Growing a business is a lot like growing a tree. It requires constant attention, nourishment, and pruning to ensure it grows up straight. Your account planning process is no different. If you’re not careful, your strategy will be overgrown with weeds, twisty roots, and dead branches that prevent it from reaching its full potential.
According to HubSpot, the top two tactics used by account planning marketers are finding key accounts and identifying target contacts. However, there are some B2B account planning mistakes that they are bound to make. Here are the top B2B account planning mistakes to avoid.
No Alignment with the Sales Plan
The first step in creating an effective B2B account planning process is to develop a sales plan. According to Rain Group, need and budget are the two deciding factors for all customers, which is something to consider when developing a sales plan.
A sales plan is a high-level strategic document that outlines the company’s goals, objectives, and strategies for the year. The account manager should work with their team on developing this document with input from stakeholders across all departments and key partners within the organization.
The sales plan will help you determine your target accounts and where they fit into your broader strategy. It also allows you to set clear goals for each account, such as the number of wins per quarter/year, revenue targets by quarter/year, etc.
Not Understanding the Customer and Market Landscape
The customer and market landscape are critical to account planning. Understanding the customer’s needs, wants, motivations, and the market is essential. It’s also necessary to examine how these are changing over time. For example, 46% of consumers shopped only online during the holiday season of 2021, according to Jungle Scout.
This information can help you anticipate changes in behavior that affect your offerings or approach. For example, you may discover that customers are becoming more cost-conscious. You should invest more resources into developing lower-cost or subscription-based solutions rather than continuing with your existing model of selling one-time licenses at high margins.
Lack of a Clear and Objective Statement of Purpose
A clear and objective statement of purpose is the key to success in account planning. It can help your team align around a common goal, set priorities, and measure progress.
Without a clear statement of purpose, you may find that you have multiple teams working on the same project or competing for control over a client’s budget split across various silos within your company. It’s not unusual for companies to have different departments compete for clients. And even worse when that competition harms relationships with customers by creating internal conflict over budgets and resources.
You should be able to clearly explain what you do so others understand why they should work with you instead of someone else. Having this clarity is especially important if you are meeting with new prospects or trying to convince existing customers why they should continue working with your organization instead of switching providers at some point down the road.
Too Many Goals, Too Many Plans
It’s a common misconception that having a lot of goals and plans will help you achieve them. In reality, the more goals and plans there are, the harder it is for you to achieve them. The same logic applies to B2B account planning. Too many goals can be distracting, while too many plans may overwhelm your team with work that needs to be completed.
In addition to making progress on all of your key initiatives, it’s also essential for your organization to maintain an accurate picture of where it stands in terms of reaching its objectives.
Insufficient Collaboration with Key Stakeholders
In the account planning process, collaboration is crucial. It can mean getting stakeholders on board with your goals and objectives or working with sales leaders to ensure they are aligned with your plans. The goal is always to ensure your organization’s efforts align with how each stakeholder wants the account to be treated.
Stakeholders may have ideas about better reaching their audience that you might not have considered otherwise. And they know what type of messaging works best for them, so why not take advantage of that knowledge?
As a marketing leader, you can get stakeholders involved in your plan by hosting brainstorming sessions where all key players come together and share their thoughts on how best to engage this particular client segment over time. You could use this time as an opportunity for everyone in attendance to weigh what will work best from both a messaging and an execution standpoint.
No Metrics or Targets to Evaluate Success
The best way to ensure that your account planning efforts are successful is to clearly understand what success looks like and what it doesn’t. It requires setting metrics and targets with your team, which means accurately understanding how much money you want to make in the next year, quarter, or month.
Once you’ve set these goals, keeping them realistic is essential. If your business goal is 100% growth over last year’s revenue, it will be difficult, if possible, for most companies. Setting achievable and challenging goals will motivate all stakeholders on the team.
Lack of Accountability for Results
Accountability is the quality of being responsible or answerable for one’s actions. When an individual is accountable, they are willing and able to accept responsibility for the results of their own decisions and choices. You can quantify accountability by measuring how much each team member has contributed toward achieving results.
Conclusion
There are many different types of account planning mistakes that you can make in your business, and they all depend on the situation that you’re in. Sometimes, these mistakes are easy to fix, and sometimes they require serious re-adjusting of your strategy. The important thing is to know what these mistakes are so that you don’t make them yourself.