SaaS companies around the globe are coming to the end of their financial year, and that means in the coming months Enterprise AEs will be provided with revised territories and asked to start prioritising and planning their account strategy.
Account Planning for your highest potential accounts is a critical skill for your go to market teams.
In siloed companies you’ll find three plans:
Account Based Marketing - how are we going to generate demand in our largest target accounts?
Account Based Selling aka the Target Account Plan - how are we going to close opportunities in our largest target accounts?
Account Based Customer Success aka the Customer Success Plan - how are we going to drive adoption, expansion and renewal in our largest accounts?
Instead, you’ll want to bring all of these teams together to define an aligned plan to attract, close and grow the accounts with the highest revenue opportunity.
Today I’ll share two templates to help your teams with this process.
The Account Planning Template
The first asset I’ll share is the account planning template.
This is an interview style document where you’ll guide your team through a series of questions that will require research and critical thinking as they learn about the account, their industry, their competitors, their challenges, and how your company’s products and services can uniquely solve those pains.
You should use the account planning template in a workshop environment (ideally in person), where your core account team - including representatives from marketing, sales (including SDR and AE) and your customer success team (for existing customers) can collaborate together to work through each of the sections.
The template is not about asking your team to find information that RevOps should have already provided (firmographic, technnographic data), but about truly understanding the account, their industry, their challenges and priorities for the future.
It includes multiple sections:
Account overview
Account strategy
Financial report research
Key personnel
Our team
Competitive landscape
Our value proposition
Customer references
Current relationship
Testimonials and referrals
Action plan
Forecast
Monitor and report
Additional notes
This is NOT your account plan!
By the end of the workshop you’ll have a clear understanding of the customer’s business and now have the inputs for your actual plan - the Account Plan Canvas.
The Account Plan Canvas
I’ve seen a lot of account plans. 30 page slide decks. 20 page Word docs designed to look like slides. Complicated org chart modules that keep an AE busy for a day. Even an Excel with 15 tabs! Plans that once complete are never read and never updated.
The problem is that the creator of the plan has tried to combine the research part of the job (the template above) with the output part of the job.
Instead, I recommend a simple one page Account Plan canvas where your team can take their detailed research from the template, and summarise it on the canvas.
If you want help developing an Account Plan program for your strategic accounts, I help founders and revenue leaders to develop this capability in their global sales teams. Get in touch to find out more.
The canvas is easy for others to read, forces you to think about what is important, and is easy to update as things change in the account.
Ideally, have your local business print shop print this out at A0/Poster size and use on the wall during your workshop with sticky notes to collaborate on what makes it onto the canvas.
Then upload the canvas image into a slide or doc, and add text boxes to input the items from your sticky notes to have a shareable document,
Either upload the canvas to the Account Page in your CRM or create fields for each of the eight sections. Don’t make it too complicated otherwise it won’t get updated and it is difficult for others to interpret.
My advice is to separate the research workshop from the canvas workshop.
Allow your team to digest the research, to think, make connections and develop a plan.
The canvas workshop will then provide a much higher quality of output than a pure form filling exercise.
How can I fit the plan onto one page?
As you look at the canvas - I’m sure you’ll be thinking - how on earth can we cover a plan for a strategic account on a single page?
This forces you to focus, to prioritise, to have clarity.
Less is more. Even for a global strategic account their should be 2-3 priority actions your team are focused on - a list of 20 means nothing is a priority.
If you want help bringing your teams together to create Account Plans that drive action - I’m here to help.
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