MANAGEMENT
How to Define and Open Major Accounts THEODORE B. KINNI
Establishing major accounts is “really 70 percent planning and strategy and only 30 percent face- to-face execution,” says Neil Rackham, author and founder of SPIN Selling.
Given the cost of pursuing new ac- counts – which increases with the strategic importance of the prospec- tive customer as well as the size and complexity of the sale – how you start to identify and pursue major accounts is especially critical. “Large compa- nies will have to spend maybe half a million dollars before they are going to get any business from a new major account – because, nearly always, products in a major account are cus- tomized, adapted, specially config- ured,” explains Rackham. “It’s costing a lot of money; it takes a lot of time. So you have to pick the winners.”
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THE RIGHT PROSPECTS The first step in picking the winners in major account sales requires some upper-level decision making. “I hear a lot of the salespeople being told that they are to determine and develop 10 major accounts in their territories,” says one sales consultant who’s a veteran facilitator of national account management and strategic selling seminars. “But what happens if the guy in Chicago has no major accounts in his territory? If we have him select- ing on his own, the resources of the corporation get diluted.
“Sales managers or executives have got to set up a list of criteria
that work as screens, just like you were mining for gold,” says the consultant. “Major accounts have to be this size, have this kind and number of people, have this num- ber of product lines, or have to be in one of these market niches. We need to screen the whole popula- tion of potential major accounts on a nationwide or global basis and then determine how we are going to allocate our resources around those customers.”
Once potential customers have been identified through this sifting process, sellers must analyze them individually. “How do you know it’s the right door?” asks Rackham. “I remember working with a New York bank that had a team of six people working on how to get into a large pharma company. Now, I had worked with this company and knew that they had made a corporate decision to reduce the number of their face-
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