Keep Your Sales Pipeline Filled

A healthy sales pipeline keeps your calendar filled with qualified sales opportunities. But don’t focus only on the potential future deals to the exclusion of your current strategic accounts…otherwise your sales will collapse. 

You need to regularly review your strategic account planning process to ensure both short- and long-term growth. What does this mean? It means planning to build long-term business relationships that allow you to design, develop and chase business that brings value to both you and your customers. 

To do strategic account planning right and keep your sales pipeline filled with new and qualified opportunities, you need to:

1. Be aligned across the company.
   Any employee with a customer-facing role should be aware of all the ways your company can help your customers succeed and know how to describe your value proposition in a way that resonates. The stronger your alignment across the organization, the more powerful your message and the more likely you will operate effectively not as an individual department but as a well-coordinated enterprise.


2. Be clear about strategic account roles and objectives.
   Each strategic account team member should know exactly what they need to do to contribute to the team goals and how their contribution plays a critical part in the success of the overall account. A strong strategic account plan will spell out what each cog in the wheel needs to deliver to get where you want to go.


3. Ensure strategic account team commitment.
   You can’t do this alone. Strategic accounts take the committed support of many members. Make sure they are fully engaged in the effort at the beginning and are dedicated to the effort throughout.


4. Capitalize on the “right” opportunities.
   You need to do diligence in selecting the accounts and opportunities within each account that are worth investing in. Your solutions should be wrapped around your client’s business goals so you are pulling in the same, mutually beneficial direction. Do an analysis of what is important to you, what is important to your client, and highlight where these goals intersect. Then you can look at the opportunity in terms of short- and long-term revenue, strategic value, degree of risk, and competitive positioning. This will of course require that you know a great deal about your strategic accounts…their industry, their competitors, their market, their strengths and their weaknesses.


5. Communicate the value to the customer.
   If you are convinced that the account warrants extra care and attention, it is up to you to work with your customer to show them the value of your partnering together at a strategic level. Where, exactly, can your solutions add value to them compared to the alternatives?

Strategic account plans can go a long way to secure a company’s future…now and with a healthy pipeline that keeps both companies growing.

Download Sales Best Practices Toolkit for Leaders