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Account planning is an umbrella term used to describe a set strategy typically designed to close or upsell business within the sales team’s target accounts. Account planning in Salesforce involves micro and macro objectives where different team members on your side will have specific sets of responsibilities. It also covers the companies you’re competing with for the deal, details about their decision-making process, and other notes that will shape your strategy. Your account planning methodology should be a process that moves all the way down the funnel; from BDR’s prospecting and setting meetings, AE’s providing valuable insights, and pushing the deal along, marketers providing sellers the optimal content (as well as paid social to surround key stakeholders), to customer success responsible for making an upsell ask at the right time). As you can see, an effective account planning process usually will require both buy-in and collaboration from the entire team. Once you’ve discovered an effective process, though, then the process becomes mutually beneficial to everyone. We usually see customers who take an account-based approach identify strategic accounts and leverage account planning to penetrate and win that business.

Account planning in theory should simplify the sales process of your selling org. Though it seems complicated, effective account plans keep both your reps, leaders, and anyone involved in the sales cycle in lockstep throughout the deal. A sales pitch becomes simpler as the steps and roles of everyone involved are documented inside of your CRM. Teams that use an account planning process often-times store the data in slide decks or spreadsheets and never use it again. We believe that where your account plans are stored and can be accessed by your team plays a tantamount role in the success of your account planning initiative. Critical account information such as key stakeholders, business objectives, and their challenges and more make good plans advantageous for the selling team. Account planning software keeps all of your data inside your CRM, as well as leveraging tasks and existing CRM data, helping drive your business strategy.

The account planning process starts once your top accounts are identified. Marketing strategy, BDR and sales outreach, and talking points/value propositions should all be understood (to a useful degree) by your entire team. When your team moves together in motion into an account, your business looks coordinated, strategic, and for lack of a better term, like you actually care about your prospect. It’s important to trust your selling process as much as you trust the product you’re selling. Strategic Account planning ensures both of your bases are covered in this instance. We also recommend you create plans for your most important customers. Think about what separates your top 5-10% of customers from the rest, and build a plan to map key stakeholders, identify where you can have opportunities for expansion, and document their challenges, goals and objectives in a SWOT analysis. This critical activity and ongoing care will lead to a higher chance these accounts don't churn.

Key Account plans can be as simple or complicated as your team wants to make them, as we understand that each industry is different and priorities shift from vertical to vertical. Our account planning template breaks it down. At Prolifiq, we leverage strategic account planning to understand and provide customer metrics like employee size, annual revenue, SWOT analysis, tech stack, pain points around Salesforce CRM use, and the key stakeholders we should be targeting. Components of an effective account plan that span across almost all businesses include (as mentioned); a map of stakeholders sellers should be connecting with, identified verticals (if the account is large enough) within the account, and which ones could best use your product, competitors to said account, and what their timeline of purchasing products in your industry (for us, it’s technology). Account planning in Salesforce gives your team the ability to collaborate on these pillars within your CRM. As a side note - setting revenue targets for the account are good too if they're an existing customer, highlighting the potential of the account.

Before beginning to key account plan for an account, it is important to ensure that you and your sales team are aligned on the goals you’d like to accomplish with your account planning initiative. What will be the pillars of your account planning methodology? Is it tied to pipeline creation, closed revenue goals, or account expansion? Once you’ve established success metrics, it’s time to understand the role and responsibilities of each team member. Where will data be stored and updated throughout the execution of your plan? Is there a projected timeline you’re trying to hit? Combining these pre-planning elements with a customer-centric approach and the list of metrics included in the question above will give your team a fantastic starting point to begin your account planning journey. In most cases, an account planning tool is mutually beneficial to each business unit as well.

Strategic account planning is a process that brings customer-facing teams together in order to achieve a common goal, which is to accelerate revenue growth and hit revenue targets. B2B companies who sell into larger, enterprise accounts need to have a deeper understanding of the different teams and needs, which leads us to the importance of account plans for two reasons. Your current customers will always be the easiest path to quick wins and maximize revenue, and aligning customer support, marketing, and sales around how to capture that additional revenue is a critical part of building your strategy. Another need for account planning or account planning tool is to have a comprehensive and disciplined approach to winning larger deals. Most B2B sales cycles involve multiple stakeholders, business units, and conflicting priorities. A process for existing customers or target accounts where you document who needs to be engaged, what they’re measured on, and how you will help them hit their goals is important to consistent success. This strategic plan helps reduce customer churn, helps identify potential opportunities for expansion, and will give you the upper hand in a competitive landscape and help your sales team increase revenue each quarter so that you surpass your sales targets

Yes, this is always a good idea to build key account plans for customers. However, if you are just beginning to implement a more strategic account management approach, here are a few ideas to help build the plan for your customer. Ensure you have accurate Salesforce data for the account and the main contacts involved. Make sure you have relationship maps for existing accounts that identify the budget-holder, who signed the contract, who initiated the deal and other key members. A core sales skill is being able to outline what the customer initiatives are, and how they will measure success. Do you have a clear SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats)for this customer? What kind of ROI are they looking for? What specific challenges are you solving? Make sure it's clear how you are taking them from their current state to their desired state. This accountability helps keep the internal team aligned on driving results and reducing churn as well. An effective account plan for your customer accounts will take everything above into consideration.

Account plans that don't drive strategy and results typically miss the mark in a few areas. The initial sales pitch may not uncover critical parts of a good strategy, such as a lack of understanding the challenges of your large accounts, their current state, and how they measure success with anyone working on the account. Strategic account management and a good hand-off from sales professionals to Customer Success will always have this. We also see a lot of account teams that only map out stakeholders from one business unit for an existing customer, versus beginning to get wider with stakeholders with purchase decision power in other parts of the account. Without getting wider, it becomes difficult to get a deeper understanding of the business and the best way to engage them. The best account planning methodologies should reflect how your team sells.

Bringing account planning into the Salesforce CRM typically involves changing your process and bringing key account plans from Google Slides, spreadsheets, whiteboards, and other places. Designating account teams and the specific roles in Salesforce is a good starting point. A lot of B2B sales professionals do their planning for target or existing accounts in slide decks, spreadsheets, whiteboards, and more. This leads to account planning being a once a year effort or once-per-quarter effort instead of an ongoing part of their sales strategy. Taking the documented plans for large accounts and bringing them into Salesforce can be done through account planning tools, which enable you to build stakeholder maps and full plans inside of your CRM. These strategic account plans typically get used in the account object, but can also be modified or cloned to serve a similar purpose in the opportunity object as well. Sales targets become easier to hit when there is a clear path to winning the deal. Strategic account planning in salesforce is a key change in your process.

When we think about designing account plans, one of the successful approaches we've seen is starting from the bottom up. Think through the foundational business components, AKA the "What". Then comes the "Who" with key stakeholders, etc. These plans shouldn't take more than a couple of days to build, but the key here is that the key account management process doesn't truly shut off. These plans should be updated regularly as information, stakeholders and conditions change. All of this is somewhat dependent on the product or service you offer. Handling planning with your CRM will make this a single source of truth and will help drive results. Account plan strategy is always changing as goals and objectives change.

There's a good chance your boss or a CFO will ask for the business case or ROI when it comes to key account plans within your CRM and the investment needed. With salesforce account planning tools, pointing to quick wins, the impact on pipeline, retention, win rates, and sales cycles becomes easier. How do your retention rates change for accounts you have comprehensive account plans for versus a baseline of previous years for those without plans? An account planning strategy should help the team build more rapport with the customer. Track how many people your team typically engaged in a partnership before, versus those customers that have key account plans associated with them. Is your salesforce data being updated, maintained, and kept visible for leadership, managers, and individual contributors across the business? Lastly, are you growing revenue from your customers or key accounts? Look at the data in Salesforce from previous years for a benchmark, and then assess and measure these numbers moving forward as renewals and sales cycles reach their normal lengths.

Account planning tools are built to help teams get closer to their key accounts while giving teams the chance to get closer to key stakeholders in your biggest opportunities as well. The tool helps sales teams understand who is who within the account, visualize the buying path, and helps provide visibility into other business units so your team can find quick wins. This provides a template for the team to drive a repeatable process to deliver value to every customer. The best account plan will have the stakeholders labeled by their influence, support, and overall engagement throughout your sales cycle or partnership.