KEY QUESTIONS FOR ANY ACCOUNT PLAN - PART 1

We all know that building long term relationships starts with an insight into your client’s needs and aspirations. Having an effective account plan is a great start. Here is the first of two short pieces with questions that we, based on years of testing, think will enable you to see how to check how effective your account plans are.

To get you started on how effective your account plans are, ask yourself:

• What do we know about the client and their strategic objectives (think about what they already know about themselves and don’t know about themselves) that will enable us to deliver a distinctive offer?
• What do we know about the client’s industry (think about what they already know themselves and don’t know themselves) that will enable us to deliver a distinctive offer?
• What (in addition) should they be worried about?
• In order to build a distinctive offer, who do we need to build alliances with at the client, what do we already know about them, how strong is our relationship really with them? What action do we need to take?
• Who do we need to build alliances with outside the client to be able to support them effectively, how should we do this?
• What changes are coming down the line (PESTLE*) in the next 1-3 years that we can make the clients aware of to help them realise their aims/objectives?
• What are our client’s competitors doing and what opportunities and threats does this pose to our client? And what can we do to use this intelligence to support our client?
• What are our competitors doing within the account and what do we need to do to counteract their threat?
• If we were to identify the top 3-5 things that we could do to make a real difference to the client what would they be and why?

If you have in-depth answers to all these questions, you’re on your way to having an effective account plan.

Look out for the second batch of account plan questions in this series for what to do next.

* P = political, E = economic, S = social, T = technological, L = legal, E = environmental