What does it mean to manage your account “like a business?” It means managing the account with an “account business plan” that provides a vision for strategic growth, and activating this plan as a guide to the actions you and your team will take to co-create customer value.

Like any effective business plan, this approach must ultimately result in revenue generation and account growth, but evolving your account planning process and account plan to this level of execution and impact can be challenging. Far too many people, even in the SAMA community, tend to regard the account plan as more of a data repository or “form,” an accountability document that they receive limited value from, yet find themselves investing significant time and effort into updating and keeping it current.

But there’s good news! If we adopt a different mindset about the purpose of our account plans and establish clarity as to the account planning levers or “pressure points” that must be identified and activated to discover, validate, activate, pursue, and capture these revenues, the account plan can become much more than just a “form” — it can and should be evolved into a proactive and predictable revenue generator.

In this interactive 60-minute working session, participants will select a strategic/key account and benchmark their execution of best practices that can enable account growth and revenue generation. As the model is unpacked, key areas of emphasis and discussion will include:

• Where will you look for account growth and revenue this year (value targets)?
• Who will you need to align with to ensure you have clarity and visibility to these value targets?
• Why do these value targets matter to your customer’s key stakeholders?
• Why do these potential growth areas matter to you and your team (How much is it worth)?
• What does success look like to these stakeholders, and what business outcomes do they expect?
• How will you pursue these potential sources of revenue, and whose help will you need
• When should you pursue these value targets, and how should you prioritize them
• What could potentially stop you (or impede your progress) and can these obstacles be removed?

Attendees will leave the session with an understanding of the revenue-generation model for evolving account plans — to identify and prioritize focus areas of growth that can be shared and strategized with their cross-functional account team members post-conference.