Mark Donnolo is an account planning expert and that’s exactly what we’re covering on today’s episode of The Salesman Podcast. It perhaps sounds like a dry subject but an investment in account planning is the best bang for buck way to ensure you end the year way over your sales quota.
Featured on this episode:
Resources:
- SalesGlobe.com
- @MarkDonnolo
- Mark on Linkedin
- Book: Essential Account Planning: 5 Keys for Helping Your Sales Team Drive Revenue
- Book: The Innovative Sale: Unleash Your Creativity for Better Customer Solutions and Extraordinary Results
Transcript
Will Barron:
Do you want to learn how you can not just hit your target, but the steps you need if you want to double or triple it? Then this episode is for you. Hello, Sales Nation, and welcome to today’s episode of The Salesman Podcast. On today’s show, we have Mark Donnolo. He is the author of Essential Account Planning, and that is exactly what we’re diving into today. Now, account planning, it sounds somewhat dry. We all should be doing it. Perhaps we’re not doing it as well as what we could do. Mark turned all of this on its head. I promise you there’s a tonne of value in this episode. Everything that we talk about is available in the show notes over at salesmanpodcast.com. With all that said, let’s jump straight in. Mark, welcome to The Salesman Podcast.
Mark Donnolo:
Thank you, Will. Glad to be here.
Why You Need to Strategically Plan Your Accounts in B2B Sales · [00:45]
Will Barron:
I’m glad to have you on, mate. Today, we’re going to dive into a topic which I think it might not be the most exciting thing that the audience have clicked on on these episodes, but it’s probably the thing if you’re in a complex B2B sale that’s going to earn you more money than anything else. You can give me your thoughts on this in a second, but to tee things up, why do we need to strategically plan our accounts in B2B sales rather than what we tend to do or what I found myself tend to do when I’ve not planned accounts, which is fighting fires all day, being reactive to things, and just selling by the seat of my pants?
Mark Donnolo:
I would say this is actually a very exciting topic, Will, and I think the reason is because it can make our lives a lot easier. I’ve lived exactly what you’re describing, which is selling by the seat of your pants. I think sales people inherently love to be out in front of the customer. They love to sell. They love the action. What they don’t love is they don’t love sitting down and planning, strategizing, trying to figure things out in a conference room. They’d rather be out in front of the customer.
Mark Donnolo:
I think that’s one of the things that makes account planning hard, but one of the lessons that you learn is when you’re in those positions, those precarious positions where you’re coming up to the end of the quarter or you’re coming up to the end of the year and you’re not at goal or you’re not where you need to be, and you don’t have the pipeline that you need to have in order to get there, and you’re not quite sure where those next deals are going to come from, those are the clarifying times where you go, “Gosh, I probably should have done a better job planning this out.” So, I think that the point is if we’re planful, we can actually perform a lot better, make our lives a lot easier and a lot better as well.
Account Planning and Where to Start · [02:24]
Will Barron:
Makes total sense. I know my most stressful periods in sales have been exactly what you just described, probably compounded with I knew I had one account that if I closed it, or one deal in the medical device world, if I closed it, it would be a big theatre refurbishment, it’d be 15 camera systems going into an NHS trust, whatever it would be, I knew if I closed that one deal, the business would be mine. But I found myself in the scenario many years in a row of I had this one big deal, my target would be crushed if I hit it, but I wasn’t sure if I was ever going to hit it. I didn’t have a backup plan. That’s probably the best way to describe it. There was no backup plan to this deal not coming in.
Will Barron:
So, Mark is the best place to start with this, and this is going to sound weird until I fill out this question, but is the best place to start with this at the beginning or the end in that should we suss out how we’re going to strategically plan before we start doing it, or do we need to start with the end in mind and work backwards from what our quota is and then do the account management back from that point?
Mark Donnolo:
I think it’s the latter, Will. I think it’s knowing where you need to go. In fact, when we talk about account planning, we talk about goal setting is one of the big areas. That’s really important with account planning. You have to know where you’re heading and then you can work backwards from that. With account planning, what we tend to do is we’ll look at the big goal, and usually for people that are doing account planning, these are pretty significant size accounts, so they’re worthy of doing this work because they’ve got a lot of complexity, a lot of buying points, and you probably have a lot of big dollars attached to them. So, by starting with the goal, say, for example, you had a quota of $10 million for next year. That’s a pretty sizeable goal for most people. How do you get to that goal?
Mark Donnolo:
Well, the first thing we would do is we would take that 10 million and we would start to flush the lines and identify what we have, first of all, in backlog. So, what do we already know about that’s in process or maybe is going to renew for next year? Perhaps contracts that are going to show up again. Then we start to go through the easy hits, things that we already are aware of in terms of opportunities within the account. We may be doing this for one account. Most people are doing it for several accounts. Unless they manage just one, they’re doing it for several accounts.
Mark Donnolo:
So, if you have that $10 million, what we’re trying to do is typically, you know the old adage, if you want to have two and a half or three times your pipeline in terms of your goal and your pipeline to ensure that you’re going to get there, we do the same thing when we’re planning for the account planning. So, we’ll say, “I want to find two and a half or three times that $10 million,” call it $30 million. “I want to find $30 million of opportunity at the beginning of the year, even before I start the year, I want to find that.” So, I’m going to go through-
Will Barron:
Half the audience here, Mark, have just grabbed all of their chest and gone, “Three times more than what I thought I could get anyway.”
Mark Donnolo:
Well, and that’s exactly what happens. So we go through the list with the team and we say, “Okay, let’s find $30 million of opportunity.” We might find 10 or 12, because that’s easy to get. That’s where the creative work starts. That’s where we start thinking about how do we find other opportunities? So, we start combining elements like, “Okay, what do we have to offer in terms of product or service? Are there different ways to offer that product or service? What about buyers or buying points? Are there different buyers within our accounts that we haven’t considered?” Then we look at partners. A lot of times we don’t consider that, partners, which might be alliances, resellers, other firms that are complimentary to our firm, and can we team up with them to find opportunities?
Mark Donnolo:
So, the creative thinking, which is what adds a lot of the value in the beginning and really pushes us to think of things we might not have thought of before through those different combinations. We know that a lot of those aren’t going to be deals that come out, but the idea is that we’re pushing our thinking and we want to find, if we’re looking for $30 million, we want to find some chunky deals as well. So, if we’re finding things that are $500,000 or $300,000, we want to start finding chunks that are a million, 2 million, $3 million chunks. We want to start pushing beyond what we would normally look for. That’s going to start to unleash some ideas we wouldn’t have had before. That’s a good place to start.
Why It’s Never a Good Idea For Salespeople to Tackle Account Planning Without Input From Sales Leadership · [06:47]
Will Barron:
Perfect. Getting real practical about this, knowing that most of the audience are B2B sales professionals, there’s a whole bunch of sales managers and leaders are listening as well, but I tend to speak to them around the houses through a conversation to B2B salespeople. Just coincidentally someone listening to this show now, Sam is listening to this show, Sam the salesman, and his quota starts in a month’s time, so perhaps he’s hit quota already, he’s a month ahead himself, he’s got a month to plan for the next 12 month period, say his goal is 10 million, to keep that round number. Is this a sit down with management leadership and plan through it? Is this something that you sit on your own, you spend a weekend going through it? Is this something that you do once at the beginning of the year, plan it out perfectly, and then don’t think about it for 12 months until your next quota comes around? How do we implement this from a physical sitting behind a desk in a pen and paper perspective?
Mark Donnolo:
You don’t want to go it alone. I know some people have to because they work independently, but ultimately you mean you really want to have a team that’s working on this. If I’m Sam the salesman, I am probably going to have other people, if I’m selling to large accounts, other people that may be working on those accounts as well, other account managers, other sales people. So, I probably want to pull those people in for selling technology products or medical devices. I may want to pull specialists in who are the SMEs, the subject matter experts that might be helping me. I probably want to pull in my manager at some point. The idea behind that is that we’re not doing this in isolation. We’re doing this with a team, because people are going to bring different perspectives in terms of how we’re going to get to this objective.
“Anybody that has a vested interest in that goal that you have should be in the room with you helping you to plan that account or plan that goal.” – Mark Donnolo · [08:36]
Mark Donnolo:
So, I think the way you should think about it is anybody that has a vested interest in that goal that you have should be in the room with you helping you to plan that account or plan that goal. This doesn’t have to be a long, laborious session. It really can be what we think of as a brain trust. We get people together and we do some real brain work around that idea generation. So, you don’t want to go it alone. You don’t want to do it one time either. So, yes, you want to do it as you prepare for the start of the year. But I think one of the big pitfalls in account planning is people do exactly that. They do it once at the beginning of the year, they put it away because I did the account planning. I met that requirement. I did the presentation of my bosses. They gave me the okay. I’m going to put that away and I’m going to go get on with business now.
Mark Donnolo:
Then I don’t look at it until next year and I go, “Oh, that’s interesting. I said I was going to do these meetings with these executives, and I never did that.” So, it has to be a living process. You want to be looking at it on a regular basis. Could be monthly, could be quarterly, depending on your sales cycle, but you want to have those check-in points. The idea of process and making it a living process is extremely important for a few reasons. One is that it keeps it top of mind and we’re remembering what we said we were going to do.
Mark Donnolo:
Number two, it makes it an accountability point. You know, Will, if you tell somebody that you’ve got a goal and you’re going to do certain things to accomplish that goal, just by telling them that or by documenting that, it makes it more likely that you’re going to do it, because they’re going to have a checkpoint with you and you’re going to say, “Will, did you do this?” And you’re going to go, “Gosh, I’ve got to get ready to make that happen.” So, it builds accountability to have those checkpoints throughout the year. You don’t want to put it away. You want to make it a reoccurring, living process.
An Effective Account Plan Is Only as Effective as The Actions Behind It · [10:15]
Will Barron:
Just to double down on that for a second before we drill into what account plans look like on paper or on a screen, should we be then, and this again might strike fear into some of the audience of getting the management and essentially the boss or key account people within the organisation that they’re trying to get into on board with this, should we be setting dates for this? Should there be not just, “I’m going to close this account within the year.” It’s going to be, “I’m going to speak to this person before this. We’re going to strategize on this. We’re going to have this meeting before then.” Is that something that’s going into these plans as well to increase accountability from all angles?
Mark Donnolo:
Right. The account plan cannot be high level and conceptual alone. It’s great to have some conceptual high level thinking, but you have to boil that down to action plans, and those action plans should become literal dashboards. So, if I say I’ve got a strategy to introduce a new product into this account, and I need to meet with certain executives, or it’s probably not just me, I probably need to have my boss meet with some other executives as well, because we’re trying to hit multiple points, influence and buying points, if I have that action or that strategy, I have to have an action plan that’s specific and has dates on it, and it says who’s going to do those things. Then we have to come back and we have to look at that and make sure that it really happened. So, that action plan really becomes the teeth for the accountability and the process, which really is what makes it work in the end.
A Practical Approach to Analyzing Accounts and Figuring Out How Much You Can Get From Them · [11:50]
Will Barron:
Perfect. Perhaps we’ll come back onto the action plan and what that looks like, whether we’re using software to track it, whether it’s a document in a second. But again, Sam the salesperson, they’re new to this, they have listed out all their accounts, they’ve listed out all the potential low hanging fruit which we should go to first. I think you mentioned earlier on they’ve got two or three bigger deal sizes, they’ve got it up to, say, the 20 million mark, but we’re aiming for 30 million to hit a target of 10. So, we’ll come onto the other partners, different buyers, new products into the accounts, increasing growth in the accounts in a second. But stick on new business just to keep it somewhat simple and straightforward.
Will Barron:
What does a plan… not a plan. How do we confirm the amount that we think we can get out of an account? Is there some kind of analysis we can do on the account? Whether it be the revenue, whether they’ve just had an influx of cash through venture capital, or if we’re dealing with startups, if they’ve just been funded, if the share price is great, if they’ve just got a new CEO, is there a way to get all this data, all these data points and put it into some kind of process that spits out, one, how easy it is to convert or get into an account, and then two, how much they’re likely going to spend with us?
Mark Donnolo:
The answer is it depends. I think what the big dependency point is the industry that you’re in. Some industries have really good information. If we’re thinking about financial services, we’re thinking about selling mortgage insurance or mortgage services, we’re thinking about selling certain IT services, there is a lot of published data out there, so we know what the customers are buying. If we get into other types of services, we may have to go get that ourselves. So, we may not know that. So, you start looking for other indicators. Like you said, if a company got funding, if there’s a major initiative that’s happening, so if one of your customers has an initiative to improve their security processes and we happen to sell security software, we know there’s an opportunity there. Sometimes we have to estimate that ourselves. One of the best ways you can get information is by enlisting your customer in the account planning process.
the account plan is not about doing it to the customer, it’s about doing it with the customer. There’s some benefit to them, or there should be, in us being successful. If there’s not a benefit, then we have to question whether we’re a true partner to them.
“The account plan is not about doing it to the customer, it’s about doing it with the customer. There has to be some benefit to them, or there should be some benefit to them for us being successful. If there’s not a benefit, then we have to question whether we’re a true partner to them.” – Mark Donnolo · [14:30]
Mark Donnolo:
I think another one of the pitfalls in account planning is we tend to do it ourselves and it becomes an internal exercise. If we can enlist our customers in the process in terms of coaching us and helping us to figure out some of these answers, that can give us information as well. So, in the best cases I see, we’re getting the account plan to a certain point and we’re sitting down with key customers and saying, “Okay, we want to accomplish something with you,” because the account plan is not about doing it to the customer, it’s about doing it with the customer. There’s some benefit to them, or there should be, in us being successful. If there’s not a benefit, then we have to question whether we’re a true partner to them.
Mark Donnolo:
But my point is, if we’re having conversations with the customer, we can also ask them about those things. “What are your big priorities? What do you anticipate in terms of things that you’re going to be doing next year in terms of projects? What might your spend be, or what might be the units that we could use to indicate what that spend might be?” So, we have to do some investigation work with the customer if that data’s not available publicly to us.
The Art and Science of Predicting the Success of an Account · [15:08]
Will Barron:
How much of this is down to experience and to make it accurate? Because we can all guesstimate some of this. How much of it is down to experience versus some, and I think I know where you’ll go with this, versus some incredible mathematical formula or algorithm or software that we just throw all this in and it gives us some… well, it gives us some security that we’re going to hit target out the other side of it. How much of it is down to you know the accounts, you’ve got that business acronym, you can have intelligent conversations and ask great questions and get the correct feedback versus numbers in a spreadsheet.
Mark Donnolo:
Well, Steven Hawkings, who you know well, has said that he thinks there’s an ultimate equation that predicts everything in the universe, but we haven’t even found that for sales yet. I don’t think we’ve found that equation. I think what we know is that it’s really a bit of art and a bit of science. The art is you do have to have experience. You do have to have knowledge about the account. You’ve got to be able to go in and do the investigation. The science is the methodology that you use behind this. The science would be understanding the indicators of potential in the account.
Mark Donnolo:
So, for example, let’s take a simple one. If I’m selling office products and office supplies, there are indicators in the account, which might be, say, number of white collar workers in an account, which could tell me the potential demand for consumables, office furniture, machinery. So, I can use indicators like that. If I’m selling other types of products, and if we talk about medical products, which is something that you sold before, if we’re selling to a hospital system, we know the number of beds, right? We have other indicators of potential. So, there is a bit of science in that, but then also the art is knowing how to apply that, knowing how where to ask the right questions, knowing other indicators of potential, knowing how to talk to the executives to get the right type of information from them.
Sales Frameworks That Work Wonders For Account Planning Processes · [17:09]
Will Barron:
Is there a framework for someone who has never done this before, perhaps they’re new to the role, perhaps they’ve just always sold by the seat of the pants, is there a framework such as a SWOT analysis, and there’s probably a million other acronyms for the same kind of process of the strengths within the account, the weaknesses, opportunities, threats and number of over letters after the fact, is there a framework that you would advise new people, not necessarily to sales, but new people to account management or account planning to put in place just so that each account has a comparable amount of data so you can go across them and real cherry pick where you want to be?
Mark Donnolo:
Right. Right. There is. I think when you ask most sales leaders, you ask most sales people what an account plan looks like, everybody can rattle off the table of contents of an account plan. My whole point is make sure that it’s comprehensive, make sure you’ve got the right components in it, make sure that it’s specific enough and not too high level, make sure that you’re doing it the same way across all of your accounts so that you can have those bases for comparison. So, if I break it down into the pieces, you mentioned SWOT analysis, that’s really one of the first parts of the account plan, which is the profile and position.
Mark Donnolo:
We go into all this in the book, Essential Account Planning. We go into the components, we go into the process, we go into the different types of techniques you use. But if you think about the profile and position, that’s going to include what’s going on with the account right now, it’s going to include what their priorities are for the coming year or coming years. It’s going to include our position in the account. That’s your SWOT analysis. So, where are our strengths and weaknesses and opportunities and threats. It’s also going to include what the needs are by buyer type or buyer person and levels, so we really should know what they’re trying to accomplish.
What a Comprehensive Account Plan Looks Like · [19:03]
Will Barron:
Because I think that’s important, I don’t want to gloss over that, Mark, what does that look like physically on a piece of paper or on a screen? Is that the end decision maker is the CFO, this person’s name, they want to achieve this in the next 12 months. The people we need to buy in to get the CFO on board is X, Y, Z name, what their goals are. Is that what we’re looking to achieve, or is that in too much detail?
Mark Donnolo:
I think it’s at two levels. The first level is understanding the profile and the position for the account. The first level is what does that customer company want to achieve? Do they have big strategic priorities, and what do the divisions or where the business units need to achieve? Then when you get down to the next level, which is more specific, you get into what we think of as needs mapping and alignments. What we’re doing then is getting down to that detail, so then we’re saying person by person within the account who lines up to that person, or we think of it as facings, who’s the facing in our company to the person in their company?
Mark Donnolo:
With the president of their company, who should be facing off with that president? It may not be the salesperson. It may be the president of our company. But with the president of their company, with the vice president, with the head of engineering, whoever the buyers are, we need to understand what their particular needs are, what their particular priorities are. So, I want to know what they buy, and I also want to know what they’re trying to accomplish. By doing that, we then know what we have to do in terms of our messaging to them. We do have to get specific. What that looks like, basically, if you can envision it, you would have, almost as a spreadsheet, you would have the name of the buyer, you would have what their position is, you would have who the alignment point is, so who within our company aligns to them. You would understand what their top needs are or what they need to accomplish to be successful.
“People within accounts are the ones that make decisions. The company doesn’t usually make decisions. It’s people. So, if we understand what they’re looking for, and we really are thoughtful about it, then it’s going to make us a lot more successful in meeting their needs.” – Mark Donnolo · [21:25]
Mark Donnolo:
You would also understand what their level of purchase is and what they might buy as well. Then you would also have the actions or priorities that we have for that person, for each person in our account, so what we should be doing. It does get very specific, then that ultimately converts into that action plan. So, you do have to get down to that level. People within accounts, as you know, Will, people within accounts are the ones that make decisions. The company doesn’t make a decision usually. It’s people. So, if we understand what they’re looking for, and we really are thoughtful about it, then it’s going to make us a lot more successful in meeting their needs.
Strategic Selling is a Team Sport; You Cannot Do It Alone · [21:36]
Will Barron:
I love this, because inadvertently, you’ve taken some of the pressure off the audience here. If you have this document, if you have someone, I’ve used the word facing someone else, you’ve got to get senior people in, you’ve got to get your product specialist involved if you’ve got them. For me, medical devices, I had product specialists, I had even logistics people that would then interface with the delivery and biomedical engineering departments within the hospitals. If you can get all these people together, if you get them all on board with this document, it’s not just putting you on the line of, “Here’s the plan,” and my neck’s out here in that I’ve got to do these tasks. If I don’t, I’m going to look like a fool at best. I’m going to lose my job at worst. You’re also roping in everyone else to have the commitments as well.
Will Barron:
I’m not saying that we’re sharing the blame here if it goes wrong, but it’s an opportunity to get people on board, but bought in. If you’re doing this and the rest of your team aren’t, and I use medical devices as an example here, I was selling camera systems to the NHS with endoscopes and keyhole surgery equipment. I think there was 10 of us across the country, so the country, UK split up into 10 segments, and there was one product specialist for each of the surgical disciplines, for urology, for gynaecology, for general surgery, and so on. So, they would be split across everyone across the country. Luckily for me, the urologist lived an hour away, the gynaecologist girl lived quite close as well, so they would be just on my patch because it was easier for them to visit my customers than it was anyone else’s.
Will Barron:
But if I had to put this plan into place, it was more detailed, there was names. I’m digesting this as we go through it. This is awesome. One, if you get names, numbers, faces, times, dates, commitment points in a document like this, and you get everyone on board. You can almost then leave them to it to go about their day and speak to these individuals from a product specialist perspective, because I know our product specialists would be at different conferences that I wouldn’t be at. They’d be networking with different teams on totally different projects, and they’d interact with these individuals. If it was a theatre manager, if it was a procurement team, they’d be doing all this in the background anyway. If you have the best plan in your team, if you’ve got the easiest plan to follow, they’re naturally going to work with you, aren’t they? And they’re naturally going to put you ahead of the rest of the team. If you’re going to be slightly selfish for a moment, you’re going to get the best results from that within the organisation. Right?
Mark Donnolo:
Well, that’s true. If you think about strategic account selling, it is a team sport. It is not an individual sport. If you think about, I’m a big fan of college basketball in the US, and there are four teams that consistently are at the top in terms of most final four appearances in the NCAA, most tournament championships. One of those teams is UNC Chapel Hill, my alma mater. Well, Michael Jordan was a great player for UNC Chapel Hill, but he did not play it as an individual. He played as a team. There’s a reason that team keeps showing up at the top year after year. It’s not because of the players. It’s not because of the coach. We’ve had several coaches over the decades. It’s because of the system.
Mark Donnolo:
There’s a whole system that they use, and that’s why they’re always at the top. There are a handful of teams like that. So, if we’re approaching it as a team sport, if we’re approaching it as a system and we’re doing it in a planful way, then we’re not going to be down by 10 points with two minutes left in the game, which sadly happens a lot in sales. We’re trying to pull rabbits out of hats, and that doesn’t work.
How Often Should You Revisit Your Account Planning Document? · [25:23]
Will Barron:
Then you get into weird conversations, the desperation comes across, whether you’re on the phone, whether you’re in person. You perhaps make deals, you have conversations that you wouldn’t have done otherwise. This is where you get into the weird world of sales 20 years ago when influence and manipulation are going next to each other because you want that holiday and you’ve got to get your target to get it. I think planning ahead allows you to make better decisions and allows you to be… I don’t think we need to dive into too much in the moral compass side of things, but I think it allows you to be happier about the work that you’re doing.
Will Barron:
So, we put all this together, Mark, everyone’s agreed, perhaps we’ve not got it in front of the customers. We’ve not taken action on this yet. That’s the next step. So, we’re going to do that for a week, two weeks, a month. How often do we need to revisit this document? Because I think your words were it’s a living document earlier on. How often do we need to revisit it, and do we need some kind of project management software? Is that dependent on the number of deals, the sizes and the number of people who are involved, or can this be done through an email chain that goes out every few weeks?
Mark Donnolo:
I think in terms of the timing, the most common and probably the most successful is quarterly updates. So, we’re doing the plan at the beginning of the year, we’re having quarterly checkpoints. That also is a good point for us to be able to have quarterly business reviews with our customer. Customers love QBRs. So, if we can do that business review with them and they’re actually part of the account plan, that syncs up nicely as well. Software is important. I think the first software is probably the software in people’s heads, it’s people, in terms of making sure that we have the right habits. We need to put the habits in place in terms of being able to create an action plan that’s visible to everyone. We need to put the habit in place in some organisations of having an account planning czar.
Mark Donnolo:
This is a person that may be over all the account planning process for the company that helps shepherd that through and make sure people are on track. If you don’t have somebody in that role, then you end up doing that yourself, which is fine, so you have to have that discipline. The software, yes, I think that does help. The traditional account planning process is we put it all together in PowerPoint and it becomes this big, laborious job, and then we get up and we do the presentation, and it’s 50 slides or wherever we come up, and it’s way too much detail. Every time the management team reviews the account plans, they’re looking at a different format from every team. So, we’re kind of stuck in the world of PowerPoint, but we want to get out of that.
Mark Donnolo:
So, if we can do something online in the cloud in terms of, and you can do this off of some of the CRM systems, if you can have your account planning process online in your CRM system, then everybody’s able to collaborate online to see that. One of the key components is, as I said, this action plan so we can see, we can literally use that as a dashboard and see where we are and where we’re tracking, and that when we get to the quarterly business reviews, that’s the piece that we should be looking at. We should be looking at what we said we were going to do, and are we on track, and do we need to make any course corrections as we’re moving through the game?
Mark Donnolo:
That software is a critical piece. I will also say you can’t do it all virtually. We have wonderful tools available in terms of web conferencing and collaboration, video collaboration software. There is a lot of value, particularly if it’s a large account, to get people in a room together and work on the initial planning. You get much more interaction, you get much more collaboration, it creates more pressure in terms of how we’re going to find three times our goal. It creates more creativity. It also doesn’t allow people to multitask, which they will do if you try to do it virtually. So, again, best practise. The best companies I see, they will go to the expense of getting everybody in a room at least once a year to do their initial planning.
Habits That Will Help You Achieve Greater Success Within Your Accounts · [29:24]
Will Barron:
Makes total sense. You said something then, and my ears pricked up, my eyes opened as you said it, and that is habits. What do we need to be doing each day, as opposed to monthly, quarterly, yearly? What do we need to be doing each day to make sure that we are focused on specific accounts and specific activities within accounts versus me getting medical device sales, getting calls from surgeons, asking to loan gear, calls from internally asking for stupid reports that they should be doing themselves, the logistics guy saying he’s broken down and the camera system that he’s supposed to be delivering is not going to be there on time for this procedures, what are the habits we need to instil that we go through each day before we start dealing with all this crap that’s ladled on top of us as sales professionals?
Mark Donnolo:
Well, I think before we get to each day, I think what we have to do is think about how we’re doing this. You mentioned software. Software is a great enabler. The software really is a tool, though. So, again, best practise that we see when we talk to executives and teams that are doing this well, and this applies to day to day, you don’t get hung up in the software. You have to think and you have to problem solve and then let the software enable that or let the software help you to document that. I keep talking about pitfalls. Another pitfall is letting the tool take over. This happens with CRM with our planning the pipeline on a regular basis as well. It becomes all about the CRM. Well, it’s not. It’s about problem solving. So, one of the daily habits is we don’t go through and say, “Well, what’s the probability of this particular deal closing, and what’s our projected close date or days to close?” Yeah. That’s all BS anyway. People make that stuff up, right?
Is There a Way to Predict When Deals Are Going to Close? · [31:12]
Will Barron:
Well, this is one of my questions. We’ll come back onto habits in a second. I’ll jot it down so I don’t forget, but you mentioned it now. Is there a way to predict when deals are going to close? Clearly it’s not a useless metric, but I’ve never managed to do it. The different CRMs I’ve used, it’s days left to close a deal, percentage of the deal closing, opportunity within the account. Clearly you can narrow these down as you get closer to that end moment. But if we’re talking a year in advance, is there much value to these at all anyway?
Mark Donnolo:
I don’t know if anybody can predict when the deal is going to close. I think the people that want prediction are finance, obviously sales. They want to know because that’s how we do our financial planning, so we want dates, right? So we’re forced to then make up dates. What we can affect, though, is we can affect the probability by doing better problem solving, working with the right people, getting the right value proposition. We can also affect urgency to some degree by knowing how to keep the process moving along, by being responsive, by getting to the answer as efficiently as possible, faster than our competitors.
Mark Donnolo:
Now, you can’t make a customer buy before they’re ready to buy or make that decision before they’re ready to make that decision. You can in some transactional environments, but in a major account environment, you really can’t do that. So, I think we can affect urgency to some degree, though, but I don’t think we can nail dates. I think it’s kind of like trying to predict stock prices. We just don’t have that skill usually.
More Habits and The Benefits of Having Problem-Solving Conversations With Potential Buyers · [32:56]
Will Barron:
Because I know my experience with this is I’d set a date and then my sales manager would be ringing me two weeks before saying, “How’s it going? Are we nearly there?” So, I’d just put the date forward another three months and then forward another three months. Then the date starts 2017 and ends up 2021, and perhaps the business comes in and it’s worth it, but it’s difficult to judge that lead time. What I’m getting from this conversation is it’s important to plan, to track all of this, because it allows us to reduce the deal time, but perhaps we don’t know the end point, which is why we need the 3X on our top target. I interrupted you and derailed you there, Mark. Tell us more about the habit side of things.
Mark Donnolo:
We need to shift the conversation a little bit as well. In terms of habits, the conversation is not how many days to close and what’s our close date? That’s only the first piece. The other important habit is, “Okay, well, what can we do to advance this? What’s the customer dealing with? Let’s have a little brainstorming session to talk about possible ideas and angles and things that we can do maybe to help the customer out.” We don’t have enough of those creative problem solving conversations when we’re looking at deal flow and we’re looking at pipeline, because we’re doing it usually in desperation. We’re doing it to try to meet some requirement, and the requirement should be about the customer.
Mark Donnolo:
I see this over and over. If you and I sit down and we start talking about the deal, sometimes we’ll come up with stuff that I wouldn’t have thought of myself, and we’ll engage other people that I might not have reached out to, and then things start to happen. “Well, what about this partner?” Or, “There’s a guy we know in the account that maybe could give us some more information.” It’s the creative piece that’s really important. So, that’s one habit. I think another one is accountability. This goes for the leader of the account team, and it also goes for the sales leader, which is demanding accountability.
Mark Donnolo:
With account planning, too often, as I said before, what happens is we do the plan, we put it away, we pick it up again next year. The accountability says you have an account plan, you have a strategy, you have an action plan, and we are going to hold you accountable for hitting those milestones, for hitting those goals. It’s not acceptable to just say, “Well, that didn’t work out.” You need to hit those milestones, and doing those right type of activities does result in performance, so a lack of accountability is a big issue. That runs all the way to the top in a lot of sales organisations where the account planning is not a major priority. It’s a rote exercise that people go through. The account planning strategy has to be part of the sales strategy, and usually the chief sales officer is the one that’s got to make that mandate and say, “Here’s where it fits in and here’s why it’s important, and here’s why it’s unacceptable not to do it, and here’s why we want to do it, because it’s going to make you successful.”
Mark Donnolo:
I’ll bring up one other habit, Will, which is motivation. People don’t want to do this. As we said before, people would rather be out selling. The motivational piece is in terms of incentive. People should understand how their work and account planning lines up to their incentive programme, the results of their incentive programme, their commission programme. So, I’m actually going to get paid more if I do this. It also aligns to affirmation and reward. So, when people are doing the right things, no, you don’t get paid for everything that you do well, but we got that meeting, we built that relationship. There should be accolades. People should be recognised for that. So, we have to have recognition around people accomplishing things within the account plan.
Mark Donnolo:
Then regarding habits and also incentive, it’s not just about the incentive that you’re going to earn this year. It’s about the incentive that you could earn and what it could do for your life and for your family next year, over the next three years and the next five years. As salespeople, we don’t think long term. We’re thinking a couple weeks ahead. So, there’s this idea of being aspirational. When I’m doing account planning, I should not be doing it just for next year. I should be doing it looking out over the next three or five years. That allows me to set a bigger goal. So, the big, audacious, hairy goal thing is we want to be able to set a goal and say, “Well, how big could this account be? Could it be 30 million? Could it be $50 million?” Then if we put a timeframe on that and we say, “Well, is that in three years? Is that in five years?”
Mark Donnolo:
If you put a goal down and you put a timeframe down, you create a trajectory or a path to get there, and then we know what we have to do along the way. That also changes our positioning with the customer. So, when we say with the customer, “We’d like to be a 40 million partner with you,” well, if they don’t see us that way, the first thing they do is they go, “Really?” Then they step back and then they say, “Well, how are we going to do that?” And we start having the question about how. The habit of being aspirational, but also knowing how it connects to the betterment of your life, so what does it look like for our team when we’re actually at a $40 million level with this account, what’s that going to do in terms of our earnings and what we can do for our families? So, there’s a lot of emotion you can get into this thing as well to get people enlisted in your plan by what it can do for them in their lives. It goes beyond filling out the forms.
There’s Magic in Thinking Big · [38:23]
Will Barron:
It makes total sense. I don’t know if I’ve ever done this in the show before, but I’m actually quite inspired, Mark. I’ve got a product launch which is going to take me from now till Christmas, but I’ve got relationships with the companies that we work with, especially the big boys, the Salesforces, HubSpots, LinkedIns that we worked with. I’ve got relationships there where I could probably sit down, even just fly out and go and see them if I’m going to be increasing deal size and talking strategically about a whole account with them, I could probably fly out, have a sit down with the people that I work with there at each of these individual companies, and ask them that question of, “How do we go from six figures that we’re working together, or to quarter of a million, half a million?” Or whatever it is, because I know we can offer that value, and there’s definitely strategic ways that we could implement that.
Will Barron:
That kind of number is four, five, six CRM setups that come through our user base, which is happening as it is. I know the kind of revenue that Salesforce in particular are driving through us, and there’s seems like plenty of opportunities to do that. So, you’ve inspired me here of I might sit down, make a plan, put it in front of the audience, perhaps don’t include company names or do include company names, I don’t know, we’d have to be somewhat strategic about that, but then do it as a case study of, “Here’s my goals. Here’s what I am aspiring to do over one year,” for sure, and then five years, the revenue that we want to bring in through the ad sales, through the lead gen that we do, through the podcast audience and the email list and all this kind of stuff, and make it somewhat public so they can follow along, and they can keep me accountable to some of this as well. They can enjoy in the successes and they can enjoy kicking my ass when I don’t follow through on things. I’m intrigued. I’m going to have a genuine think about this over the weekend and see-
“If you want to succeed in anything, one of the questions you should ask is, am I thinking big enough here, or am I just getting by with what’s been asked of me?” – Mark Donnolo · [40:38]
Mark Donnolo:
There’s magic in thinking big, and I think that’s one of the big findings we have in the book, is that the account plan is not about filling out forms. It’s not about getting the exercise done. It’s about thinking big. You’ve got to put those big numbers out there. Also, Will, as we said before, if you can get other thought partners that help you go through that, they can help push your thinking as well. But that should be one of the questions everybody asks. Am I thinking big enough here?, or am I just getting by with, what’s been asked of me?
Mark’s Advice to His Younger Self on How to Become Better at Selling · [40:42]
Will Barron:
Makes total sense. With that, Mark, I’m going to have to wrap things up here, because we can talk about this all day, mate, because I’m pulling information and knowledge for myself, which hopefully is translating for the audience, but I’ve got one final question I ask everyone that comes on the show. That is, if you could go back in time and speak to your younger self, what would be the one piece of advice you’d give him to help him become better at selling?
Mark Donnolo:
I love that. I love that. I think it would be don’t be so nervous, and know that things are going to work out and enjoy the process. I think a lot of times for type A people, we tend to push so hard that we don’t enjoy the ride. If I could tell my younger self that, just enjoy it and really get yourself engaged in it, I think I would do that.
Parting Thoughts · [41:20]
Will Barron:
Makes total sense. With that, you’ve hinted at the book. Tell us more about it, where we can find it, and then where we can find more about you as well, Mark.
Mark Donnolo:
Great. Well, the book is called Essential Account Planning. It is available on Amazon, and it goes into interviews with sales executives, stories, tools, process. It’s got some workbook components, so it’s a very usable guide. You can also learn more about us at salesglobe.com. You can find our blogs out there as well. Then depending on your interests, we have a couple of other books called The Innovative Sale, which is about creative problem solving for sales, kind of left brain and right brain thinking, and then What Your CEO Needs to Know About Sales Compensation, which is about connecting the strategy to the frontline through incentives. Those are all available on Amazon.
Will Barron:
Fantastic. Well, I will link to all of them in the show notes of this episode over at salesmanpodcast.com. Thank you, Mark, for obviously the intelligent conversation you’ve had with us. It’s me throwing ridiculous questions at you and you pinging back useful answers. I appreciate that, mate. The fact that I genuinely feel inspired to put something together for this, to document it, to share it with the audience so they can see what’s going right and what’s going wrong, I think the accountability element of this could be really useful. So, I appreciate that, and I want to thank you for joining us on The Salesman Podcast.
Mark Donnolo:
Thank you, Will.
