To increase revenue and grow your key accounts, it’s crucial that sales teams understand their customers’ goals and challenges. Business-to-business (B2B) sales teams need to start with a base of effective account planning to discover their customers’ unmet needs. Account planning transforms customer relationships from transactional into trusted partnerships by meeting customer needs first, instead of strictly selling services or products.
In this article, you’ll learn why strategic account planning should be a key part of your team’s sales process and how to create effective sales account plans for your existing customers.
What is account planning in sales?
An account plan is a detailed strategy for growing your existing customer relationships. It involves discovering a customer's unmet needs and how your team can meet them to increase their lifetime value.
Account planning is the process of creating strategic account plans to improve relationships with key decision-makers to ensure long-term retention and revenue growth.
Account planning should happen on an ongoing basis to stay on top of clients' ever-changing needs. Sales representatives should continually research and strategize existing accounts to better understand customer needs.
When we asked B2B sales professionals if customer relationships help them make sales, over half of respondents (51%) said relationships are a significant part of their sales process. Account planning is an effective way to develop and maintain those vital customer relationships.
What are the wins you can expect from strategic account planning?
When you make strategic account planning part of your sales process, you'll see improvements across your company. Not only will sales close faster—you’ll close bigger deals more frequently. Your clients will quickly become loyal, repeat customers, while revenue starts to increase.
“In today’s corporate landscape, everybody’s inboxes are inundated, and it can be hard to break through the noise,” explains Ben Maxwell, Strategic Account Executive at Affinity. “So, when we’re talking about how to strategically plan to make an impact, using the existing relationships within your company’s network is the future of where technology sales is going, regardless of what industry you’re in.”
“People buy from people they know and trust,” Maxwell elaborates. “When you’re not starting from scratch with a new customer—and you can be introduced through someone in your company—that’s going to be the easiest way to get a seat at the table with these key account stakeholders.”
Let's explore some benefits of strategic account planning for your sales team.
Speed up the sales cycle
Account planning isn’t a lead-generation activity in the typical sense. You’re not expecting your sales reps to go out and find new customers. Instead, account planning is a sales strategy that generates revenue from existing accounts.
Acquiring new customers takes time, whereas closing a new deal with an existing customer can be much faster.
“Account planning can’t be underestimated when it comes to closing deals quickly,” says Maxwell. “You can use account planning and customer data to help identify who at the company you have connections with in every department. This allows you to get in front of the departments that have the ability to potentially block a deal with a warm introduction.”
With account planning, team members focus their efforts and energy on closing high-value sales with existing customers who are already primed to buy from your business.
Build important relationships to increase customer lifetime value
A big part of account planning is researching your current customers' needs and how your business can best satisfy them. To uncover those needs, it’s crucial to build mutually beneficial relationships with key account stakeholders. How do you do that? By having conversations with your customers that enrich your understanding of their business, and genuinely caring about their business needs.
You can then find a way to solve your customers' problems while also fulfilling the interests of your business. By offering value to your customers, you can increase customer retention, loyalty, and lifetime value.
Reduce acquisition costs
When it comes to reducing acquisition costs, client retention is key. Jonathan Gross, Managing Director at Pemeco Consulting, says “It's certainly a lot more cost effective to get follow-on work from an existing client than it is to source a new client and compete and so forth.”
Because account planning is about generating revenue from new initiatives with existing customers, you can reduce acquisition costs and focus your resources on upselling and cross-selling to your current customers.
Increase efficiency within your sales team
When your sales strategy is informed by strategic account planning, you give your sales team everything they need to be more efficient. Instead of spending hours focusing on new customers or accounts with limited growth potential, they can spend their time on high revenue, high-value accounts.
The ins and outs of the account planning process
Finding an account planning process that works for your sales reps is essential to the success of your account planning strategy. You can’t effectively use account planning as a sales tactic without an actionable plan.
These six steps will help you start your account planning process.
1. Understand your current accounts
Before you can start getting more from your existing accounts, spend time researching and understanding them. Start by compiling the critical metrics for each account—revenue, profitability, growth, geographical location, any known initiatives, and which of your products they're using.
You can also gather relationship metrics—who on your team has worked with the customer, when was the last time they reached out, and any other event or occurrences that could help inform how you approach the customer. If you're using a relationship intelligence tool like Affinity for Salesforce, this data is automatically captured, giving you a clear understanding of the historical context of a deal and opportunities for warm introductions elsewhere in the organization.
Analyzing this information not only helps you understand the existing customer relationship, it can also help determine the best way to approach the customer to close the deal.
“Being able to go into an account that is new or hasn’t been worked in nine months, and see the running history of that account because everything has been automatically logged is hugely beneficial,” says Maxwell.
“If you can easily see what kinds of meetings took place in an account a year ago, what kinds of emails were exchanged, that provides you with a level of context so you can make informed outreach to specific contacts. It allows your outreach to be much more relevant based on the information that was automatically logged.”
Once you've done an in-depth analysis of the data you and your team have on file in your CRM, consider contacting the customer directly to get first-hand information about their needs. Here are a few questions to help you get the right information from your customers:
- Which areas of your business are currently your key focus areas?
- How has our partnership helped your organization?
- What are the biggest challenges your organization is currently facing?
- What do you see as essential to the success of our partnership?
- Are there any activities your competitors are undertaking that you’re hoping to replicate?
Finally, if you have a face-to-face conversation with a customer, record the interview in your CRM for future reference.
2. Pinpoint what your clients need
Armed with the information you collected in your account research stage, it's time to identify and prioritize your customers' needs. You can provide value to your customers by tailoring your offers to their needs. Consider the challenges, problems, and concerns presented during your research.
Brian Erickson, Managing Vice President at Pariveda, highlights how firms can use technology to identify and address customer needs: “How do we think about ways to creatively find what the needs are and appeal to those needs? That's where we've been using technology to be a little more pointed in sharing some of our content and our information with our clients and prospects.”
You should also consider ways your products and services can help solve customer problems. When you pinpoint your customer needs, you can tailor offers to fulfill the demands of those accounts, creating a mutually beneficial relationship that brings value to you and your customers.
3. Implement a strategic account management process
Strong account planning is only possible if and when you implement a strategic account management process. An account management process helps you organize your customer communication and outreach efforts to result in maximum sales.
There are different ways to go about strategic account management. A common solution is to hire an account manager or account management team to track and record information like last date of contact, sales rep, sales progress, financial transactions, and more.
You can save your account managers time by automating these processes with the help of Affinity for Salesforce. Affinity for Salesforce integrates with your inbox and calendar to automatically capture all customer encounters, such as emails and meetings. It then automatically updates Salesforce records so you have easy access to the data you need to close deals faster.
4. Create a relationship map
Understanding the human element of your accounts is essential for successful account planning. A relationship map is a way to visualize the relationships between your team and individuals in your customers' organizations. Consider a relationship map as your roadmap to meaningful interactions with your existing customers.
A relationship map is more than your standard organization chart. It clearly outlines the key stakeholders and ensures you're reaching out to the appropriate people. This can help you understand the relationships at play on any given account, which you can then use to optimize your lead interactions.
Jeff Poczatek, Vice President of Global Sales at Affinity, explains how relationship maps can uncover hidden connections in your network: “Thinking about how to plug in who knows who within a network, and ultimately determine whether your firm has deeper connections that you don't know and can't see is critical.”
Sitting down at a whiteboard and mapping out the relationships for each account might sound like a time-consuming process, but there are ways to automate this important work.
Save time, money, and perhaps your sanity by using Affinity for Salesforce to automatically map your entire organization's network. It analyzes every interaction to establish the strength and nature of each relationship, giving you insights that drive deals automatically without the need for whiteboards or tedious data entry.
5. Keep your data clean and up-to-date
Maintaining your account information and relationship maps is essential as your existing customer relationships evolve and new accounts present themselves. While you can set recurring tasks to update data, finding an account planning tool that automatically updates your records is ideal.
Jonathan Gross, Managing Director at Pemeco Consulting, notes how faulty data can be costly: “Whether it's the artificial intelligence, whether it's the messaging you're sending, it's only as good as the data that's in your system.” He says, “if you send the wrong message to the wrong person at the wrong time, and you’re totally off the mark, they're gonna click the unsubscribe button very, very quickly.”
With Affinity for Salesforce, you can rest easy knowing that your data will be kept up-to-date and your historical communication data will appear in your CRM. When you connect Affinity for Salesforce, you immediately get long-term context on relationships and deals that would have been lost or required hours of manual data entry to capture.
6. Create an action plan
Now that you've got all the information you need to drive deals, it's time to create a plan to meet your client's needs and reach your revenue goals. Create an action plan that outlines what team members will be involved, what resources are needed, and how you'll keep track of your progress.
Ensure you include the following action items in your plan:
- Identify the top 3-5 accounts you'll prioritize
- Identify the top 3-5 objectives for each account
- List the resources needed to reach your objectives
- Assign tasks and key owners
Account planning best practices
Every business will take a slightly different approach to the account planning process. Whatever your process, these best practices will help you get the most out of your account planning.
Increase your CRM adoption
It’s difficult to engage in account planning if you don’t have the data to analyze to support it. CRM adoption is critical. To ensure you’ve got everything you need to get the most out of account planning, your team needs to actively use your CRM.
According to a 2024 survey conducted by Affinity, 35% of Sales and Ops respondents said their sales team doesn’t use their CRM because they don’t have enough time.* And another 32% said their team doesn’t believe the data is actively being used.
“There’s a quote you hear a lot from sales teams using Salesforce, ‘If it’s not in Salesforce, it doesn’t exist,’” says Maxwell. “The need to constantly switch between platforms to get all your data into a CRM like Salesforce is off-putting.”
Affinity for Salesforce takes away the need to work harder and instead lets you work smarter. It gives teams the ability to work where they want to work and save time while doing it. With Affinity for Salesforce, you can access relationship, contact, activity, and deal insights in your email and browser—this let’s sales reps focus on finding high-quality opportunities and closing deals.
Create an account planning template
Make the account planning process run smoothly by using a customized account planning template. An account planning template is a framework that helps organize the steps you're taking and the information you're gathering.
You can find a pre-built template online or customize a template to your needs. By using a template that everyone is familiar with, you save time and money by keeping all sales representatives on the same page.
Audit your account plan
It's essential to incorporate regular check-ins to ensure your account planning process is functioning correctly. Creating a plan and following is great, but it's only half the battle—you need to check in on your progress and adjust as needed.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are a great starting point to ensure you audit your account plan. When you have KPIs associated with your account planning goals, you'll have a built-in trigger to ensure you're evaluating your success and challenges.
An account plan can—and will—change over time, so take the audit as an opportunity to change your planning process as needed.
Get the most out of your data
You're investing a lot of time and effort in collecting data, so getting maximum value from the data you're recording is important. Find creative ways to use your data across your sales teams.
Affinity for Salesforce was designed to help you get the most from your data with the help of relationship intelligence and data enrichment. You can generate triggers, dashboards, and reports directly in Salesforce using the data you've collected. For example, use triggers to alert salespeople if a relationship score on one of their key accounts drops below the desired threshold. Or create a report to monitor how often sellers are meeting with target companies to track the success of those meetings.
Are you ready to improve your account planning process, increase your Salesforce adoption, and improve your Salesforce data hygiene? Then you need Affinity for Salesforce.
{{a4s-request-demo="/rt-components"}}
Account planning FAQs
What is the purpose of account planning?
The purpose of account planning is to map out important details about new prospects or existing customers, including relationship data, so you can develop a strategy to onboard them as a new customer, retain existing customers, and develop long-term relationships with both.
What is the difference between strategic account management and account planning?
The difference between strategic account management and account planning is found in their execution. Account planning is the process of creating strategic account plans to improve relationships with key decision-makers to ensure long-term retention and revenue growth. Strategic account management is the framework you use to execute the account plan you created in the planning process.
What is a key account plan?
A key account plan is very similar to an account plan. This term is usually reserved to describe accounts that are considered VIPs or important customers. A key account plan identifies customers' needs and looks for ways your business can meet those needs. Key account management is the process of managing mutually beneficial relationships between your business and your most important customers.
What are the potential pain points in the account planning process?
There are potential challenges you can face in the account planning process. These include:
- Lack of customer data and information
- No existing connections to key stakeholders
- Inconsistent processes to guide account planning
- Not having the right technology
What is an account planning template?
An account planning template is a framework for organizing the account planning process. It can help you organize the steps of your process and the data and information you gather during the planning.
* Data from Affinity’s 2024 survey of 250+ business leaders across investment banking, media and communications, real estate, professional services, healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, and enterprise technology.
