In a world of constant disruption, will your Key Account plan hold?

Watch: Will your Key Account plan hold through disruption?

In a world of constant disruption, will your Key Account plan hold?

There’s a simple way to find out. Ask yourself: did the account plans from the last two years work as written? I’m not talking about outcomes. Did the plans themselves work, or did the outcomes come from some other set of circumstances?

Clayton Christensen, the Harvard professor Thinkers50 twice named the world’s #1 management thinker, wrote that “every action that managers take, and every plan they formulate, is based on some theory.” He gives us three ways to test whether our theory is good or not:

Is it built on patterns drawn from careful observation? Is it organized into categories, so the meaningful differences stand out? Does it explain cause and effect: why a move would work, and when it wouldn’t?

He also warned about “correlations that masquerade as causation.” Two things happen together once, and it looks like a pattern. That’s how a guess gets mistaken for a theory.

Lets develop this management planning skill using Christensen’s method and see which of your key account plans are built on a good working theory today.

First, recognize the patterns behind why things don’t go as planned. For instance, if top executives in legal, people you have no relationship with, keep slowing your progress, there may be a larger regulatory issue in your industry that your account plan didn’t account for.

Second, group these gaps into major categories. A key account relationship holds more complexity than a CRM can organize. What you’re tracking in an account plan is a set of ideas about what action to take and why, along with the tasks themselves. There are 4.4 trillion possible states an account can be in, so our team needed a system that could organize this complexity in a way that lets us see what needs to happen and act quickly.

Lastly, determine the relationship between actions and outcomes. A good working theory lets you judge what’s likely to happen if certain things are true. Those things are the patterns, organized in a way you can understand. A simple way to think about it: what action would drive growth in this gap?

This approach helped our team build key account plans that generated over $2B in revenue and held #1 industry rankings through four major economic downturns over the past 20 years.

We called it “𝐋𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐆𝐚𝐩𝐬.” It was our way of thinking critically about what could disrupt our business, so we were better prepared for whatever stood in our path. The result was better key account strategy, planning and forecasting we could trust.

We built the Vitality Index on 30 years of observation across key accounts, organized into 7 domains and 21 growth drivers across four levels of partnership. If you want help testing the theory behind your key account plans, schedule a free 30-minute consultation and ask for a demo.