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Praise for ACCOUNT PLANNING in SALESFORCE

Donal uncovers the vast advantages of Account Planning done right and shows how our own client intimacy approach has benefitted from getting closer to our customers.

Patricia Elizondo, Senior Vice President, Xerox Corporation

Companies around the globe are transforming the way they connect with customers. ACCOUNT PLANNING in SALESFORCE contains valuable advice on how to use Account Planning methodology in Salesforce to accelerate revenue growth. It is a great example of how our partners are leveraging the power of the Salesforce platform to provide customers with the right tools to accelerate their success in the cloud.

Ron Huddleston, Senior Vice President, ISV & Channel, salesforce.com

Unlike most books on this topic, Donal grounds his recommendations in the context of modern B2B sales, where customers – armed with massive amounts of information and advice – can afford to engage salespeople later and later in the purchase decision. In this world, an insight-based approach must serve as the backbone of a powerful Account Plan. And, as Donal demonstrates, there are no shortcuts to getting this right. This book is required reading for those of us who want to keep selling and avoid the trap of order-taking.

Matthew Dixon, Executive Director Sales & Service Practice, CEB and co-author of The Challenger Sale

Even a dyslexic, A.D.D., former CEO like me found it to be a compelling relevant read … Love the statistical back up … Practical and relevant … I’ve turned around over a dozen sales teams in my career and the content provided in this book is the basis for that success. Daly nailed it!

Ken Bado, former CEO, Marklogic and EVP, Autodesk

A must-read for all sales professionals working in a salesforce.com environment! Account Planning is a core sales skill that requires a disciplined approach and ongoing care and maintenance. The book not only teaches the ‘how,’ but ‘why’ proper Account Planning will drive bigger and stronger sales opportunities.

Matthew L. Cox, Senior Director, Sales Strategy and Operations, Hewlett-Packard

All too often Account Planning is a once-a-year effort that gathers dust on the shelf. Use Donal Daly’s ACCOUNT PLANNING in SALESFORCE to help transform this critical activity into a usable, customer-centric approach to growing loyal relationships all year long.

Bob Thompson, Founder / CEO, CustomerThink Corp.

Donal’s unique combination of methodology expertise and smart software comes to life in this book. It is filled with priceless nuggets. If you want to operationalize Account Planning, this is the best roadmap I’ve seen. I encourage all sales professionals to follow it.

Carol Burch, former Global SVP, CRM Clear Vision Program, SAP

A practical guide that embraces the modern world of global Account Management with a refreshing balance of integrity, knowledge, expertise, and humor. Daly’s business acumen is evident as he clearly articulates what it takes to maximize revenue from Large Accounts. A must read and, dare I say it, an enjoyable read …

Padma Rao, Director Sales Enablement, Akamai

This book is a no-brainer for sales reps and sales executives who want to maximize revenue from large accounts. It’s filled with practical strategies you can implement right away.

Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies

Account planning must live and breathe as part of how you run your business. It needs to become part of your culture, and should be integrated into your overall business cadence. If you want to drive the right culture and cadence for Account Planning in your business, this book is a blueprint to start with.

Peter Jofriet, Director, Sales Excellence, Honeywell Process Solutions

ACCOUNT PLANNING in SALESFORCE helps companies focus and collaborate on creating value for critical accounts, and Dealmaker Smart Account Manager is a critical component. We are excited to add the combination of the book and the software to the portfolio of sales enablement tools we support. If you use salesforce.com you should definitely read this book!

Walter Rogers, CEO, CloudCoaching International

This is the only Account Management book I’ve seen that effectively maps methodology with technology, a critical weapon in the armory of today’s sales professional.

Gerhard Gschwandtner, CEO, Selling Power

While many authors only address one or the other, in this book Donal has addressed the intersection of both technology and methodology, the necessary mix of pragmatic principles of Account Planning coupled with the operation of CRM. The book brilliantly covers both the ‘what’ and the ‘how to.’ Whether you use Salesforce or any other CRM system, if you want to master Account Planning and maximize your personal performance, this book is a must read!

David Brock, President, Partners in Excellence

ACCOUNT PLANNING in SALESFORCE is a roadmap for successful Account Planning. Easy to read, full of crucial advice, it should be used by every Account Team selling to large customers. Strongly recommended.

Anne O’Leary, Executive Chairman, Kinematik

We all know that focusing on the right customers, and only the right customers, unlocks sales success. But how many of us put this into practice? This book holds the key to maximizing revenue from your biggest customers, and guides you through making it a repeatable practice by integrating it with Salesforce. Don’t just read this book – use it as a playbook and then act!

York Baur, CEO, Windermere Solutions

Sales people often confuse Account Planning with just having multiple opportunities in the same Account. Donal has ably demonstrated that the greatest win lies not in individual opportunities but in getting the overall Account Strategy right. This book clearly lays out a systematic way of planning, executing and tracking that strategy by leveraging technology as a true enabler. In this easy-to-follow book, Donal shows how it can be done.

John Golden, President & CEO, Huthwaite

At Chasm Institute we’ve long promoted market develop-ment concepts that seem mirrored here in Donal’s Account Planning methodologies. Stand-alone, they are best-of breed. Integrated as a native Salesforce application, they are killer. ACCOUNT PLANNING in SALESFORCE will not only teach you The TAS Group’s methodologies … it is a practical, no-nonsense guide for leveraging your Salesforce investment. And, the classic rock music references are both amusing and useful!

Mark Cavender, founder & Managing Director, Chasm Institute LLC

The title of this book could have easily been ACCOUNT EXECUTION. In his book, Donal lays out a pragmatic approach that makes Account Plans actionable, leveraging the benefits of salesforce.com and providing a roadmap on how to harvest key client relationships for sustainable and repeatable revenue.

Jim Ninivaggi, Service Director, SiriusDecisions

Finally!!! … a book that describes the best practices of Account Planning, and offers practical steps to use the most popular Salesforce support technology to implement. I love the section on trust! Account Managers and Teams should read the book, apply the concepts, and benefit from the increased revenue and improved Account relationships that will result.

David Roberts, Assistant Professor, Sales Discipline at Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC

I have to believe Donal had a blast writing this rich, insightful, and utterly practical book. He toggles back and forth among his roles as engineer, CEO, and salesperson, expertly providing the reader with what they need to understand about Account Management – especially the fact that it isn’t just a string of sales opportunities from the same customer, as many still think. This is an eye-opener and a must-read for anyone accountable for building long-term, mutually profitable relationships with key accounts.

Dave Stein, CEO & Founder, ES Research Group, Inc.

INTRODUCTION

An undertaking like this book is beyond the capacity of the author alone. At each step along the way, I received extraordinary support and guidance from a broad constituency of contributors and reviewers.

At the core of the book is the Account Planning and Management methodology from The TAS Group, which owes its value to our customers across the globe, the many methodology experts who preceded me in earlier incarnations of The TAS Group, and my current colleagues. It is through their implementation experience that we have been able to refine the methodology, and the supporting tools and models that are incarnated in the Dealmaker software platform.

But deep gratitude is due to Marc Benioff, CEO of salesforce.com, and the visionaries who joined with him in foreseeing a new way of delivering business software applications. Before the term ‘cloud-computing’ was invented, these luminaries envisioned a solution for the business software user untrammeled by the constraints of traditional enterprise software, freed from the limitations of deskbound systems access, and empowered by a software application that could be accessed anywhere, anytime.

It was this exciting vision, and the re-imagining of enterprise software, coming to life in the early part of this century, that was the exemplar to me (and many others) to invent new ways of approaching traditional business problems. In our case, our Mount Everest was sales training; an age-old and aging business model that appeared to me to have stagnated.

Consider this: in 2004, when I wrote the SELECT SELLING FIELDBOOK, the sales training industry was nearly 35 years old. I have on my bookshelf a book called Consultative Selling (Hanan, Cribbin & Heiser), published in 1970 by the American Management Association. The opening sentence in the book might lift your spirits or cause you a wry smile:

In the language of the salesman, there is a “whole new ball game” in selling today.

Roll the clock forward to 2004 and the sales training industry had changed little over that time. No dominant player had emerged. The market was highly fragmented, and in many sectors the dance between buyer and sales training provider was a revolving door of different suppliers claiming unique methodologies, or distinctive plays (forever leveraging sports analogies) to respond to the “whole new ball game.”

However, what struck me most notably was the complete absence of meaningful software support for this important endeavor. And it is important and worthwhile: applying sales methodology effectively will dramatically impact your sales effectiveness. For decades studies have shown that effective use of sales methodology has a direct correlation with improved performance. But when assessing the landscape for supporting the application of sales methodology, the sales professional looked around her, and all she saw was a wasteland. Standing beside her counterparts from the Finance department with software that itself was well-rooted in accounting principles, or her colleagues from Marketing as they refined their customer profiling with automated A/B testing, or the Customer Service teams she depended on – who themselves depended on their automated knowledge system to support her customers – the sales professional, anxious, under pressure, and looking to improve herself, could reasonably wonder why she didn’t have access to intelligent automated systems that ‘knew’ about sales methodology.

I recall speaking to a friend of mine who then was Senior Vice President of Sales for Expedia Corporate Travel (now Egencia). She and I had done business together before when I was running a previous software company. Her frustration at traditional sales training approaches was founded in many failed training initiatives. Recognizing the deficiencies of learning programs that were principally classroom- or eLearning-based, her challenge to me was simple: “Can’t you just take all of your software knowledge, and figure out a way where the sales team will just learn what they need to learn when they need to learn it, and make it easy enough, and smart enough, so that they will continue to use it and learn-by-doing?”

Coming from a background of 20 years of building enterprise software applications, I wondered about what could happen if we re-imagined the delivery model for sales training. Surely there was a better way to learn than sitting in a classroom for a three-day training program, only to forget in a month the majority of what was taught? Surely sales methodology should be applied and available when the sales person was working their sales opportunity – and wasn’t that most often when they were using their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.

Then I got excited as I considered the benefits of an integrated sales performance system, measuring progress, responding intelligently, and sustaining the learning through embedded context-sensitive advice. If the promise of sales methodology was to be realized, then intelligent software seemed to be the obvious route. I gathered together some of the team who had worked with me in my previous companies. Some of us had worked together in a company during the 1980s and 1990s where we built Artificial Intelligence systems. The possibilities for a sales system that got smarter with more use seemed a realistic goal. Imagine having a knowledgeable virtual sales coach available 24/7. What if we could eliminate the need for sales forecast calls through software that, based on experience, would ‘know’ when the opportunity would close? Or maybe it was possible to determine which opportunities you were more likely to win – guiding your allocation or prioritization of resources. The concept was thrilling.

We came up with a vision for how a sales organization might learn online, apply online, use online and coach online. We conceived a product called Dealmaker and were on our way. I had said to my friends that I would not do it again – but here I was with my fifth software start-up: Select Selling Inc.

But this was 2005, and there were not that many business application companies that had ‘gone online.’ The one clear exception was salesforce.com – in truth a band of zealots led by Marc Benioff, who were stargazing and prophesying a utopian vision of “No software” that has since proven to be less quixotic than their detractors predicted.

We looked at everything that salesforce.com did: we located our hosting infrastructure in the same building as salesforce.com; we studied their license agreements, and we borrowed from their pricing paradigm; we copied the Salesforce Foundation model as we too believed in ‘doing good while doing well;’ we learned from their marketing messaging; we analyzed their product management approach; we spoke to their customers and their employees; and we began our annual trek to Dreamforce. Then we decided to integrate Dealmaker with the salesforce.com CRM application.

In 2005 we released the first version of Dealmaker for salesforce.com. It was in fact the first sales methodology on the AppExchange – the marketplace for business applications integrated with Salesforce – and as our company was founded in Ireland, we were recognized as the first European application on the AppExchange.

Around that same time, Oracle acquired Siebel – and while that might seem like a non sequitur, the relevance will soon become apparent. In 1999 Siebel had acquired OnTarget, a leader in the sales methodology market, and owner and author of Target Account Selling (TAS) and other tremendous intellectual property around sales methodologies (including the Enterprise Selling Process and the Portfolio Management Process Account Planning method). As we entered the market in 2005 we came across many TAS fans – particularly those who were using it embedded in Siebel CRM. So after Oracle acquired Siebel, we purchased the OnTarget business unit from Oracle in July 2006 and changed our company name from Select Selling Inc. to The TAS Group.

Now we had a cloud-based enterprise class software application integrated with Dealmaker, the world’s leading sales methodology, and a passion to drive change. We had unique value as the result of combining two disciplines: intelligent software applications, and deep sales methodologies. With innovation in our blood and at the core of our efforts, we began our journey in earnest to change the sales training industry fundamentally.

That was seven years ago, and, as you would expect, Dealmaker has changed a lot over that period. The ‘smarts’ have gotten smarter, and the methodologies have been significantly extended and updated to reflect the changing dynamics in the economy, the pervasiveness of the Internet, and the arrival of social networks and consequent evolving nature of buyer-seller interactions. In this book, I have tried to capture the essence of these experiences as they relate to Account Planning.

Over that time, salesforce.com has changed dramatically too. From its modest beginnings as a provider of Sales Force Automation (SFA) to small businesses, it has morphed into the leader in cloud computing, and is a real enterprise software provider covering sales, service, marketing, and more recently human capital management. It has become a viable online platform for software development and has charted the ‘social’ territory in enterprise organizations with its Chatter application. For two years running it has been cited as ‘The Most Innovative Company in the World’ by Forbes magazine – a truly remarkable accolade to receive when you consider the innovation from companies like Apple, Google and others during that same time.

Our partnership with salesforce.com also has evolved during that period and has become more strategic. We could be the poster-child for the Force.com platform as a development vehicle. It has been a tremendous experience for us. Dealmaker is now deployed as a native Force.com application. That means that Dealmaker is hosted in the Sales Cloud, running on the same servers, adhering to the same security model, and with complete integration between Dealmaker and the underlying CRM data. We couldn’t be more ‘joined-at-the-hip.’

Similarly salesforce.com has recognized the value that we provide with our Dealmaker software and sales methodologies. The wheel came full circle in 2012 when salesforce.com recognized our expertise in Account Planning and Management and signed a contract to become a Dealmaker user. This was a momentous event for our partnership.

Coupled with that we receive phenomenal support from salesforce.com in our go-to-market activity, and advice on our technical strategy and product direction. We are fortunate to get assistance in customer engagements, and the leadership at the world’s leading cloud software company provides a constant compass as we plot our path to achieve optimal synergy between our two companies to the benefit of our joint customers.

In some ways this book, ACCOUNT PLANNING in SALESFORCE, is a celebration of the partnership between the two companies, but its core raison d’être is to improve the efficacy of salesforce.com’s customers in Account Planning.

Account Planning is a tremendously important endeavor. It drives revenue, increases customer satisfaction, aligns your organization, and provides incredibly gratifying moments when you can see the impact of your work – both for the customer, and for your company.

We are constantly impressed by the wisdom of the experienced sales professionals, account planners and strategic account managers we have been privileged to work with, and are grateful for their tenacity and insights. I hope that this book has captured some of the value they shared with us and has amplified it somewhat through our continuing sales methodology research and innovation in sales performance automation.

We have tried to encapsulate the best of our experience and knowledge and improve it with the wisdom of salesforce.com and the sales community. Any shortcomings or mediocrities are mine alone.

Donal Daly
Cork, Ireland
January 2013