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Welcome to Selling What's Possible, the podcast that's pushing the boundaries of modern account sales. I'm your host, David Irwin, CEO of Polaris I/O and a veteran with 30 years of experience in successful account sales programs.
In each episode, we'll dive deep into the world of strategic account development, uncovering innovative approaches and fresh perspectives that you may not have considered before. We'll be joined by top sales professionals, revenue leaders, and dynamic innovators who are reshaping the landscape of account sales.
Whether you're navigating the complexities of key accounts or seeking to expand value-driven outcomes for your customers, this podcast is your guide to consistently growing your strategic account relationships.
Get ready to challenge conventional wisdom, explore new methodologies, and unlock the full potential of your account sales strategies. This is Selling What's Possible - where we turn potential into reality.
Dave Irwin (00:00)
Welcome to Selling What's Possible, a podcast dedicated to enterprise account management. Today, we're going to focus on customer needs and how that fits into driving the growth cycle of account planning as we enter 2025. And today joining me is Ted Corbeil. is the Director of Revenue Enablement for L2L.
which is a software company focused on manufacturing sector. Ted, thanks for joining us today. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background in revenue enablement. And I read a little bit about you on LinkedIn when it comes to your passion for value creation opportunities. share a little bit about your perspective on that as well.
Ted Corbeill (00:45)
Yeah. Thanks Dave. Nice to meet you. Thanks for inviting me on the podcast. Yeah. I'm Ted Corbeil. I'm a retired Marine intelligence officer. And somehow, some way I found my niche in enablement and sales enablement. And really what I've really found the last couple of years is my military approach to building data-driven discipline.
plin repeatable processes has found a niche within early stage high growth SaaS companies that are looking for value creation and value growth. You got to have someone that can come in, organize a cohesive plan to drive the growth strategies to deliver those kinds of results.
Dave Irwin (01:25)
well, you must be a very popular guy because that's exactly what performance is based on. And in the world of AI and so much data, it's still something that is elusive. Predictable growth, achieving predictable growth, sustainable growth, making it repetitive and easy. And that brings us to this whole area of account planning specifically.
You know, we're moving into the whole cycle of account planning for 2025. And, from my perspective, account planning, when I talk to most leaders, it's, incredibly manual. It's still in PowerPoint. It's a cyclical thing. It's something that, teams have to do versus want to do or desire to do. Typically it's to frame something for executive management goes and sits on the shelf. Is it really looked at again until the next planning cycle?
And it's very difficult to execute whatever's in that plan, what's the purpose of the plan? What's the scope of the plan? you know, tell us a little bit about your perspective on account planning. where the biggest gaps are, and where account planning should be headed.
Ted Corbeill (02:31)
Of course, it's everyone's favorite time of year, right? The holiday season. No, it's account planning season, right? So it's everyone's time of year. And as you pointed to, some of the problems I've seen in being a part of probably six different sales organizations now from enterprise all the way down to early stage startup. And they all kind of continue to have the same common faults of being
superly internal myopic self-serving, where account planning is one of those dreaded things that everyone knows it's that time to do my account plan or update my account plan, and it almost always defaults to a check the box activity. There's a framework, a standard template, fill out these slides in this presentation, and what I'm seeing more and more is those account plans tend to be more focused on
your products and the latest and greatest products and the sales targets for those new products or features or capabilities. And devoid of any insight into what the customer is trying to do. What are the customer's growth plans? What are their strategic initiatives? What are their desired outcomes? So it becomes just a recipe and just an exercise in futility. Where even the most successful reps have this very
complicated complex plan that shows very clearly how they're going to sell XYZ products at X amount of dollars in revenue for pipeline for this year. But almost as quickly as they're approved, they're forgotten, right? You almost never see this instance where you get regular updates on how the execution is going and the results. And you almost never do a debrief at the end. I'd say, we accomplish any of those?
Dave Irwin (04:09)
Right.
Ted Corbeill (04:17)
And quite often I never really see, it ever co-developed with the customer? Is it ever presented to them? Are there any inputs from the customer in those things? those are all kind of the, you know, the traditional account planning cycle is one of those bad habits. One of those things that have always been done that we've passed on from generation to generation of sales teams. And it's just, it's just not working for anyone.
Dave Irwin (04:41)
Yeah.
of ironic that the account plan is really not about the account and what they need, but more about the internal perspective on what is to be sold to that account or desired in terms of revenue targets. And it's really, it seems to me, mostly a financial exercise a lot of the times, which is how much have we sold them? How much are we going to sell them?
and then we're done. And that's kind of such a narrow perspective. Where do you think that comes from? Who created the original account planning templates that are handed out for these guys to fill in in the first place?
Ted Corbeill (05:19)
You know what,
I think it comes down to math. here's the number. How do we get that number? Let's start breaking that number into pieces, right? If we have the large company sales target, let's allocate that across the sales teams
Now it's split out amongst the reps and now the reps going to break it out against their book of business. And they're going to say, I got to get a million dollars against these 20 accounts. So where can I go get that money from? So what I do is I just take all my products and I put in a matrix and say, what are they currently buying? And what haven't they bought yet? Well, there's where the extra pipeline is going to come from. Right? So
it's an exercise just in mathematics that doesn't take into consideration any data points.
other than that, right? it seems easy to do. It seems logical to do. And when you show it, it seems like, this is based on substance when it's not,
it's just based on raw math out with no context to the business intelligence, the market intelligence, or what your customers are actually trying to do.
Dave Irwin (06:25)
Yeah, you know, it's so interesting you bring up math. have this, something I call the economy of key accounts. And it's the fact that the bigger the companies, the Global 2000, the Global 3000, they spend, by far and away the most money on almost every category. In fact, the growth potential inside these accounts is astronomically huge compared to what account teams are pursuing. And if you think about the math that's being
followed as you articulated, kind of from the inside out. It's almost narrowing the opportunity for growth by its very design because it's looking to just fill a number that is small percentage of the total growth potential. you're right, when the focus is on that, you tend to just, well, I only need to sell these three products to make my number versus I have the opportunity, given the problems this client has to sell,
Ted Corbeill (07:07)
Yeah.
Dave Irwin (07:21)
100 X amount of value there or if I follow a pathway into this large-scale Enterprise account I could really exploit it for so much greater growth But the design of the plan almost puts this wall around The growth potential and contains it in a very small, you know area How do you think account teams can sort of?
Overcome that to expand total perspective they have of the account they're pursuing and really blow out the numbers a different mindset. Is that possible to do with teams just thinking differently?
Ted Corbeill (07:59)
Yeah, 100%, it starts with your mindset first, right? Again, my background, I'm coming at this from the context of being a Marine Intelligence Officer, So our job, we're always responsible for supporting strategic planning and providing information about whether enemy in terrain, right? So in this context, I don't necessarily wanna call the customer the enemy, but they have a vote in what they're gonna buy and where they're gonna put their dollars against. And they are...
Dave Irwin (08:23)
Absolutely.
Ted Corbeill (08:25)
they have their own growth plans, internal growth plans of where they're, how they're going to grow. And if you don't understand anything more about your customer than your single pointed contact for the champion of, the economic buyer who signed the last order form from you, and you don't understand the context of how that product or service is supporting one of their initiatives that's driving business outcomes for them, then you're putting yourself at a distinct disadvantage.
You got to have to understand what is the company doing and just the who, what, where, when about your account. What do you really know about them?
And when you start understanding that, then you can start unlocking the bigger picture. Like what deals are we driving? What based on what are their business outcomes? What strategic initiatives are they? And at what level are you talking to a lower level person and their strategic? Everything ladders up.
Right. Those customers do the same math we do. We want to grow by X amount and it gets spread down to them. This guy is trying to find his 500 K business outcome. Right. But if you can support that, then how can you ladder up to his boss who has a 10 X number and above that has a hundred X number of just that one guy. that myopic focus on selling your current contacts, the next latest and greatest product offering.
Dave Irwin (09:27)
Right.
Ted Corbeill (09:46)
Like that's what's limiting yourself. You got to understand your customer, how they make money. What is the industry impact and the marketing impact to them? You know, is the economy, the recession or imposing appending tariffs impeding them? What's their strategic growth plans for next year? And how does that ladder roll down to them? And how can you best support them? And then when you start delivering value there, now their boss and their peer see
Dave Irwin (09:48)
Yeah.
Ted Corbeill (10:14)
And now you're, you're laddering in, Hey, that initiative we're supporting is a company level initiative that's shared at these other three groups. So you gotta have a logical path of where, what is the higher, what does the matrix organization look like on their end and where do you have, where are you supporting them? And then how can you support a cross-functionally? That's how you need to think about it. Not white space potential based on your product categories, but there.
Dave Irwin (10:22)
Right, exactly.
Ted Corbeill (10:43)
their business divisions.
Dave Irwin (10:44)
Exactly. Yeah. It's almost like it's a set of artificial constraints based upon an old outdated that is very internally oriented, very focused on product. Even the concept of white space is all about you and not about them. And the problem is it's very limiting in terms of growth. So instead of achieving explosive growth or massive growth, and there's always these great teams that are able to
break that paradigm and be an example to everybody else. But there's always a question, which is, how did they do it? What are they doing that's different? And that, do I work backwards from customer? And you brought up analytics and data as sort of your background, but it's that insight. understand the customer's needs first and then planning against that. My issue is that, or observation rather, is that
Ted Corbeill (11:16)
Yes.
Dave Irwin (11:36)
Nobody gives the account teams the intelligence or the tools or the insights the provisioning that incredibly important business in the first place. So they're just sort of expected to know this stuff on their own, nowhere in the background when you hire an account executive, does it say expert in analytic research?
Ted Corbeill (11:49)
Yes.
Dave Irwin (12:01)
you know, finding to penetrate large scale growth opportunities across expansive organizations the size of a small country. It's just go out and sell something and bring it back, but there's so much more to it, isn't it?
Ted Corbeill (12:09)
Yes.
Yeah, 100%. It's daunting. And the larger the company, the more research you have to have. And it depends on the size and scope and the resources available to your sales team. I was at Hewlett Packard Enterprise where we had business intelligence teams and market intelligence teams. And we had all these resources that could almost overwhelm the AE, right? With like, here's all this data. How do you make sense of it? Someone's got to get ready to parse that data and make it relevant.
Dave Irwin (12:36)
Yeah.
Ted Corbeill (12:43)
And then you have the opposite end extreme where you're at a smaller startup without those resources and they're being asked to find it. as you know, just how many times have you been around in a situation where you're trying to figure out exactly what that current account even is buying from us? What are they currently using? Right? What are they currently using? You talk to finance or billing and you try to talk to customer support. You try to talk to the implementation team and the AE and somewhere in there is the truth. Right. and that's part of the challenge too.
Dave Irwin (12:59)
Right, even that's challenge.
Ted Corbeill (13:12)
you know, who is responsible for the account plan? Who is involved in the account planning? We've seen, I've seen over the last couple of years, over and like we talk about the stakeholders on the buyer side, multiplying, same on the sales side, right? We almost like, you're gonna match them peer for peer. We're trying to highly segment out the sales process and highly specialize the roles.
Dave Irwin (13:28)
Yeah, right,
Ted Corbeill (13:37)
So have an account executive who might own the account, solution engineer that might get brought into demo right from the beginning. Then depending on somewhere later in the sales stage, you have an implementation team that gets involved to talk about that. Then there's some kind of handoff to a customer success rep and you have a customer support rep who provides the technical support and the sales manager probably gets involved at some point. Like you have just as many stakeholders where it's like,
Dave Irwin (13:58)
Great.
Ted Corbeill (14:05)
between that, who knows exactly what the customer wants. It gets so fragmented that it gets really, really difficult to understand that.
Dave Irwin (14:13)
So you have the vendor side is siloed, the customer is siloed, and then you have an account plan that is in PowerPoint and static that not everybody's looking at all at the same time.
Ted Corbeill (14:26)
Yes, exactly. Because like I said, it's one of those historical artifacts at this point that gets updated once a year and it probably some kind of approval process somewhere by the end of Q1 and like now let's go get it. And then never to be revisited, never to retract the results, no accountability do we achieve it or not. And that's where, know, again, as a Marine Intelligence Officer,
Dave Irwin (14:45)
Right.
Ted Corbeill (14:52)
We have this concept that's called the analytical line where you do your initial research and you make an assessment of the situation on the battlefield. And then you, now that's a living thing, right? As you get more data in every day, you're taking that data and you're comparing it to your analytical line and you're paying specific attention to data that refutes the analytical line to overcome confirmation bias. So you're saying, does this support yes or no, my assessment?
And if yes, okay, if no, why, all right, let me look into that and see is that true or not. That's the mentality you need to have around an account growth plan or a value plan is it can't be this thing you do one time and it was last updated in January and now we don't ever take in new information and keep it running and going.
Like that's why the account planning cycle feels so difficult is because you're trying to process a year's worth of data and project into the future what we think is going to happen instead of like revisiting it. And, know, quite honestly, you know, when do you get the customers input into it? When do they have a say into, you know, what are their growth plans beyond just their fiscal calendar?
Dave Irwin (15:52)
Once a year.
Ted Corbeill (16:06)
Like it's just broken when you're not doing it from what's the customer trying to do.
Dave Irwin (16:11)
Right. They're the ones who spend the money. They're the ones who have the budgets. They're the ones who, you know, pay for everything. what you're describing, You really need an online sort of dashboard view that everybody can see that's fed with data.
that the team can react and adapt to. I read an interesting statistic from Gartner that 83 % of sales teams struggle to adapt to changing customer needs and expectations. And if you think about the customer having so many different stakeholders silos of business, they all have individual needs. Those aggregate up to an overall or objective or funded initiative.
Ted Corbeill (16:38)
Mm-hmm.
Dave Irwin (16:54)
In order to stay relevant, you have to know what those people are thinking and planning the time. And you really need an account plan that's online, that's modernized, that's up to date, that's kept up to the moment that people can look at all at the same time, don't you?
Ted Corbeill (17:03)
Yeah?
Yeah, of course. And I think, know, what's, we say, you know, CRM it's in the CRM, right? Your, your, your Salesforce, your HubSpot, but we know now as, as you have these growing disparate roles within your account teams, they're in separate systems too, right? They're, they're not in your CRM. Yeah. The CSM might be using, you know, something else. So they're having a client conversation.
Dave Irwin (17:35)
Great.
Ted Corbeill (17:41)
or the primary champion leaves or so, or there's a technical difficulty and the trouble tickets in JIRA and they're using some other CSM system to monitor voice of the company, customer and CSAT. And where in your organization is all of that disparate silo data consolidated into one true customer health dashboard that everyone can see, right? That's the challenge, right? You have an account executive that's probably not paid on renewal.
So all they're doing is trying to open up a new expansion opportunity when the CSM tells them that they're ready to buy the next great thing. You have a technical support person that's battling specific trouble tickets at one site. You have a CSM that has relationships over here. And you you don't have all the data points to even really see what the true customer health is. And you might have an executive sponsor getting invited to their customer advisory boards or who knows what.
You know, and you're not, don't have all the data to even figure out what the customer's trying to do. Like it's, it's a real challenge.
Dave Irwin (18:39)
Right.
just to frame it a little differently, one way of looking at things that's different than white space is what I call blue space. But it's the idea of problems by buying center versus products by business unit.
Ted Corbeill (18:57)
Mm-hmm.
Dave Irwin (19:00)
It's almost like the reverse of white space where you're looking at what is the customer looking at, right? These are all the initiatives I'm trying to solve. They fall into different categories. They span different buying centers which can have cross-functional making buying decisions at very different of seniority, spanning departments, spanning regions of the globe, But you know.
Ted Corbeill (19:06)
Yeah.
Dave Irwin (19:26)
The problem itself originates somewhere and that buying center that is in charge of addressing it or solving it is looking for help. They're looking for suppliers, vendors, partners to come in and assist in getting the job done. they get funded to solve those problems at different altitude levels. And that's really what you're talking about is working backwards from those buying events, buying centers.
Ted Corbeill (19:35)
Yes.
Dave Irwin (19:54)
and trying to those by attaching services capabilities in a relevant dialogue that customer can relate to. That's really what an account plan ultimately is getting at, is how do I take that picture and align myself to it and then drive growth against that.
Ted Corbeill (20:04)
Right. Yeah.
Yeah, you keep reminding me, of the challenges when you have a global enterprise account and you have multiple sales teams across multiple regions selling at different buying centers that almost every single one of them needs to have their mini account plans. You can't myopically consolidate it to one big thing.
because now all those nuances are getting lost and right. Or geographic regions have an impact on it. Marketing conditions, there's a lot of factors that influence their abilities and the business problems they're trying to solve that there's not just one Samsung problem that you're working on. You could be working on a million of them and there could be a whole, you could have multiple sales teams across your global enterprise interacting with them. So sometimes,
Dave Irwin (20:49)
Exactly.
Ted Corbeill (20:59)
trying to consolidate it into a single enterprise customer health dashboard is probably not realistic.
Dave Irwin (21:05)
you know, all I can say for sure is that really good account teams that end up sort of evolving over time.
customers buy from the team, right? They're buying from the belief that the team can execute solving some problem or doing something for them that they've come to rely on and trust. And so they go back to that team over and over and over again. And in that case, the team is just as important in the process of winning, so to speak, growth opportunities as any individual person is because it's the collective work of that team that
Ted Corbeill (21:17)
Yes, from the people.
Dave Irwin (21:45)
delights the client, gives them the outcomes that you mentioned before that they desire, that they can rely on and trust.
Ted Corbeill (21:48)
Yes.
Dave Irwin (21:53)
And I know when account teams do that well, clients just come back and buy more and more and more from the team.
Ted Corbeill (21:58)
Yes.
In my opinion, it's been very complicated for an organization to go back and say, we deliver the ROI, the time, the value, right? Do you agree, Mr. Customer? Yes, thank you. You've delivered the value. So now we talk about now that time to grow. All right, what's the next challenge? What can we help you out with? But without that kind of framework of like, what is the value that they're buying us for? Are we implementing the right things?
to collect the right data points so we can prove that we've delivered that value. And then did we claim the win? Do they agree that they've achieved, accomplished the business outcomes that we said we deliver? If so, then this is a highly productive, valuable partnership. Let's continue to grow together, right?
Dave Irwin (22:36)
Right.
Right.
Ted Corbeill (22:46)
But what's challenging is, what I always look for is the handoffs. There's so many handoffs in that process from the...
from the SDR, the BDR who starts the conversation to the AE, to the solution engineer, to the implementation team, to the customer success. There's so many different ways for that to get lost in translation that it's really hard to execute and prove that you've delivered that value. It's a challenge as I've seen, yeah.
Dave Irwin (23:12)
Yeah, that's piece I want to kind of end on here. think you're right. If you think about how an account team operates, it's all an email, back and forth with each other and then meetings to talk about doing something. But there is no central, as we talked about, online plan where you can observe the plan in action. And this brings me to kind of this whole
Ted Corbeill (23:22)
Yes.
Dave Irwin (23:39)
concept of we use the word account planning, but we don't use the word account growth execution or account execution, right? You can't execute without the plan, but you can execute a plan that's on a shelf. And so if you don't have a plan that's living and breathing, there's no way to execute on that plan or monitor the execution. You can't execute what you can't measure. So it really comes down to, you know,
recasting what account planning should become, which think in part is much more dynamic, more online, the whole account team can see everything going on, data's coming in from the customer, not just coming in from the sales CRM system and the quota assignments on these accounts. if can break that paradigm and just...
Ted Corbeill (24:25)
Mm-hmm.
Dave Irwin (24:33)
you know, sort of shatter the old way of doing things, they can really unlock enormous growth potential. And I've seen it because the amount of spend that these companies have, particularly the larger ones, you know, with I think the average global 2000 company owns 157 other companies. You know, they operate in enormous footprints of
Ted Corbeill (24:52)
Wow.
Dave Irwin (24:57)
of economic spend in many different categories. And once you solve a problem in one place, you can solve it in other places. But oftentimes the team doesn't even know what those other places are, that they exist or to even go there. So I think that there's just a fundamental, you know, recasting of what modernized account planning could be or should be. So I'd love to just capture your, you know, if there was one thing from this great conversation we've had about account planning, know, as a takeaway.
Ted Corbeill (25:07)
Right.
Dave Irwin (25:27)
Going into 2025 and there's obviously things you can do as a team now and there's things you can do in the future
Ted Corbeill (25:32)
Yes.
Dave Irwin (25:34)
You know, what would you suggest account teams think about in terms of trying to sort of break this paradigm? and think broader and bigger and more strategically and Again working back from the customers needs as a primary construct
Ted Corbeill (25:51)
Yeah. I think my best piece of advice where I think they should focus on is what is your current assessment of the, of the customer's growth strategy? What is your analytical line? What are they going to try to do in FY 25? Right? What is their plan for growth and where are you, how are you going to best support them to get there? If you come from it, from that perspective, like what is their goals and their desired business outcomes? What part of that can we help deliver?
I think that will be the key to your success is putting, framing everything you're going to do and all your actions around rallying to help them deliver those business outcomes, then hitting your white space targets for that account.
Dave Irwin (26:36)
I think that's great advice. Even if you're hamstrung with the ability to size up and understand an enterprise account at scale, you can still areas of growth opportunity. Work backwards, break those down, and try to tie that back into your and service and plans for the account and try to match them up.
or align them. think alignment's been, or lack thereof, has been a big theme of what we've talked about Well, Ted, it's been great to have you as a guest. People want to reach out to you. What's a great way for them to communicate?
Ted Corbeill (27:16)
find me on LinkedIn, connect with me, love to have conversations like this.
Dave Irwin (27:20)
Excellent. Well, I love the analytical line. I think that's an excellent concept. I'd love to have you back to talk about execution, growth execution, not just planning and where it should evolve. But once you have that, how do you execute scale? Someone with your background would be great at giving guides and advice as how teams, as you said, align to the mission.
Ted Corbeill (27:28)
Yeah.
Yep.
Dave Irwin (27:46)
and what can be achieved in terms of really large at-scale growth in a different mindset.
Ted Corbeill (27:50)
Yeah. I appreciate the conversation. I really enjoyed it. Happy to come back anytime
Thanks, Dave.
Dave Irwin (27:56)
Bye bye.