Understanding PeopleSoft Strategic Account Planning

This chapter discusses:

• Strategic account planning.

• Strategic account planning business processes.

• Account assignment.

• Account planning.

• Audience segmentation.

• Reporting and metrics.

Strategic Account Planning

PeopleSoft Enterprise Strategic Account Planning enables your organization to capture maximum value throughout the customer lifecycle. It helps you align your strategy with customer needs and corporate objectives and measure progress against metrics-driven goals. You can segment your customers and consumers and work with partners to identify opportunities in high-potential or underperforming accounts. Performance metrics can be customized for your business, leveraging both internal and external data sources. You can also improve execution of the account strategy by triggering recommended actions based on actual versus target goal attainment. With Strategic Account Planning, you can proactively manage your resources to extract more value from every customer relationship.

At the simplest level, strategic account planning is the process of managing accounts at a company or client level rather than the opportunity level. An account can be a company, consumer, site or partner. Account planning is the process of setting the goals for the accounts and measuring those goals. Account management represents a fundamental shift— regardless of business model—away from a transaction-oriented approach to account based relationship building

PeopleSoft Strategic Account Planning Business Processes

Strategic Account Planning enables you to plan for and manage the customer relationship through the following stages:

• Evaluate customer value and needs.

  Strategic Account Planning helps your organization identify the customers who will bring you the most value and greatest profit. It helps your account team evaluate each customer’s current and long-term revenue potential, as well as strategic importance, so that you can invest the right level of resources to serve them profitably.

  You can manage your customers at both the company and account manager level. Accounts will typically be grouped into customer portfolios at the company level. Your account managers can further segment their territory based on criteria they define.

  Global account managers who cover a few major customers can segment them into smaller divisions to identify cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. Account managers who are responsible for a large set of accounts or consumers can segment them into smaller groups based on revenue, profitability, and common characteristics such as industry, geography, or buying requirements. This feature helps account managers focus their time and efforts on the right customers.

• Develop a measurable strategy.

  The account strategy drives your plan for managing the customer lifecycle. It determines how you can capture more value from both high-potential and underperforming accounts. Different customers require different strategies. Each strategy must be based on measurable goals and objectives to help you track the progress your team and partners are making in the account.

  Account managers can use Strategic Account Planning to:

  • Define metrics-driven goals and qualitative objectives for each account.

  • Align account goals and compensation with corporate objectives.

  • Identify critical success factors for reaching plan targets.

  • Outline the value proposition required to meet the customer’s specific needs.

• Allocate resources based on customer value.

  The next step is to determine how you will allocate limited resources to execute your account strategy. To drive profitable revenue growth, you need to choose the most cost-effective channels while ensuring a seamless experience that optimally meets your customers’ needs.

  Strategic Account Planning enables you to match the right resources to market, sell to, and provide service to your customers. Team members are automatically or manually assigned to accounts based on criteria that you define. Territory changes are automatically updated so that your accounts are always assigned to the right account manager. You can also create account plans to leverage partners in capturing more value from key customers. Finally, you can quickly adjust your resource allocation by measuring and monitoring performance against account goals and objectives.

• Identify new opportunities to increase customer value.

  Strategic Account Planning provides a centralized repository of all account information, delivering a complete, 360-degree view across the enterprise of all the sales, marketing, and service interactions with the customer. PeopleSoft also has prebuilt integration to third-party data sources so that account managers can leverage real-time information to uncover new opportunities to increase customer value.

• Collaborate with account team and partners.

  Strategic Account Planning improves collaboration by clearly identifying key tasks, due dates, and owners to meet the plan objectives. Managers control who can access and edit the account plan. You can also use PeopleSoft’s inline analytics to drive plan execution. Based on progress against account goals, the application will trigger alerts and recommended actions.

  The account plan helps the team identify which relationships they can leverage to influence key decision makers. The account team can view all the contacts associated with the account and track metrics, such as number of meetings with key contacts, to evaluate how well they are executing against the relationship strategy.

Account Assignment

This section discusses:

• Global account programs.

• National and regional account programs.

• Organizational structure.

Global Account Programs

A global account program is an integrated, multinational framework for implementing a strategic, global account management process. A closer look at global account programs in practice reveals the difficulty in both defining and understanding what exactly constitutes a global program versus a national, regional, international or multinational program, and what is a global account. Companies use varying criteria of geography and customer characteristics in classifying their accounts and programs. Yet, in-depth research with individual companies suggests that factors such as a high level of process and systems integration, geographical spread, and worldwide coordination of resources and operations distinguish the global account programs.

National and Regional Account Programs

A national or regional account program possesses a number of key processes to successfully implement corporate strategy for strategic accounts. These include: securing senior management support, creating the appropriate internal systems to coordinate activity nationally or regionally, building the appropriate product or service delivery model, account planning, program and account metrics, training and educating the right people, using compensation to drive the right behavior to achieve account objectives, and optimizing technology and IT systems for national and regional account communications and knowledge management.

National account programs establish centralized decision-making and operate within a uniform culture. Regional account programs may cross national boundaries but tend to develop semi-autonomous operations defined around geographical locations such as Europe, North America, or the Pacific Rim. Within these programs, decision-making is more decentralized; organizational processes are more complex, and the culture more diverse.

By contrast, global account programs coordinate worldwide process and operations, utilizing both centralized and decentralized decision-making to implement a corporate global strategy at regional and local levels worldwide. Organizational complexity is high and cultural sensibilities are a critical success factor for global account relationships.

Organizational Structure

Organizational structure for a strategic accounts program refers to the company reporting structure and design of infrastructure for delivery of product, service, and solutions to key customers.

In some corporations, organizational structure for strategic accounts is integrated into an existing centralized structure. Where existing corporate structure is decentralized, however, a strategic accounts organization can be created as an umbrella while the underlying structure is left in place. Functionally effective strategic account programs have been implemented using each of these approaches.

Internal alignment goes hand in hand with internal selling by the strategic accounts group to make the business case for strategic account management among all the stakeholders in the corporation. The sales force architecture that has territory and division salespeople staking claim to accounts and turf is deeply rooted in many corporate cultures.

Organizational structure for a global accounts program versus a national or regional program typically involves a higher degree of structural complexity, flexibility and a combination of both centralized and decentralized authority.

Account Planning

Account planning is a process of planning for a strategic account that provides an understanding of the customer or client’s position, compiles and analyzes data, sets goals, establishes responsibilities, allocates resources, and sets measurable objectives. Unlike most traditional account planning, strategic account planning is meant to be a flexible, collaborative, and ongoing activity that is both comprehensive and linked to the day-to-day management of a strategic account.

Account planning usually involves the strategic account manager, their manager, account team, and possibly the customer, and the focus of an account plan will differ according to the go-to-market strategy developed for that account. Components of a plan frequently include: a mission statement, industry/market/ customer overview, business objectives alignment, position/performance in the account, resource allocation, strategic opportunities and value-based account plan objectives.

Audience Segmentation

Audience segmentation tools enable organizations to finely target customers and prospects based on customer or profile attributes. These tools are invaluable for organizations that need to prioritize customer investments and strategies based on tangible criteria such as customer value, customer profitability, and other custom metrics.

Audience segmentation tools provide an interactive graphical segmentation tree display and show hierarchical segment relationships and real-time counts. The visual and detailed nature of these new capabilities enables marketers to support the natural, iterative segmentation process while quickly gaining insight into customer segments.

Audience segmentation includes:

• A visual segment builder.

  You can define segments (groups of customers defined by selection criteria). Hierarchical relationships between segments are included, and you can clearly and easily view them in a visual and interactive tree structure. Using the visual segment builder, you can see the hierarchies created by parent-child relationships of segments. Further, segments can be contained in segment groups, which enable you to group segments and segment hierarchies in a logical fashion.

• Enterprise segment definitions.

  Segments can be published to be actionable. When a segment is published, it is available for use by various components, including the AAF, Strategic Account Planning, and SmartViews. In the AAF, these terms can be used to build any conditions in an AAF policy. For Strategic Account Planning and SmartViews, users can select published segments to create a segment plan. They can set objectives and goals, and they can view the overall performance of the segments through Strategic Account Planning and SmartViews.

• Integration with a virtual data library.

  New types of selection criteria are supported, enabling you to select from the AAF data library terms, audience and segment membership, campaign execution data (for example, marketing contacts this month via email), and campaign response data (for example, individuals who placed an order and referenced a campaign’s promotion code).

Reporting and Metrics

This section discusses:

• Metrics – Program / Account

• Account Selection and Segmentation

Metrics – Program / Account

The metrics of a strategic account program or strategic account are the measurements by which the objectives of an individual account plan, relationship or portfolio of account relationships are evaluated. The criteria for these assessments cover a range of expectations established individually and jointly by the supplier and the customer who anticipate mutually beneficial results from the relationship.

Metrics define the value or set of values the supplier brings to the customer, the value the customer provides to the supplier, and the shared value. Value is represented in both financial and relationship-based terms and, ideally, is incorporated into the account plan at the beginning of the partnership.

Examples of value and measurements include: segment loyalty and growth achievement, expanse of executive relationships (broad / deep), mutual gain in productivity and efficiency, increased share of client’s total spend, acknowledgement of client of the value of partnership, and improvement in client’s business results.

Account Selection and Segmentation

The process of account selection and segmentation is a systematic method for optimum customer portfolio management. Account selection is part of determining the go-to-market strategy for each customer. Using a set of tools and criteria, accounts are selected as well as de-selected, and they can be segmented or tiered according to varying levels of resource allocation, funding, and service. The process of account selection requires the supplier to first define a strategic account. For example, one company defines strategic accounts as “those accounts that are managed separately from the organization’s traditional sales channels, by account managers who have total responsibility for the sales, business processes, value proposition and customer satisfaction ”

The account team’s perspective and input contribute to objective evaluations of accounts, helping to match the supplier’s comparative capability to customer opportunities. Importantly, the process can determine in which accounts a supplier is over-invested or under-invested, a critical determinant of business success. Proper account selection is considered a critical step in the design of a strategic account program.