What is key account planning?

Every year the sales team is given a quota and is commanded to achieve it. At this point the Account Manager tries to figure out how he or she is going to achieve this quota. The Account manager can figure out based on history and his view for the coming deal.

For example Account A purchased 100K last year. They have similar needs this year which would lead to similar sales, so I plan to sell 100K again

Account B purchased 500k last year. What they bought is enough for them this year, although they may upgrade a couple of things for 150K so we plan to sell 150K

Account Managers can do that with all their current accounts, figure out what they can sell and if they need to find more customers, which as it turns out, is always the case.

These account plans will get more targeted quarter to quarter, month to month, with hopefully better strategy. 

Why should SEs be part of the account planning:

1- More turn over with sales people – SEs are more constant. 

2- In some cases SEs have more insight to the actual opportunity

3- SE are affected by the closing of the opportunities they are working on

4- provides guidance to SEs on what they should be focusing + following up on

5- ensure that the SE and the Account Manager are on the same page

6- SEs will be introduced a bit more on what salespeople do so if they ever want to transition to a pure sales role, they are exposed to the job. 

From The account manager perspective, why would they want the SE to be part of the account planning. 

1- 2 heads are better than 1. I always find it useful that I have someone to bounce ideas off of. 

Depending on the org, there might be weekly, monthly or quarterly account review sessions with the higher ups. SEs don’t have to attend these, but it would be nice if you attend on occasions.

2- SEs have a better view if the technical solution actually solves a problem. I’ve had situations where for some reason the account manager thinks that an opportunity can close however the technology might not be the greatest fit and would require some work to fit it. In the account manager’s eye it might be easy, if we do this, the customer would buy. They might not actually have a view of how hard the “if we do this part”.

3- makes sure that the vision is the same for the SE and the AM. Go after the same opportunities, attach the opportunities from different levels – while AE going after Manager, SE can go after the engineers.

Those are a bit different than just the key account planning a Salesperson might perform on his or her own. The goal of the upper management is to ensure that the salesperson is on track to achieving quota and that all their sales people are participating in the company hitting their target, and they want to make sure that if they report the information to the CEO or the board, that the information in the CRM is accurate. 

From the Account Manager perspective, I found that these meeting’s goals for them to defend that what they have in the CRM is accurate, and if they are not hitting their target for the period that there is a good reason (usually there isn’t a good reason) and to defend why they cannot pull some other opportunity into this period. 

If you’re an SE on that call be very careful. Usually you are there to observe, and might be called upon by someone from to verify what is being said. The Account Manager can ask for you to verify, i.e to back then up, or the upper management could be asking you to confirm the information being provided by the account manager is correct. There is a very fine line between throwing between being truthful and throwing the AE under the bus. That is the reason most AEs don’t want SEs on the call, and SEs usually don’t complain about that since they have better things to do. But if you want to see what the dark side looks like, it would be cool for you to attend in an observatory fashion. 

All this applies if the Sales Engineer is dedicated to 1 Account Manager or multiple Account Managers. It gets harder if there are a pool of SEs that support whoever needs them to support. This is the case with inside sales engineering and that team may not have any additional insights  

A question to those listening, have you participated in account planning in the past? Why or why not? Did you get any benefits from doing so? Comment below!