Account Goals: It's Not Just About The Money
If you’re in sales, just to make money, you may not be as successful as you would like to be.
Sure you may hit your numbers, but the real value in what you do should be how much your product or service helps your customers. When you do the right thing by your customers, you build long-term relationships within the account and raise your profile. To truly assess your effectiveness, have you considered how you are setting your account goals?
To ensure long-term success in your accounts, you need to think beyond the revenue goals. Make sure you include:
Relationship Development Goals:
People are an integral part of success for any organization, and this holds especially true for account management. If your account plan has any chance of success, you must factor in relationship development goals. People relate to people, it’s that simple. If an account is going to reach its maximum potential, then there must be a plan to gain access to or strengthen relationships in and around your accounts.
These include:
- Customer relationships: Who do you need to gain access to and how? What existing relationships do you need to improve or strengthen and what actions will you take?
- Colleague relationships: Who inside your own company do you need to proactively engage and build a relationship with to help you with your account(s)?
- Partner relationships: Which business partners will you work with on this account and what activities will you conduct to strengthen these relationships and engage them in your account(s)?
And don’t limit your relationship goals to the business functions you are comfortable with. Challenge yourself to develop a multi-stakeholder strategy. This approach increases your chances of success within the account.
Enabling Customer Success Goals:
These are goals revolving around helping your customers achieve their goals. These can be related to the value you promised your clients during the buying journey as well as initiatives and outcomes your customers are trying to achieve. There are two words of caution with these account goals:
#1: You cannot make the customer's goal your own goal, because there are too many factors outside of your control. You can have actions and state your goals in a way where you are supporting them in achieving their goals.
#2: You have to think ahead of time about what you're promising your customers and make sure you can deliver on it. If you're selling product A and you're telling your customers it can save millions of dollars, it better deliver on that promise or you are unlikely to see that customer come back for future purchases.
Expansion Goals:
The third category of goals you should have in your account plans is related to the advancement of your company’s status and your own status inside the account. This applies to existing customers as well as new ones, and whether there are active opportunities or not in the account. These goals include activities around; increasing your company’s brand, expanding your product footprint, and raising your own profile in the account so that they know who you are and what you’re about.
And finally, Financial Goals:
Financial goals are always part of account planning but should not be the only metric for measuring the success of your selling and relationship strategies. With that said, closing an opportunity is not an account goal, it's a strategic tactic to achieve your financial goals in the account. Financial goals aligned with the other three goal categories will increase your chances of creating sustainable growth in your accounts.
Your account goals are integral to your account plan. The better you define your goals, the better you can serve your customers, coordinate your team, and drive growth in your accounts.
Do you want to get a better idea of how to set account goals and how to build world-class account plans? We can help. Contact us today to help you start better defining the health of your account plans and addressing some of the many challenges that you face in establishing effective account management.
