assets you deliver to certain people depending on the type pf person they are and their stage in the buying process. Web personalisation software uses functionality called reverse IP look-up, allowing you to know a lot about a website visitor, like industry, company size, and so on.

If you also recognise this visitor as one of your target accounts, then you can literally present customised web pages to them on the fly. Which is nice.

This is very powerful, and, understandably, has got a lot of people excited about more focused, higher return marketing investments.

Remember, though, that Account Based Marketing is not a silver bullet. You should do it in parallel with other more ‘traditional’ demand generation activities, because you need a good spread of differently sized opportunities for a healthy, forward-moving pipeline.

Tags Account Based Marketing

Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy, Technology

Ohio

October 31, 2016 //

Ah Ohio. A heart-shaped state in the middle of the US that you probably don’t know too much about. On eastern time but still a lot of driving hours (probably 18 or so; never done it) west of New York City.

I spent two-and-half years living in Cincinnati, which is nestled in the so-called tri-state area of south-west Ohio, south-east Indiana and north-west Kentucky. Strangely enough, I never visited the state capital Columbus, or the northern metropolis of Cleveland, which was probably a mistake, and certainly an oversight.

I had a great time there. The mid-west is pretty different to the East Coast and West Coast. It’s fairly conservative and traditional in its outlook. It’s often accused of being late to things. There’s a famous quote, attributed to mark Twain and several others, that when the end of the world comes, it’s best to be in Cincinnati as it’s always ten years behind the times.

What’s more interesting is that Ohio is actually a microcosm of the US. The US is not California, New York or Florida. Ohio is a reflection of the whole of the US in terms of demographics, like race, age, religion. It’s also one of the so-called swing states in US Presidential elections.

As you might expect of a national bellwether (no, I thought it was spelled weather too), Ohio has voted for the Presidential winner every year since 1960. As I write this post, Hilary Clinton is comfortably ahead in the Presidential polls, nationally speaking.

But not in Ohio…

Categories General

On Being Content

October 28, 2016 //

It’s all too easy, all too often, to feel like we’re on a treadmill, sucked onto the conveyor belt of the myriad bits and pieces we need to do in work and out of work. It’s easy to get frustrated. I know I do.

But then I think about my own personal situation. I’m not one of the infinitesimally small portion that owns half the global assets in the world, not by a long chalk. But I was born into an English-speaking environment, which helps in an increasingly shrinking world.

I was also born in the second half 20th century, in an era of unprecedented technological advancement, in a country with a plentiful supply of food, drink, education and utilities, most of the time.

I live in a first world country in a particularly peaceful and settled corner of the planet, especially when you look at other less fortunate areas.

I have a job, with an income, and a roof over my family’s head that I can afford to maintain and stock every month. I can’t afford to do many of the things I want to do with my home, but then that’s like painting the Forth Bridge.

So does that put me in the top 20% of the top 20% of the top 20% of the world’s 7 billion inhabitants? Possibly. That’s a lot to be thankful and happy for.

I’m fortunate, and should be content. A lot of us are pretty fortunate, especially if we have the time and access to write or read this post.

It’s all relative, really.

Tags Happiness, Relative

Categories General

The Second B2B Account Planning Stage

The First B2B Account Planning Stage

The B2B Account Planning Stages

Get it Out There

500 Blog Posts

What Type of Account Manager Are You?

Account Based Marketing without the Right Tech

Account Based Marketing with the Right Tech

Ohio

On Being Content

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