Account planning is a great way to optimize your sales strategy. It’s an approach that can help you understand your customers and their needs, collaborate with others on your team, and set realistic goals for the future. This article will go over the benefits of using account planning in your sales strategy so that you can see how it might benefit your organization or company.
Allows for Targeted Outreach and Engagement
One of the most significant benefits of account planning is that it allows you to be more targeted with your outreach. Account planning helps you focus on the right accounts for your sales strategy rather than wasting time and energy on accounts that are not a good fit for your product or service.
Account planning can also help you be more strategic about engaging with customers. In the State of Sales 2022 report, LinkedIn found that 82% of top salespeople always conduct research before reaching out to prospects. The data they gather from research is what helps them stay on top of their game.
If you know enough about an account before reaching out to them, you can tailor your message to resonate with that specific customer or prospect. This results in a better response rate from prospects and clients because they feel their needs have been met by the salesperson who reached out to them!
Lead to a More Cohesive Team
The right account planning strategy will help your team be more cohesive, leading to a more productive and engaged group of people. Account planners often bring together all the stakeholders within a company or across departments within an organization. This can include salespeople, marketing teams, and customer service representatives who work with customers on an account-by-account basis.
Account planners also work with senior leadership within companies to ensure everyone is on the same page regarding how they approach their business development efforts at each step.
Account planning helps you build relationships with your customers by providing insight into what drives them. Hence, they’ll be more inclined to trust you and follow your recommendations. Also, you would be able to ensure taking the necessary measures that can encourage them to do so.
Help Improve Customer Retention Rates
Account planning can help you understand your customers’ needs and desires. This will allow you to give them better products, services, and experiences in the future. It will also help retain them as accounts because they will feel valued and appreciated by your company.
Demand Gen Report’s survey of companies that have adopted account-based marketing showed that more than half have successfully reached their goals, including faster sales cycles and stronger relationships with clients. Retaining accounts is vital because your business has more revenue coming into the stream than going out of it.
When you implement an account planning strategy, you focus on valuable customers. This gives you an insight into which customers to retain first. Hence, you get an advantage over others trying to retain every customer.
While keeping as many customers as possible is undoubtedly beneficial, it is a fact that you cannot retain all of them. Hence, it is best to leverage account planning and retain important customers first.
Helps You Better Understand Your Customer’s Needs
You need to know what you’re selling when trying to sell something. And when you’re trying to sell something to someone, you need to know what they want. The 2022 B2B Buyer Behavior Survey found that 68% of buyers would choose a vendor that demonstrates a stronger knowledge of their company and its needs.
How can you understand their needs if you don’t know your customers? If you don’t understand their needs, how can you meet them? And if you can’t meet those needs, why would they buy from you?
Account planning helps companies understand their customers’ wants and needs so they can develop strategies around them. It’s an essential part of any sales strategy because it allows companies to better understand their customers and the market in general.
Acquisition Costs May Be Reduced
When you consider the cost of acquiring a customer, it’s easy to see why the cost of servicing a customer is much lower. The first time someone buys from your business, they may have a good experience and become a loyal customer.
But if they never return, that’s money down the drain. On top of this, as customers become more familiar with your product or service offerings, their expectations increase. You’ve got to keep up with them by constantly improving your products or services, which costs too.
According to the Salespeople Perceptions and Top Performance Study, 71.4% of respondents said that 50% or less of their sales prospects are a good fit for what they’re selling. Account planning can help you target leads more likely to become paying customers than others.
When You Have a Good Sales Plan, You Can Set Reasonable Goals for Sales and Revenue
The HubSpot Global Sales Enablement Survey found that nearly four out of ten companies failed to meet their sales goals in 2020. When you have a good sales plan, you can set reasonable goals for sales and revenue. When your team has clear expectations of what is expected of them, they are more likely to succeed in their job. When it comes to account planning, the benefits are many:
- You can make sure your sales team is focused on the right things
- You can make sure your sales team is using the right tools
- You can make sure your sales team is using the right processes
Conclusion
Hopefully, this article has given you some ideas about incorporating account planning into your sales strategy. It’s a powerful tool that can help you reach your sales goals while also giving you the ability to better understand your customers and their needs.
With account planning, you can ensure that you sell to the right people at the right time. You’ll be able to identify potential buyers and know which products they may be interested in purchasing.
