Do you have a plan to grow revenue from your Fortune 5000 accounts? With ClyTel you can create one now.

We are Sponsoring SAMA’s 47th Annual Conference by admin
Apr 26th, 2011

According to SAMA’s biennial research survey, “Trends and Practices in Strategic Account Management,”only one in five SAM leaders say that their strategic accounts are being executed effectively. And guess what? It’s those accounts that grow the most. That’s why SAMA is focusing their 47th Annual Conference on execution.

We are very proud to be a SAMA 47th Annual Conference Sponsor and Tech Lab speaker. We’ll be doing our share on helping SAMs focus on execution by discussing best practices and case studies around creating, managing, and executing effective account plans in the cloud.

To learn more about the conference and our presentation, click on the link below:

https://www.strategicaccounts.org/events/2011/conference/techLabs.php

Our session is on Monday May 16, 2011 at 5 PM EST. If you’ll be in Orlando with us, we hope you’ll attend.

Getting Great Returns from Account Planning Software: The Importance of Implementation by admin
Aug 9th, 2010

When it comes to account management software, what makes the difference between a great revenue booster and an average system? Like any tool for improvement, strategic management software must be well implemented to provide the best ROI. Well-designed software makes effective implementation much more likely by taking real users into account. From that perspective, here are some specific features of top account planning software.

• It’s user-friendly. The programming supports beginners and advanced users alike. Account team members can easily refer to sample account plans. Templates and a wizard are available to automate the planning process. The wizard includes helpful videos and text guidelines, and it can even offer suggestions in response to the data being entered.
• It evaluates account plans. Effective software supports its own implementation by generating usage reports. These indicate not only how complete the account plans are, but also how strategic they are. For instance, it could highlight that employees tend to neglect a planning section assessing the company’s relationships with various decision makers or reflecting on clients’ unmet needs. Project managers can use these data to identify specific shortcomings and provide targeted employee training as needed.
• It blends in. Software is also more likely to be implemented if it’s integrated with existing computer programs and protocols and improves upon them. For example, employees who are accustomed to using PowerPoint appreciate account software that automatically generates PowerPoint files of their strategic plans. Software can also simplify account managers’ work by automatically emailing team members when plans change and new actions are assigned.
• It’s flexible. The best account planning software lets companies easily update their planning processes. Plans can be changed quickly and easily in response to adjustments of company goals or feedback from account teams. This flexibility can be the key to company-wide acceptance of a new system.

In sum, software is only as good as its implementation. Software designed with implementation in mind can make the difference between a mediocre account management program and a well-received revenue booster.

Q: Should my company be using account planning software? by admin
Aug 3rd, 2010

A: Account planning software can accomplish previously time-intensive tasks with the click of a button. But would automated account planning be valuable to your business in particular? As the following examples suggest, this depends primarily on the scope of your project.

Scenario 1: Large Company, 50 Relevant Accounts

In our first example, a large company wants to manage its top 50 accounts with an automated system.

Without Software

Presently, strategic plans for these accounts are created one-by-one during an annual facilitated planning session. Documents are later emailed for revision, and PowerPoint presentations are exchanged to share data. What benefits could an automated account planning system provide?

With Software

The primary benefits in this situation would be searchability and automated data extraction. In other words, account management software could quickly search account plans, pull data, and generate reports. Without this automated option, a business analyst would need to review each account, extract key information, and synthesize the data in a report. But this traditional approach might suffice; it might simply come down to comparing the value of the analyst’s time with the investment in software.

So, for just 50 strategic accounts, it might not be cost-effective for a company to invest in management software. Account management software’s primary benefit is its scalability. If it won’t be widely applied, then it might not be so valuable. However, the company might find that other benefits make the software investment worthwhile.

Other Benefits

• Automated at-a-glance account histories
• Automated PowerPoint reports
• Simplified online collaboration and file sharing
• Account-relevant news updates from major publications

In the next example, these features combine with the scope of the project, make the software even more valuable.

Scenario 2: Large Company, 2000 Relevant Accounts

In our second example, the same company wants to expand its strategic management system to encompass not just 50, but 2000 accounts. The scalability means that automated account planning would likely deliver high returns.

In the first example, the top 50 clients represent a large proportion of the company’s revenue. It could therefore be justified to have a business analyst focus on each account with a more time-consuming approach. In contrast, the second example adds a lower tier of accounts. These are smaller clients for whom individualized facilitated sessions cannot be justified. But when each of these 1,950 accounts is exposed to some degree of low-maintenance account management through the automated system, chances are good that some will become bigger players. In this scenario, account planning software could bring a great ROI.

Account Planning: What Fortune 1000 Execs are Saying by admin
Jun 28th, 2010

The results are in! ClyTel recently commissioned a survey of Fortune 1000 senior executives. Our questions focus on account management and the practices used to retain and grow revenue with top clients. Survey results suggest that account planning has become a priority among the majority of leading companies. Here are some key takeaways:

• Executives report that on average below 25% of their accounts are currently managed with account plans.
• Almost 80% report that their sales executives look favorably upon developing account planning for more clients.
• Companies are taking various approaches to managing this new type of relationship with critical accounts. About 33% report using customer relationship management systems to create and manage account plans.

For more details, click here to download our PDF of the survey methodology, analysis, and conclusion.

PS – Congratulations to our Fortune 1000 survey winner, Mr. Rick Olszewski! Olzewski, an EVP with Louisiana Pacific Building Products, won $250 for his participation in Clytel’s sales account planning survey. Olszewski has donated the prize to the Boy Scouts of Middle Tennessee Council.

Introducing ClyTel by admin
Jan 5th, 2010

Over the past year I’ve seen more businesses lose their top customers than ever before. When I asked what happened, the answers boiled down to this: “I guess we weren’t as important to them as they were to us.”

So what are companies supposed to do to retain their top customers? One thing we know for certain is that order-taking won’t get you there, no matter how well the orders are fulfilled. If your customers have to call you to solve problems they’ve identified – you are just another vendor on their vendor list.

But what if you were the one vendor who

• brought new challenges to your customer’s attention before they saw them coming?
• and then showed them how to solve these problems?

If you were, then perhaps you wouldn’t have to discount on price? You’d certainly grow in stature with your customer and with time become their strategic advisor. Then you’d have more contacts at higher levels and you’d also be invited to help plan their next big moves.

So how do you become a strategic advisor to your key customers? By using the best tool invented in the corporate world to get you there: a Strategic Account Plan. A Strategic Account Plan is exactly what it sounds like – a plan to help sell more into key accounts by organizing methods and strategies well in advance, for becoming a strategic advisor.

A Strategic Account Plan consists of three parts:

• Customer Profile – who they are, where they are, and where they are going
• Your Position – where you are, what you’ve sold to the account, where existing opportunities are believed to be, who you know inside the account, where your competitors are, who your existing and potential partner/allies are, etc.
• A Plan – identifying where you can and want to go within the account, including a step by step path for getting there

Once you have a strategic account plan, the job is to make sure it gets done. You’ll also want to validate the plan with your customer. After all, if they don’t buy into your vision, it’ll probably be more than a challenge to grow revenue in the account.

So where does ClyTel fit into all of this? Simply put, ClyTel provides an organized way to create, share, track, and modify a custom strategic account plan for each customer.

With that I’d like to invite you to subscribe to this blog’s feed and get our latest research, techniques, and tools – all of which you can immediately use to generate more revenue from your Fortune5000 accounts.