Most Government account plans don't survive contact with reality
Account planning in Government is one of those things everyone agrees is important, and yet very few people do well.
For a lot of teams, account planning turns into a compliance exercise: a slide deck or spreadsheet produced once a year, dusted off before Q4, and quietly ignored while people chase whatever opportunity happens to be loudest that week. What good account planning looks like in practice:
It starts with an honest assessment of where an agency can actually buy from. Not where you hope they will buy from, but the panels, categories, standing offers, incumbent suppliers, and prime arrangements that shape their options. If they have no mechanism to buy from you, the rest of the plan is theoretical.
It avoids being overly broad. “Defence” is not an account. Neither is “Home Affairs”. Strong plans focus on specific groups, programs, or problem owners, and accept that depth beats coverage.
It is problem-led, not product-led. The best plans are built around pressure points: contracts nearing expiry, programs that are late or under scrutiny, new policy directions that look neat on paper but messy in delivery.
It takes timing seriously. Budget cycles, caretaker conventions, end-of-year shutdowns, and internal governance gates dictate when engagement is useful and when it is just noise.
It forces real choices: which accounts get time, which do not, and what activity stops so priority work can be done properly. If your top accounts look the same as last year, and the year before that, it is usually a sign no real trade-offs were made.
It is properly resourced and owned, with named account leads, realistic time allocation, and an understanding of the effort required to engage consistently, not just when a tender appears.
If your account plan does not influence where you spend your time, who you speak to, or what you say when you get there, it is not a plan. It is dressed-up admin.