Account Planning Best Practices

In my experience, most if not all account planning initiatives fail. They fail due to people and process issues, not tools/technology. The main root causes are:

• Inadequate executive sponsorship – they do not consistently expect & inspect
• Asking reps to collect & maintain too much information
• Expecting AEs to do plans for too many accounts (should be no more than 3 per AE at scale)

1. Preparing the team (AE, AM, CSM, sales engineer, etc.)

• Develop shared understanding the value being created for the customer
• Need top level executive sponsorship of a single tool & process
• Institute training with certification (using on-demand video w/quizzes)
• Research the following: industry, financials, company snapshot, competition, politics, technology & platforms
• Have a dedicated account planning support team – they usually hold “sales enablement” job titles.
• Restrict to a handful of strategic accounts – generally no more than 3 per AE at scale.
• Expect this to take 9-12 mos to roll out.

2. Building the plan

• Run regular account planning workshops to keep the team educated
• Require the minimum necessary information (see below for Strategic Account Plan Template)

3. Executing & updating the plan

• Managers must inspect during weekly (or every other week) 1:1s
• Update based on big changes: M&A; org change; account team change; deal wins; competitive losses; strategic initiatives; resource needs; exec support requests

4. Continuous review & inspection

• Sales leadership reviews (weekly or every other week AE/manager)
• Executive sponsor reviews (RVP quarterly focused on moving opportunities; senior leadership 2x per year focused on needed resources for strategic accounts; annual workshop to deep dive/refresh)
• Share with customers (quarterly: strategy map, insight map, political map) as part of value / account plan review
• Reports & dashboards to track adoption% of accounts with plan by AE by AVP, etc.

Strategic Account Plan Template

• Account Overview
  • Firmographic information (HQ location; industry; # employees and/or annual revenue)
  • Business description (including: misssion/vision; target markets; industry trends/insights)
  • Key business initiatives (highlight those that link to your value propositions)
  • Overall account health
  • Success stories & case studies
• Marketing Strategies (ABx)
• Stakeholder Map
  • Account team
  • Include partners
  • Include org charts if available (note: these are highly dynamic and difficult to maintain)
  • Segment by business unit if applicable
  • Contact classification:
    • Decision Role (ex: user buyer, technical buyer, economic buyer)
    • Deal/Organizational Influence (ex: high, medium, low)
    • Support (ex: Champion, Supporter, Neutral, Opponent)
    • Overall Health/Alignment (ex: Good, Neutral, Poor)
• Buying process
• Revenue & Whitespace
  • Revenue by product
  • Won & lost opportunities
  • Open opportunities & whitespace
  • Renewal plan
• Account Competitors & Other Vendors
• Action Plan

Account Planning Tools

(*) = recommended

• Next Quarter (fka Forecastera)
• OrgChartHub (for Hubspot)
• Poggio (account planning & research)
• Prolifiq
• Quip (from Salesforce)
• Revegy
• Upland Altify