Every sales person knows that just because the initial deal has closed, that doesn’t mean the sales cycle has ended. In fact, many of your existing accounts still offer tons of untapped revenue potential.
Forming a sales account strategy starts with identifying your most potent opportunities, and how you can foster a long-term relationship with your client to continue building on those opportunities. Here’s how you can optimize your account planning strategy – from segmenting and research to tailoring your strategy – and how sales enablement platforms like Revegy can help.
Why Is a Sales Account Strategy Important?
A sales account strategy ensures your sales team has a clear and actionable blueprint to focus on the right priorities. It enables you to allocate resources effectively, gain better insights into key accounts, and identify opportunities for cross-selling and upselling. With a structured framework, account managers can seamlessly manage pain points, engage key decision makers, and foster relationships built on trust and loyalty.
Organizations that effectively implement account based strategies consistently outperform competitors, enabling them to adapt to changing market conditions, anticipate client needs, and, most importantly, achieve sustainable revenue growth.
If this sounds crucial to your success, here’s how you can optimize your sales strategy step by step.
1. Segment and Prioritize Strategic Accounts
Not every account has the same potential. While some might represent steady revenue, others hold tremendous possibilities for growth. For this reason, it’s best to segment your key accounts based on factors like potential revenue growth, industry alignment, and strategic importance in order for you to prioritize them accordingly.
Segmenting helps you allocate your time and resources efficiently, focusing energy on accounts with the highest growth potential. For example, if a key decision maker in an account aligns closely with your products or services, your sales strategy can shift toward account growth strategies like upselling or cross selling opportunities.
2. Perform Research on Key Accounts
A strong account planning process begins with in-depth research into each of your key accounts. This begins with understanding everything from their pain points to how your products
or services fit into their long term goals and objectives.
From there, gather insights on key stakeholders, industry trends, and competitor activity. This data serves as the foundation for informed decision-making. You can also use tools like relationship mapping, which helps to gain more clarity by visualizing networks of key decision makers, making it easier to identify motivations or goals within each organization.
Finally, you should ensure that you consolidate this data into an account planning template or
platform so it’s structured and actionable.
3. Develop a Customized Strategy
Once you’ve segmented accounts and gathered insights, it’s time to create a bespoke action plan for each prioritized account.
For accounts with significant growth opportunities, focus on strategies to upsell or cross-sell products or services that solve pain points or help them further goals and objectives. For those in a steady phase, prioritize consistent service and meeting expectations. Ultimately, your approach should align with the client’s unique needs for whatever stage they are at.
Engaging with key decision makers and tailoring solutions to help them overcome challenges and hit milestones will go a long way in building long-term, mutually beneficial relationships.
4. Focus on Relationship Building
Speaking of building long-term relationships, sales success often hinges on this. A strong client relationship is built on trust and open communication, which will eventually foster greater loyalty.
Building a rapport with key stakeholders requires you to stay proactive in your communication.
That being said, you should ensure that you are checking in regularly, not just when you’re selling. It’s also important to be highly reliable and responsive so as to demonstrate your commitment to helping clients meet their long term goals.
Combining transparency with a proactive approach can make all the difference when it comes to nurturing trust in your key accounts.
5. Execute Your Strategy with Revegy
Putting all of the above into action requires the right tools, and this is where Revegy shines. A powerful sales enablement platform like Revegy helps simplify even the most complex account growth strategies. Here’s how:
Centralized Access to Data: No more data silos – Revegy makes it easy to access and manage all account information, documents, and data in one place.
Standardized Processes: Implement consistent processes with an account planning template that reduces errors and improves efficiency.
AI-Powered Insights: Easily analyze trends, assess risks, and spot new opportunities to remain competitive.
Relationship Mapping Tools: Visualize and manage key decision makers and stakeholder relationships to align objectives.
Actionable Insights for Offers and Pricing: Use historical insights and predictive analytics to create data-driven strategies for pricing and promotions.
Harness the Potential of Your Key Accounts with Revegy
A robust sales account strategy is so much more than just chasing numbers – it’s about aligning your efforts with client needs to drive real, sustainable outcomes over the long term. When you prioritize key accounts, conduct thorough research, craft customized plans, and build strong relationships, your sales team can truly tap into the potential of their accounts.
And when you execute these strategies with tools like Revegy, you empower your team to identify higher-value opportunities, deliver tailored solutions, and dominate the competitive landscape.
Request a demo with Revegy and see how you can start optimizing your sales strategy today.
