In sales, some accounts are simply more valuable than others. The 80/20 rule (aka the Pareto Principle) says that 80% of your revenue will come from 20% of your accounts and sales pipeline opportunities. Lose just one of those opportunities, and the impact could be enormous and have a trickle effect on your entire sales forecast. Your ability to maximize key account management becomes paramount to success.
About The Customer
This client, an international management and technology consulting company with revenues of more than $5.4 billion and employing more than 22,000 people worldwide, needed to secure some major business within very specific accounts.
The firm has been at the forefront of strategy and technology for more than 100 years and provides management and technology consulting and engineering services to leading Fortune 500 corporations, governments, and not-for-profits across the globe.
The Challenge of Key Account Management
The difficulty was that their sales team had no discernible way to manage these large sales opportunities differently. They merely treated every opportunity equally. If they stumbled across a major opportunity, the answer was to simply dedicate more company resources to the project to ensure a win. In the long run, it was ineffective and didn’t work.
The Ignite Selling Solution
This group needed to learn how to think more strategically and execute more tactically when it came to key account management in order to capitalize on a greater share of their customer base. We started by installing a strategic opportunity planning process that would allow the sales team to break down opportunities in a way that exposed dangerous assumptions and gaps in their capture plan.
Armed with a set of tools, we worked with the sales team to ensure that not only did they gather the necessary information when working with a client, but that they also could apply critical thinking skills to develop the right strategy for that opportunity. The client named the initiative Focus 14, ensured that sales and management targeted 14 of the most critical opportunities in their region.
The strategic opportunity planning process was implemented with the top 14 opportunities in each region. This plan enables the sales reps and managers to take a deep strategic dive into each of these opportunities to formulate a winning strategy. The tools we gave the team to implement forced the sales team to reassess their knowledge of the opportunity and challenge their assumptions.
Results and Return on Investment
Our focused efforts in key account management and planning helped the client increase revenue in the targeted account by 14%. This was significantly higher than all other accounts closed in the same period. Also, the sales team discovered that the Focus 14 opportunities moved through their pipeline nearly 25% faster. By putting a clear focus on a particular set of customers and providing both sales reps and sales managers a strategic opportunity planning process and set of tools, this company increased its overall revenue for the year by 2.5%, a huge number considering the average sales revenue of $4.5 billion.
To learn more about Ignite Selling’s work in improving key account management, contact our team today.