How To Develop Your Top 20% Strategic Accounts

Pareto’s Principle states that 80% of your sales come from 20% of your most valued customers. As with all business development strategies, you must understand where you are now and analyse the potential of where you could be. There are many tools to help you to assess and understand your most valued customer’s, their environment and your relationship.

Knowledge is power and research is the keys to understanding and capitalising on the opportunity. The PESTLE tool (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal and Environmental) is an excellent starting point to analyse your customer’s macro environment. Researching into your customer’s microenvironment can be done through supply chain analysis, this is a quantitative analysis of inputs and outputs within and between suppliers, prices and values added. These inputs and outputs are expressed in physical flows of material and services needed to produce a final product, with the plotting of the person(s) responsible for the inputs, flow and outputs.

Secure Strategies

  • Identify and profile your existing strategic account.
  • Use the profile to identify more potential customers.
  • Research the customer macro and micro environment.
  • Develop the contact and relationship strategy.

Maintain Strategies

  • Map existing customer relationships.
  • Develop strategies to improve individual relationship.
  • Develop continuous improvement strategies.
  • Gain and act on feedback.

Grow Strategies

  • Assess current and potential business level.
  • Identify the specific gaps.
  • Develop strategies to close the gap.
  • Develop strategies to build individual customer relationship.

Maintain strategies include creating an organisational plan of your customer’s operations, putting names to positions and grading the relationship by the level of importance in your current relationship and the level of engagement.