As a B2B company owner, you may be familiar with strategic account planning. But suppose you’re not, here’s what it means. In that case, strategic account planning is an ongoing process to help you identify your target customers, prioritize which ones have the most potential and why they would benefit from buying from your company over others. Once you’ve completed this process, following through on your plan is essential. Here are some reasons that could make all the difference in growing your business.
Improve Company Profitability
When you plan a strategy for your high-value accounts, you can increase profitability by increasing revenue and decreasing costs. The best way to increase profitability from your high-value accounts is by increasing revenue and reducing costs. It can be done by:
- Targeting high-value accounts: Focusing on targeting the most profitable segments of your customer base will increase your company’s overall sales.
- Selling more products: By selling additional products or services to existing customers, you can lead them to make repeat purchases in the future.
- Selling more to existing customers: Selling more items per customer is another tactic that will help improve profitability because it increases transaction size over time without hurting customer loyalty or trustworthiness.
Use Strategic Account Planning for Planning and Forecasting
Strategic account planning makes it possible for you to plan and forecast. It helps you make better and more informed decisions and align your sales and marketing teams. Most top B2B businesses conduct their account planning in Salesforce for enhanced effectiveness. It makes it easier to define your most-valued customers. Moreover, it also ensures adequate sales revenue and income measurement.
You can then analyze how well you’re doing concerning your target revenue and income set for each client. You need a process in place that helps you forecast demand for your products/services at an account level and understand how much of the demand can be met by existing capacity. It will help you plan production, service delivery, customer service, and inventory levels.
Focuses on Growth of High-Value Accounts
The account-based marketing is expected to grow at a CAGR of 11.6% between 2021 and 2022. Strategic account planning focuses on the growth of high-value accounts. It helps you identify your high-value accounts. It then allows you to define the objectives of your plan, including what you want to achieve with those accounts.
Strategic account planning includes defining a target market for your strategic account plan and identifying customers’ pain points and needs. It would help if you also defined goals for each account to track them over time.
You’ll also need to create a unique selling proposition (USP) for each account that highlights what makes them special compared to other customers in their industry or category.
Enhances Customer Relationships
According to statistics, only 20% of B2B buying decisions are impacted by the actual product, and 80% are affected by customer experience. Customer loyalty is essential to any B2B marketing strategy because it helps build long-term relationships with existing customers and encourages them to buy again in the future. Businesses can increase customer loyalty by providing exceptional service after the sale. These include offering extended warranties, free technical support for a limited period after purchase, or providing discounts on future purchases when a certain amount has been spent initially.
Facilitates Teamwork and Collaboration
According to Gallup, a team that enjoys good collaboration and engagement will have 41% lower absenteeism, 17% higher productivity, and 21% higher profitability. As a company, you will be able to benefit from strategic account planning if your team can collaborate and communicate with each other. It means that not only do they have to work together as a team, but they also need to share information and ideas. The reason why this is important is that it enables companies to provide better service for their customers. The more informed a company’s employees are about customer needs, the easier it will be for them when serving those needs.
Conclusion
Strategic account planning is essential for selling, particularly in a B2B (business-to-business) environment. If you have not considered this step before, think about how you would sell your product or service.
The first thing that might come to mind is building a strategic partnership with the business customer. It will help them recognize how they can benefit from using your products and services and show them how it will improve their business processes and save them money and time.
If you’re looking to make a B2B sale, there are many things to consider. You need to know your product inside and out, be able to answer any questions the prospect may have about it, and understand how much value it will bring them. But one thing that is often overlooked is strategic account planning. Strategic account planning helps companies identify and target high-value accounts within their market segments to sell successfully in this environment.
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