Here is a bare-bones summary of a fantastic 40-minute video of how salesforce.com does account planning.
Summary points are as follows:
- 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
- SFDC has a dedicated account planning support team – they hold “sales enablement” job titles. Initially started with Top 30 accounts, then global accounts, and select pilot other accounts. Took over a year to roll out.
- Outside of “focus account,” regional business leaders have discretion. In EMEA, they have required that 100% of accounts have account plans. Other leaders vary.
- Building the plan
- They are using Altify/TAS DealMaker + SmartAccountManager as a tab in SFDC
- Run account planning workshops with the account planning team
- Include the following components:
- Plan details
- Executive summary
- Customer profile
- Customer relationship
- Strategic alignment to customer business priorities
- Our strategic initiatives for the customer
- Reference cases
- Key messages to communicate
- Your vision for the account
- Customer alignment
- Segmentation map: Identification of business units with rating of the importance of the BU to the customer and the importance of the BU to SFDC (based on a number of inputs)
- Opportunity map: rows with BUs and columns with SFDC products.
- Insight map: Issue tree with goals & barriers to achieving goals; projects/programs/initiatives; obstacles; SFDC solutions. Teams like this since helpful in establishing vision for mutual value creation
- Political map: This is an org chart with solid line reporting and “dotted line” influence relationships. Also, rating of relationship strength with each individual. Includes SFDC contact owner as well as “executive relationship owner.”
- Value map: Just a combination of the segmentation map & opportunity map
- (Consumption plan) not covered
- Objectives: Project management with Objective (=goal); owner; type; unit; date; priority; status; open actions
- (Scorecard) not covered
- (Completeness) not covered
- Executing & updating the plan
- AEs “live” in the Objectives tab after the account planning workshop; managers 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
- 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 a plan by AE by AVP, etc.