Strategic account planning is an essential component of every successful business. It helps businesses identify the strategic accounts crucial to their growth and success, assess their value, and develop strategies for managing them. However, many small- to medium-sized companies need to pay more attention to this critical tool or value its importance.
Strategic account planning doesn’t just apply to large corporations with billions of dollars in annual revenue; it also applies to smaller businesses with limited time and resources to invest in their most important clients or prospects.
In this article, we’ll discuss why strategic account planning matters for your business regardless of size and how you can use this strategy to grow your sales revenue.
Increase Customer Retention
Customer retention is key to a successful business. According to Zippia, a company’s existing customers contribute to 65% of a company’s business. It costs more to acquire new customers than to retain existing ones, and the longer you keep a customer, the more likely they are to buy from you again. Strategic account planning can help increase your ROI by improving customer retention.
Customers often have complex buying processes, so the continued relationship with your company needs careful attention and nurturing over time. Your team should be well equipped with knowledge about how each buyer’s process works to serve them better when they’re ready to buy again, at which point they’ll be happy with the level of service they get from your company.
Click here – 9 Reasons to Get a Degree in Special Education
Improve Customer Experience and Satisfaction
According to Salesforce, 80% of customers revealed that customer experience is critical when picking one brand over another. The customer experience is the sum of all interactions with a brand. It can be positive or negative and can be affected by any touch point along the way, like the website, social media interactions, sales calls, etc. Customer satisfaction is how the customer feels about their overall experience, and it’s an essential measure of brand health.
When you have an account strategy that focuses on improving your customers’ experiences and increasing their satisfaction with you as a company, they’re more likely to buy again from you and recommend you to others. And since satisfied customers are less likely to churn out than dissatisfied ones are, this can lead directly to bottom-line results like lower cost per sale (CPS) and higher lifetime value (LTV).
Build Better Relationships with Your Customers
Building a strong, personal relationship with your customers is essential to building trust. It can be achieved by providing them with the products and services they need and want.
However, you can also go above and beyond by giving them something extra, a unique experience that shows you understand their needs. According to Khoros, 68% of customers will spend more money with a brand that treats them like individuals.
It doesn’t have to be anything significant, it could be as simple as sending them a birthday card or gifting them one of your business’s products when they reach a milestone. The key is being proactive in solving problems for your customers, so if they have any issues with the product or service, make sure you respond quickly and effectively so they feel valued as clients.
Click here – Content And Lifehacks To Increase Conversions In An Online Store
Improve Your Chances of Upselling and Cross-Selling Your Services
One of the benefits of strategic account planning is that it gives you a bird’s-eye view of your customers, allowing you to see their needs and how they fit into your overall business. It can help you identify opportunities for upselling and cross-selling that otherwise may have been missed.
Upselling is when you sell an upgraded version or additional product or service to an existing customer who has already bought something from you. Cross-selling involves offering a complementary product or service to someone who has already purchased something else from your company. For example, if someone buys flowers from a florist shop, the florist might recommend some candles and chocolates and provide other items to complete the gift basket arrangement.
This approach is constructive when dealing with strategic accounts because these contacts are more likely than regular customers to spend more money on services from companies they trust, especially if those services are related.
Maintain a Competitive Advantage in the Marketplace
Strategic account planning helps you maintain a competitive advantage in the marketplace by helping you understand your customers’ needs and how to meet them. It also enables you to understand your competitors’ strategies to beat them.
Strategic account planners are often called upon to identify new markets, products, or services that interest current or potential customers. This process involves researching new technologies, trends, and competition within an industry and keeping up with customer feedback about existing products and services.
Make the Most of Your Marketing Campaigns and Promotions
One of the best ways to increase sales is by running marketing campaigns and promotions. These short-term events provide an excellent opportunity to bring in new customers and increase overall revenue.
However, you can’t just run any promotion or campaign. You have to ensure it’s strategic and targeted to get results. Strategic account planning helps with this by helping you create an effective strategy for each campaign or promotion so that they reach their full potential.
In addition to targeting specific goals with strategic account planning, it also helps when running these types of campaigns because they are more likely to be successful with proper planning from the beginning rather than after the fact when things go differently than planned.
Strategic Account Planning Helps You Get the Most Out of Your Customer Relationships
Strategic Account Planning helps you get the most out of your customer relationships by helping you understand who they are, what they need, and why they buy from you. It’s easy to assume that customers will continue doing business with you just because they have in the past. But this is only sometimes true as people change jobs, move on to new opportunities, or change industries altogether.
Conclusion
Strategic account planning is a great way to improve customer relationships and increase revenue. It can also help you better assess your customer needs, identify potential opportunities and make more informed decisions when it comes time to market those services or products. Strategic account planning is so important that many organizations use it as their overall business strategy.