Sales account planning: Limit business disruption

Assigning or re-assigning accounts to sales can be a controversial topic. Sales people inevitably become protective of their key accounts. In order to cause the least amount of disruption to the bottom line, you should go through the account assignment process as infrequently as possible or at least at the right time—when the least amount of disruption will be caused.

When the time does come to redesign your account assignment and segmentation strategy, there are many factors to keep in mind. But this redesign and reassignment process is often done based on guesswork and hearsay from the frontline sales team.

When you take into consideration your target accounts, sales rep performance, sales rep seniority, personal connections, and overall selling strategy (increasing upsell/cross-sell vs. acquiring new accounts), it is practically impossible to properly manage and analyze this data in cumbersome spreadsheets and disconnected point solutions.

The sales planning process is a ripple effect—an accurately designed account assignment process should lead to a comprehensive territory management and sales capacity planning strategy, which can then be used to develop an accurate sales forecast and quota plans. Because each sales process is connected to the next, it only makes sense to utilize an end-to-end sales planning solution like Anaplan.

But first, to get started, consider your account assignment design and process. In order to properly assign the right accounts to the right reps and achieve the intended results, there are specific data points that must be gathered and topics that must be discussed. Account assignments are important towards defining several aspects of your organization, such as:

• Which reps are working on which accounts
• Which accounts are being prioritized
• Which coverage model is being utilized on each account
• How well your territories are balanced
• How quotas are allocated to each rep or territory

Determine what your current process is and whether it’s the best one when business goals and historical sales performance are taken into account. This process design cannot be created in a silo—your frontline sales objective must match with your executive team’s expectation, and this must reflect in the way your measure, format, and report on the account performance.

As you begin to consider your process design and account strategy, take into consideration five business process questions and discover how Anaplan’s interface and platform can simplify and streamline your sales strategy.