Performance review

The eighth phase of the Strategic Customer Planning Cycle is where most account planning goes to die, in a quarterly meeting that inspects last quarter’s document. The method’s version is a working session on a living strategy: what has changed in the customer’s world, what the value ledger shows, which assumptions in the plan no longer hold, and what the next turn of the cycle should be.

The tone matters as much as the agenda. Gartner found that bad coaching depresses performance roughly twice as strongly as good coaching lifts it, so a review run as an audit costs more than skipping it. Dynamic conversations always beat static plans, and with a living account plan doing the assembling, the hour is spent on judgement rather than on finding out what happened.