The twenty-minute account review.

Strategic account planning takes half a day. Most companies run it for three or four accounts a year, if they run it at all. Everything in the tier below that gets nothing, and that tier is usually where the growth is hiding.

Mike Griego built the light version for exactly that problem. A rep and a manager, one hour, three accounts, no preparation, done on a whiteboard. Chapter 10 of No Excuses! calls it the 360 account snapshot. What follows is how to run one.

Where it sits.

Sales planning stacks. Territory planning answers how you make your quota. Account planning answers how you grow one account. Opportunity planning answers how you win one deal.

This is the middle layer, and it is on purpose the fast version. Full account planning, with research and a team session and a deck at the end, is right for a handful of accounts and wrong for the forty below them. Those forty still deserve some thought. They will never get a half day, so the choice is twenty minutes or nothing.

What you build.

Three parts, in this order, because the order is the method.

The situation. Everything true about this account right now, one fact per line. A new plant manager. A competitor's equipment installed two years ago. A budget frozen through Q1. A trial on the small unit that went well. Get it all on the board before anyone starts judging it.

What to sell. The product or service, the dollars, and the month. "Grow the relationship" is not an objective. No number and no month means it is not one yet.

What happens next. Who does what, and by when. The good lines earn work too, not only the bad ones.

The marking is where the value is.

Once the situation list is on the board, go back through and mark each item as a positive or a negative influence on your effort.

That single pass is what turns a list of facts into something you can act on. It also produces the only argument worth having in the room. A new plant manager is good news if you have a reason to get in front of him and bad news if the person who liked you just left. The rep and the manager will often disagree about which, and working that out loud is the review.

An unmarked list is a list. Nobody does anything with it.

Twenty minutes, on the clock.

Minutes 0 to 8. Situation. The rep talks, the manager writes. No evaluating yet, no debate. Get everything out.

Minutes 8 to 11. Mark it. Positive or negative on every line. Argue here.

Minutes 11 to 15. Objectives. Force a dollar figure and a month onto each one. Anything that resists a number is not an objective yet.

Minutes 15 to 20. Actions. Walk the marked list. Every positive and every negative either produces an action with an owner and a month, or gets set aside out loud. Silent items come back as surprises.

Three accounts fit in an hour once a pair has done it twice.

Where it goes wrong.

A situation list with no negatives. The rep is selling the manager rather than reading the account. Ask what would have to be true for this deal to die, then write down the answers.

Objectives with no number or no month. They will not survive the week and they cannot be reviewed.

Actions with no owner. An action belonging to everyone belongs to nobody, and it will be on the board again next quarter in the same words.

What twenty of these produce.

Run this across a territory and something shows up that a single review cannot give you.

The same good and bad lines keep showing up. Old equipment nobody has budgeted to replace. A maintenance lead who trusts you. A budget that closes in March. Once you can see which ones repeat, you have the start of a real way to rank accounts, built from your own accounts rather than borrowed from a template.

The actions also start to need somewhere to live. Twenty reviews produce a couple hundred dated commitments, and a whiteboard photo will not hold them. That is the point where a fast meeting wants to become part of the system: the criteria go into how accounts get graded, the actions go into the CRM, and someone owns the weekly look at whether any of it happened.

The template below runs the meeting. Print it, fill it in, and see what your team says about an account when you make them mark every line.

[Download the template.]

If you want to see where your sales system stands across the six areas, the assessment is free and takes about five minutes: mxlpartners.com/assessment