Introduction to Account Growth Projects

What is an Account Growth Project

Account Growth means so much more than simply “grabbing more wallet share.” As the customer organization grows, so does the account. It encourages a mindset among salespeople to focus on helping the customer organization to grow and approaching the relationship as a way to find “wins” that benefit everyone.

  • It complements the Prospects and Sales Projects workflows
  • Making it easier to execute your account-level strategies
  • Bringing key information together and visualizing it for everyone on the team

The term “Account Growth” focuses attention on how your team can work with and help the client organization derive more benefit and grow as a result. The sales team can do this by taking effective actions:

  • Develop an actionable process that includes best practices for engaging with accounts
  • Make account growth activities a routine part of your salespeople’s workflow
  • Align your efforts with the future outcome that the client is looking to achieve and how you align with that
  • Make customer research easy to access and use, so it’s not just another administrative chore
  • Provide visual tools that help salespeople see where and how much growth opportunity is present in each account
  • Identify the people, their roles and responsibilities, and visualize your relationship with them, and how they'll influence joint efforts
  • Train salespeople to think in terms of growth instead of management

Many of the tools you’ll use for account growth will be similar to tools used in Prospect and Sales Project processes. But what changes is how you build and grow the relationship, with an eye on success for everyone, with the focus on the customer.

Know where to focus at a glance

One of our hottest features is an account grid view that shows you at a glance which accounts to focus your attention on. Along one axis value, and along another is untapped potential.

  • Those with the highest untapped potential are the accounts that have the most room for growth.
  • Top right is clients who have purchased a lot from you and could buy more.
  • Bottom left are clients who have not purchased so much from you, nor can they buy much more, from your perspective.

agp_screenshot_grid

The data on which the grid is based is customizable and flexible, allowing you to design the characteristics that determine the value and potential scores of each account. Go to Setting up Value & Potential to learn more

They’re also dynamic, allowing the grid to change over time as each account’s value and potential change or as the characteristics on which you base them change. Learn more about Working with Growth Grid.

Create dashboards for your most critical information

Membrain’s customizable account growth project dashboards allow you to display all the most important information about each dashboard in an intuitive format.

You can show scorecards, which products and services each client is using, how many people are in the account, their technical environment, billing details, key contacts, or any other information that your salespeople need to know.



Customize to fit your unique needs

Membrain’s account growth module allows you to customize what you track and how the module works according to your unique environment. You can create :

  • Checklists
  • Graphs
  • Organizational charts
  • Link to ERPs or other external tools
  • Process steps, and more.

Like the grid, the dashboard is interactive, so the team can get more detailed information and collaborate to improve the content and the plan.

Make it actionable

At the heart of Membrain lie our process tools. They give the software much of its power, its ability to make your sales strategy actionable. These are also what make our new account growth module different from anything else on the market.

Similar to Sales Process, an Account Growth Process is the template Project Plan your salespeople can follow recommended steps, record information, and track the progress of Account Projects. Learn more about the Account Growth Process.

With Membrain, in real-time, plans can easily be built directly into each team member’s workflow using our built-in process tools. When the team leaves the meeting, everyone has their checklists and process steps already inside the workflow they use every day.

Some common types of processes that can be created in Account Growth Projects:

  • Annual Account plan - using stages for a quarterly approach
  • Fixed time Project - a delivery project with a start and end date or contract style with a specified time frame.
  • Lifecycle Process - Ongoing Account Growth or Customer Success

To learn more about Creating Account Growth Process.

Connect sales with customer success

With traditional account management, it can be tough for the account manager to know whether the customer service team has delivered on the value that was promised during the sales process.

Membrain has a unique set of tools that enable a clear and clean connection between the sales side and the customer success side.

When you make a sale, the account’s customer success team has access to all of the relevant information and can be held accountable to provide the value that your sales team promised. Using the same process tools that make account growth easy, customer service knows exactly what to do to meet the expectations set during the sales process.

 

In turn, the sales team can use information from the customer success team to provide more value and create more sales opportunities within each account.

Create a loop back to marketing

Just as sales and customer success should be connected, so should sales and marketing. With Membrain’s account growth module, it’s easy to get information about the customer’s needs back to the marketing department so they can create content and awareness to serve those needs.