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do you want to know what separates your everyday sales rep from high performing Pros it's one thing that is focus I'm not focus of the mind but focus on strategy the real pros know that smashing free quotas is all about working key accounts clients who have exceptional Revenue potential so how do you go about identifying these key accounts so that you start bringing in those big fat commission checks well let's find hi my name is Will and I make selling simple now in today's video we're going to take a look at the ins and outs of key account selling first we're going to cover what key accounts are in the first place and why you need to focus your efforts on them rather than chasing your tail with random smaller accounts then we're going to take a look at the key account criteria so what to look for what to avoid like the plague and then last but not least we're going to look at Key account list and we're going to cover a four-step process so you can start building yours today does that sound good well let's get right into it so I get it I get it right you've got a sales Target to hitting the sooner you hit the target the better otherwise you're going to be prolonging the pain the stress of working in sales and you're not going to get a big fat bonus at the end of it with that said then why do most sales professionals spend all of the days chasing their tails they fire off hundreds and hundreds of spammy emails and they make dozens of random cold calls with no real system in place to make sure that it's all going to work out there is zero consistency and as refract ai's co-founder Richard Smith recently told me on the salesman podcast activity drives success um and it but it's ultimately its consistency is the big thing you know unless you're consistent you're only ever going to get very mediocre results if you're not consistently making moves to land Big Money Maker accounts where you're just losing out because those small deals that you make each week each month will get you close to hitting your targets but those big ones are the deals that like to blow straight past it so if you want to start crushing your sales quota you need to be closing what we call Key accounts so first let's define what a key count approach to selling actually is and it's a selling approach which offers strategic value to specific accounts whilst distinguishing yourself from the competition so that then begs the question what are strategic accounts so let's use an analogy of people in your life to explain this but you've probably got hundreds of acquaintances that you're happy to speak to and again probably to help as well if there's a there's a job that's going to take less than five minutes to complete it but it's likely that there's only a handful of people that you're willing to drop whatever you're doing right now to spend time with or help out these are the Strategic people in your life you get more out of interacting with them than others and in sales it works the same way so think of all the accounts in your territory as being in a pyramid shape you've got your key counts on the top and they make up the smallest percentage of all your accounts then you've got your good customers in the middle and Below them you've got the the general Riff Raff that you have to engage with at some point even though they're probably not going to lead to millions and millions of dollars in Revenue now what's funny here is that if you run the numbers I'm pretty confident that you'll find this pyramid shape has an inverse relationship to the revenue that your customers bring in each year the general riffraff is going to bring in the least amount of money the good customers are going to bring in a decent amount of cash and the key accounts are going to bring in most of all in fact your Care Council usually bring in more Revenue than the other two groups combined that means if you can just close a few more key accounts each year you can massively massively scale your income potential so that leads us to the question how the heck do I uncover these key accounts in the sea of crappy lead data that I've got access to and the answer is simple you're going to use what we call a key account Matrix and we got a lot more further into this inside Southern Made Simple Academy which you can find over at salesman.org but here is a high level overview so if you draw a chart with two axes x-axis is potential future revenue and the y-axis is the current relationship with the account well I'm going to split this into four segments and we can label the segments selective investment accounts these are where you've got low or poor relationships but there's high potential for new business then we've got Strategic investment accounts here you've got good relationship to these clients and there's potential for new business we've got proactive maintenance accounts so here you've got great relationships but there's a low chance of growth and then we've got the avoid these bastards at all cost accounts here you you've got low crappy rubbish relationships and there's a low chance of new business coming from them as well so to find your potential key accounts all you gotta do is look through your lead data and find the accounts that fulfill two criteria they've got the potential to generate lots of Revenue and you've got good relationships already within them that is the key fundamentals to developing very quickly new key accounts you can have good potential future revenue and good relationships within the account itself so finally how do you build up your key account list well all you got to do is follow a clear four-step process step one identify your key potential accounts if you've got a CRM system this is dead easy to do you may be able to apply the selection criteria that was just outlined to your entire customer base in the software itself that being said if you identify your key accounts and you end up with 500 of them well narrow things down even further and focus on just 10 essential accounts to go out over the next 12 months or so that way you can focus your efforts at least at first and you can see if this is working or not step number two you need to rank your key accounts for the hottest prospects at the very top and the lowest at the bottom in relation to potential Revenue that could be generated and this shouldn't be a guesswork John we need to uncover the potential profits that we can actually generate here so let me give you an example let's say you're selling Management Services to haulage companies well when you're trying to work out how much revenue could be generated you could rank these businesses on how many trucks that they own and operate when I work in medical device sales I looked at how many endoscopes the account currently had or perhaps how many operating rooms that they had to work out how much revenue I could pull from the accounts if we closed it and it became a key strategic account for us next we're going to evaluate our strengths within each account relative to our most relevant competitor so let me break that down to think about how you compare on price deliverability uniqueness of your offering and additional Business Services you can provide variables like this versus the competition who might already be in the account that you want to get into and turn into one of your key strategic accounts if your if you just go out of five versus the competition for each of the ten key accounts that you're out there which leads us on to step four and now that we've actually built up some data here on a on a spreadsheet or a piece of paper however you're going about doing this it's time to make some hypotheses about the potential accounts that we should and probably shouldn't go after and if you'd like to make this data more Visual and you want to share it with a sales manager sales leader or you need to get more resources from the company you work for to make these accounts happen then you can plot the data from step two on the vertical axis of the graph and then the data from step three on the horizontal axis of the graph that we talked about earlier on and you split this up into the quadrant that we've already discussed this will instantly give you a excellent visual representation of which accounts to focus on and which that you should definitely ignore because once you know where to start where you should be focused next step is just making it happen and getting in touch with his account and getting some business done so focusing in on key accounts can be huge for your selling success I want to drill into your mind that key account selling is a selling approach which offers strategic value to specific accounts whilst distinguishing yourself from the competition it's a bit of a clinical definition there but I think that is important when we are defining key accounts and actually going after them on top of our definition a key account is one with high earning potential and high potential to have strong relationships compared to your competition and if you want to build your own key account list dead easy identify potential accounts rank the earning potential in those accounts compare yourself to the competition make some hypotheses about which accounts are best and then after that stop focusing on the small accounts that are on your territory and start nailing these massive ones if you want to generate massive commission so there we go if you enjoyed this video by knocking the video that's on the screen right now and continue making selling simple [Music]