Account Plans can be useful tools enabling Investment Promotion Agencies and their regional stakeholders to focus their promotion efforts in a coordinated way, avoiding duplication of effort. But they should not be allowed to become a big bureaucratic chore! Keep them short and simple.
Account plans – why are they important?
Account plans are the means by which Investment Promotion Agencies (IPAs) record agreed strategies for targeting new or existing inward investors.
They identify the nature of the investment opportunity, help to focus resources, whether human or financial, promote cooperation between stakeholders, and avoid duplication of effort. Account plans are particularly useful in larger economies with multiple Economic Development Organisations where there is a very real risk of the national IPA and regional EDOs colliding in pursuit of a high value client.
What does a good account plan look like? It needs to have a clearly stated objective and this should be agreed at the outset by the stakeholders. For example, the objective might be to persuade the company to locate a particular business activity for the first time, to expand an existing investment or to dissuade it from disinvesting.
An account plan should set out a simple strategy for achieving the desired goal. It should record agreement on who should have contact with the company (whether in the firm’s parent market or in the market where the IPA is based). Ideally there will be a single Client Relationship Manager for the company, but this may not be possible where more than one EDO has a strong historical interest in the firm. The plan should set out what the timeline should be, and what inputs are necessary to encourage the company to behave as the IPA hopes. For example it may say that the IPA needs to draft a tailored value proposition that will set out clearly the benefits to the company of locating/expanding/not disinvesting.
Account plans do not have to be long and complex documents: indeed a succinct one page plan will often be all that is necessary. This must not become a big bureaucratic chore, diverting investment officers from spending time with clients.
What happens to it after the plan has been agreed? Interactions with the company will of course be recorded in an electronic Client Relationship Manager (CRM) system, ideally accessible to all the stakeholders, in which the account plan will also be filed.
The plan itself should be reviewed at agreed intervals. If the stakeholders believe that it is not worth devoting more effort to achieving the goal in the plan they should drop it, and focus on a more promising prospect. Otherwise, they should modify the plan as necessary, changing the objective as new opportunities arise.
Get drafting!
