Establish what is worth saying.

A named account, researched around a commercial question.

What comes back is a testable account hypothesis, built from reliable public evidence and your own commercial experience. For an agreed priority account it establishes:

• why the account fits what you offer;
• what it appears to be buying, changing, expanding or trying to solve;
• which business unit, people or route may matter;
• what a first useful conversation could be about;
• which requirements or constraints are likely to matter if interest develops;
• and what you could bring today, against what would need internal work first.

The questions behind that are about how they buy, not about what we sell:

• Why now? What outcome is driving it, and who is judged on the result?
• What specifically do they need to buy, against what they think they want?
• When, and through what process? A tender, a direct award, a framework?
• From whom would they consider buying, and why those?
• How would success be measured after the purchase, and reported to whom?
• And what do we not know, and how do we compensate for it?

The last few are about the buying path and they matter more than they look. An offer has to survive being approved and carried out on their side, not only being liked in the first meeting.

Those are a sample. Which of them matter is worked out with you for your buyer, because the answer differs by market and by account.

None of this claims to know a prospect’s private priorities. It gives your team a better-founded reason to start, and better questions once it has started.

The answer sits in four places and the account owner needs one.

A prospect asks for a different service level, route, delivery arrangement, reporting obligation, pricing structure, contract term, partner or timetable.

The answer sits across commercial, operations, legal, finance, procurement, technology or delivery. Each of them knows its own part. Nobody has put the parts together, and the account owner is the one holding the customer’s email.

I work through that with your team. I get the answers from the people who own them, in a form that can be set side by side, so the account owner arrives with a clear case and the right internal questions already moving.

I write no recommendation. What to offer is yours to decide.

The work stays useful after the meeting.

What accumulates is whatever the account needed. Over a few months that usually looks like this:

• A prioritised account universe, and the reasoning behind the order.
• A brief for each account chosen for active pursuit.
• For a live opportunity: the question, what is known, what still needs testing, who owns each answer and what happens next.
• And a working record the account owner can come back to as the opportunity develops.

The form follows the work. An account brief, a market view, a set of questions for the next meeting, or the preparation for a live opportunity. It is not a fixed set of documents delivered on a schedule.

None of it is a deck handed over at the end. It is material your team uses in the next conversation and adds to as the account moves.