Targeting Accounts - A Specialist’s Role
I attended a day long distributor planning session, a sales meeting that ended with a “round-robin” planning session. Vendor salespeople and Distributor Specialists were assigned tables around the perimeter of the meeting room. Salespeople spent a few minutes at each table talking about existing opportunities and future targets. After eavesdropping, I noticed salespeople discussing accounts where they felt additional actions could push the selling process forward. Soon after the meeting, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Salespeople knew their assigned accounts but didn’t fully understand the targeting process. At the end of the day, nearly every salesperson listed the same three or four accounts as their targets – the same accounts and contacts were given for a diverse group of products and technologies. Later, I asked a couple of salespeople and their managers to define “target” – the results were interesting: · “A target account is a new account” ·