In their new book Account-Based Growth, Bev Burgess and Tim Shercliff emphasise the importance of focusing on top accounts. Here they explain how to prioritise.
To adopt an account-based growth strategy, start by understanding your version of the 80/20 rule. Work with your colleagues to identify where your revenue and profits come from at an account level and then prioritise the accounts that you are going to bet on being the most significant for you in the years ahead.
Here’s how we suggest you work through that prioritisation.
- Agree the overall ambition for your top accounts, together with business objectives.
- Develop an objective, data-led model that assesses your business strength relative to your competition.
- Get agreement across the business for your selection criteria and scoring model.
- Identify the sources of the data you will use to make the scoring exercise objective.
- Use the scoring model to identify tiers of accounts for different levels of investment; you may want as many as five tiers, including a tier for targeted prospecting.
- Once you have your accounts split into tiers, look at how you allocate your customer-facing resources today and how this stacks up with the opportunity you see within each tier, for sustainable, profitable growth.
- Place your bets and make sure you monitor the results of your investments, both at the individual account level and for each account tier.
Buy the Account-Based Growth book by Bev Burgess and Tim Shercliff, published by Kogan Page here.
Find out more about Account-Based Growth at www.inflexion.com
