We’ve thoroughly covered many factors of account planning, such as setting goals and targets. But at the end of the day, account planning naturally evolves into creating a project, which falls into the realm of project management. A project is primarily made up of objectives. There are usually different people working on objectives, and each ...
Having ‘line of sight’ is the skill that will set you apart from every other sales leader. Some experts believe that a staggering 95% of employees in an organization are either unaware of or do not understand the strategy. No wonder execution fails! One of the biggest issues in any organization is the lack of ...
From my observation, the SaaS industry has greatly misled people over the years. It has prioritized lead and opportunity management over account management. This emphasis was echoed in nearly all CRM systems, and we at Pipeliner CRM fell into the same trap for a long time. Guided by both the industry and the CRM solutions ...
Another important foundational aspect of account management—and sales itself—is the handling of quotas and forecasting. From my observation, only a few companies manage the problems for quotas and forecasting well. This is because there are two groups with seemingly conflicting interests: the sales team and company and sales management. Salespeople say that quotas are too ...
The next aspect of account management we need to consider–one that is vitally important–is application integration. Digital transformation is definitely accelerating across industries, according to Mulesoft Research’s 2021 Connectivity Benchmark Report. This study was conducted with 800 IT leaders throughout the world. Of these, 77 percent say that failure to transform will impact revenue. Yet ...
Sales most definitely have two sides, and this is also true of account management. In his 2014 book Zero to One, Peter Thiel wrote, “In the 1990s, the focus was on the product, and not on sales. If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough. Technology is primarily about ...
An extremely important aspect of account management is the strategic aspect, the plans of dealing with various accounts. I recently discovered through research just how much of an impact real account planning can have on company success. 93 percent of all world-class sales organizations have long-term objectives with regard to their key accounts. In businesses ...
We explored the vital importance of account management in our previous article on account management—the idea being that obtaining new accounts is far more costly than maintaining and expanding existing accounts. How do companies hang onto accounts? In examining this, we find that the primary way is through innovation. You’ll be able to hang onto ...
Businesses are used to change, but change usually happens slowly and incrementally. Technology improves by steps year-over-year. Consumer behavior shifts gradually. 2020 was not that kind of change. The pandemic brought sudden, unforeseen, and significant changes in a single year. Companies around the world are still struggling to keep up and adapt to this new ...
Account management requires a totally different toolset and skillset than the capturing of new sales. It’s vital to any company involved with sales. Account Management Defined It’s a fact that maintaining and upselling an existing account is less difficult and costly than the winning of a new account. Yet account management still requires planning, resources, ...
