Target Accounts

How can focused account profiling promote business growth?

Last week during a CRM roundtable webinar I hosted with MCAA, we discussed ways to use CRM data to make better business decisions. One of the hot topics was Account Profiling and how using a 4-dimensional approach can help grow your business volume with focus on where your sales team should spend their time. You may say, “We have a profiling system and we grade our accounts.” In my experience, the information is usually only 1-dimensional; basing it off current or the past years business volume and not growing volume. This is where the 4-dimensional approach becomes invaluable.

Have you ever noticed how easy it is to get excited about sales concepts, and how hard it is to turn them into a reality? We’ve all been there. We send our sales teams to a one- or two-day class and they come home with a head full of ideas and a three-ring binder.

I spoke last week at the Sales GPS Executive Workshop in Austin, hosted by MDM and Indian River Consulting Group. I talked with distribution leaders there about how many distribution companies proudly consider themselves to be quoting machines. 

One-dimensional account profiling, typically using A, B, C or D based on the current business from each customer, is a step in the right direction. But if you want to take a more proactive approach to uncover new opportunities with existing and potential customers, take your profiling a step further.

In the second webcast of the MDM-SalesProcess360 quarterly series, Brian Gardner, author of ROI from CRM: It’s About Sales Process, Not Just Technology, will home in on a critical part of that process: sales opportunity management.

Learn more about this webinar here or register now.

Join Reed Stith, our newest addition to the SalesProcess360 team, for a quick 30-minute webinar on sales opportunity management on Oct. 28 at 11-11:30 ET.

In this webinar, Stith will provide three practical insights to guide your team as it shifts from a reactive to a proactive mindset when it comes to acting on sales opportunities in both existing and new accounts.

Did you miss this webinar? Register and watch it on-demand!

Read the previous article in this series on developing a competitive advantage: Size Matters: What is Your Load Input Number?

What is your competitive advantage? No, really! What is your competitive edge? Sounds like a simple question, and when asked, most distributors, reps and manufacturers answer pretty quickly and predictably. If your goal is to excel in a competitive market, continuous attention to systems, methods, and processes that offer a competitive edge is essential. This series of articles focuses on areas proven to give companies a real competitive edge, yielding measurable results. These methods and processes must be things you and your team can focus on – and control – internally. Excuses related to external factors such as the economy and industry softness need not apply.

The topic in this article is target account management. If I were a betting man, I would bet your company is engaged in some form of target account management or you have at least talked about it. The question is whether your sales team is proactive or reactive with regard to target accounts.