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Six Greatest Ideas for Building Creative Plans • 133

angles on the plan is called SWOT analysis - strengths, weaknesses, opportunities
and threats.

This is a simple technique, as so many good ones are, for helping the team to
understand what it needs to do in the account.

Unfortunately, like all techniques it can be implemented well and therefore also
badly. Suffice it to say that a comprehensive, well-documented SWOT analysis
makes the next part of the planning process reasonably straightforward.

The objective of SWOT analysis is not simply to describe the environment;
rather it is to describe the environment in a way that helps us to understand what we
need to do.

It is in two parts, the customer SWOT (C-SWOT) and the supplier SWOT (S-
SWOT).

Once you have an agreed description of the environment, you can decide what
to do about it.

Set the objectives for the team
Following the use of a bridging technique to ensure that the work done in the SWOT
analysis is fully exploited, Idea 87, the team sets its goals.

In a key account plan, goals are divided into account management goals and
sales campaign goals.

Account management goals are the relationship goals and tend to be more stra-
tegic and longer term than campaign goals. Experience has enabled professional
account managers to break down account management goals into eight goal areas.

Not all plans will require goals in all eight areas, but all plans will require goals
in some of these areas. The detail of this follows in Idea 88, but for the sake of
example, three of these goal areas are:

• level of contact;
• customer satisfaction; and
• market share.