Pick a tool...any tool.

Well, almost any tool. Like in many things, it isn't necessarily that you seek perfection in the tools that will help you do your job, sometimes the most important thing is just using something that will help beyond using nothing at all.

Account planning tools, for example.

One of our clients has an offering with a very long sales cycle, but is $500k to over $1M. It touches sales, marketing, operations, finance, purchasing, etc. So there are a lot of players.

One of the 3VL resources that I employ on the team for this client is working one of those $1M deals. As I began helping her review where she was with this opportunity, and a few others that she is working with that size of revenue potential and complexity, I realized that even though we overlay a lot of good process and reporting on top of SalesForce.com, it still didn't give the full picture of all the moving pieces in such a complex sales environment.

We clearly came to the point of needing a true account and opportunity planning tool for this particular type of sale.

Previously we were a Miller Heiman partner, reselling and sometimes delivering their sales training offerings, so I started there. I like the Blue/Gold/Green sheet approach, and they are actually integrated into SFDC, so that was the incumbent. However there is a lot of other stuff out there now, and I gave some of the others a good look. Many, like MH, are tools that are best used when you've taken a full course around them. They each, of course, have their own strengths and weaknesses.

To make a long story short, because my individual findings on each alternative isn't the point - I went back to what I know well, and that is the MH Blue Sheet approach. In summary it helps you identify all the buying influences, your position with them, the type of influence they have on the sale, as well as non-people oriented influences (like do you know the decision making process?). Then it helps you look at your strengths and identify red flags. Finally, you talk through how to amplify your strengths and what you need to learn/do to eliminate red flags.

Again, other tools take different approaches, but after walking our rep through that form in about 1 hour, we knew a great deal more about our position and how to improve it...and had a much better idea of what stood in our way of a sale and how to maximize our time driving to the outcome we wanted.

Sometimes, those type of tools also help you understand where to STOP investing time. I've done them before with a rep and what at the beginning sounded like a 'great' opportunity turned out to have so many red flags and insurmountable obstacles that we almost immediately decided to focus our efforts on other accounts with higher probability.

Doing such an exercise with say a rep's "top" 6 accounts can be an eye opening and difficult experience - because if you do it with open eyes, typically some of the top prospects become less 'hot' and the whole forecast can be affected...but if you are seeking truth and predictability in your forecast, this is one tool to get there.

Using a tool like that on an ongoing basis, especially for long sales cycle, complex, high doller value transactions can be a very useful thing.

And again - it isn't really the tool - it is that you use one and you know how to get maximum value out of it!