Key account strategic plans: worksheets

Writing your key account strategic plan is the last part of the process of assembling information about the customer; analysing it; developing your response to it; and only then beginning to write the plan.

• These worksheets do not represent a course on strategic analysis, for which you would need a book: they cannot of themselves teach you how to use them. However, they are constructed from a number of well tried and tested analytical models with which you may already be familiar. How you use some may be self-evident, you may need to do some homework with others.
• The worksheets make best use of your knowledge of a particular customer. Except where specifically stated otherwise, your base and focus is this particular customer – you are not concerned with other customers unless they impact on this customer and you are not rewriting the strategic or marketing plan for the whole company. For example, if your company has a strength which some customers appreciate, but this one does not use or need, you cannot count it as a strength. If they are a US company and don't operate in Europe, European market environmental changes aren't relevant, so don't include them.
• As you go through the models, you should be using your earlier work to complete later worksheets – they are designed as a linked up process, so extract what you have learned through one model to add to the next, where indicated, and do not keep changing your mind and making illogical leaps.
• The plan framework specifies links to these worksheets so you can see where to get your material to write into the plan.
• You can decide whether or not these worksheets should be appended to your strategic plan. Some of your readers will be interested, many will not, and you do not want to try their patience by making the plan appear longer than necessary.