Customer Account Value- Having multiple Fortune 100/500 customers, I created the goal of effectively planning and understanding the market. I plotted customer opportunities against their historical technology maturity, purchase tolerance, and timing (customer names blurred out). The result, 3-years later, still stands true- top-5 customers, the approach, the maturity, and alignment.
Aggregate customer maturity mapping
Annual customer opportunity plan
Customer technology maturity view
Market Value- The aerospace and defense market has had the same challenges for at least 20 years. To move our sales teams in the right direction, I spelled out where they are now and where we could take them by moving them into the cloud answering what the next sales play, and inspiring the customer vision. This guided our sales teams and sales enablement with new and easier-to-use approaches.
Market headwinds identified
Looking at the market personas, I developed a value selling plan that caters to each
I identified several stages to deliver a high level customer activity
Today's customer process
Future customer process on a cloud platform
The customer challenge
How do we get started with the customer is simple?
What path does the customer want to take?
Where does the high value customer engagement lie?
Pre-Sales Best Practice- Part of a successful sales pilot is to define the customer's journeys and the pilot's key performance indicators. As a best practice, I've made this an integral part of every large sale cycle. A lot of success comes from defining these upfront as trusted partners, we can test our pilot success against these parameters.
Journey mapping as part of sales cycle
Defining KPIs for sales pilot success
Customer Business Plan (abridged)- I've run into 2-challenges between the sales team and customers. 1. The sales team needed additional support organizing their account 2. The customer procurement departments needed a business plan. Organizing the sales teams to key indicators and planning on how to achieve them gave way to clear tasks we needed to take to be successful. Knowing what the customer procurement departments needed for approval changed the way the business plan was constructed and delivered. These simple changes expedited sales cycles.
