Saturday, April 4, 2009

My Sales Manager Hates Account Plans!!

The April "Ask John" column deals with

I am a Pre-Sales Engineering manager with a difficult situation. Our company is really embracing Solution Selling, yet my Sales Manager partner is violently opposed to any kind of formal strategic account planning - either verbal or documented. this makes life very hard for my dedicated team of SE's. How can I get him to adopt this proactive and sensible practice?

Aside from conducting some psychoanalysis I provide three strategies for dealing with this very common situation. Read the full response here

I am amazed by how often this happens. Given the situation with the Down Economy, and almost every company, whether software, hardware or services trying sell Solutions instead of Products - salesreps still refuse to conduct any kind of formal planning. And their management chain allows this to happen.

If the rep was crushing his number at way over 100% I could possibly live with it - more than likely he is doing some form of innate informal planning anyway. But for folks at 25% , give me a break and get with the plan.

No comments:

Post a Comment