If you’re looking for an account planning solution, look no further than your CRM. For many, account planning in Salesforce is a logical—and practical—place to start. All of your customer data already lives in Salesforce, so it makes sense to dive into account planning where your data and your sales team already are.
Using Salesforce for your account planning is a great choice. But where do you start? And what additional tools do you need to make account planning in Salesforce as successful as possible? This guide answers these questions and more.
What is account planning in Salesforce?
Account planning is the process of creating detailed strategies for key accounts to help grow those important relationships into future revenue opportunities. When done well, account planning can help salespeople connect with account stakeholders to ensure long-term client retention and account growth.
We do so much within our customer relationship management systems (CRMs). Still, for many businesses, account planning is one of the most important sales initiatives that takes place outside of their CRM. Integrating account planning with Salesforce allows you to optimize the entire process.
For B2B businesses, account planning in Salesforce streamlines your business processes and enables you to create robust account strategies backed by solid relationships with decision-makers.
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Why strategic account planning is essential for your deal team
If increasing sales productivity and fine-tuning your sales process are on your radar, your deal team should invest in strategic account planning. By following an account planning methodology, salespeople will develop a more analytical way of thinking coupled with a deeper understanding of their customer’s businesses and the importance of relationships in sales.
Let’s look at some of the benefits strategic account planning can bring to your deal team.
Reduce acquisition costs
Finding and onboarding new customers is time-consuming and, therefore, costly. If you’re looking to reduce your acquisition costs, it stands to reason that working with your existing customers is a great place to start.
Effective account planning is all about generating more revenue from existing customers. You’ll be able to reduce acquisition costs by focusing your efforts on accounts that you’ve already invested in. By cross-selling, upselling, and finding other creative ways to solve your existing customers’ problems with your products and services, you can reduce acquisition costs while still increasing revenue.
Close more deals faster
Account planning is a sales strategy that increases sales efficiency by generating new revenue from existing accounts. Because your sales team doesn’t need to spend time acquiring so many new customers, they can automatically speed up the sales process.
Instead, sales reps spend time working on accounts where relationships are already established and customers are familiar with your business and the value you bring to the table.
Gain a deeper understanding of your customer’s business
Account planning allows sales teams to learn more about their customers’ businesses. To be able to sell to your existing customers, you need to be able to offer them something new.
You have to learn what business development goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) your customers are striving for. That way, you can highlight ways your products and services can help them reach their goals. Having a deeper understanding of your customers’ businesses will help you improve how you interact with key players at each customer company.
Build and maintain important relationships
Taking the time to speak with customers and get the information first-hand is a sure-fire way to learn more about your customers’ businesses. Showing them that you’re invested in their business will help to build and maintain those significant relationships.
These relationships close future deals, increase revenue, and improve customer retention and loyalty to your business.
6 steps to create your account planning strategy in Salesforce
Creating an account planning strategy in Salesforce looks different for every business. However, having an action plan to help you execute strategic account management and planning within Salesforce is key to success.
These six steps will guide you on how to build an account planning strategy in the Salesforce CRM.
1. Find a Salesforce integration
As mentioned before, there are a lot of amazing things you can achieve in the Salesforce CRM. To get the most out of account planning within Salesforce, a third-party integration will allow you to bring your company’s network into the CRM.
Affinity for Salesforce helps you easily map your network and quickly find warm introductions to relevant connections within key accounts. Available on AppExchange, Affinity for Salesforce is the only integration you need to use Salesforce data effectively in your account planning strategy.
Using Affinity for Salesforce, sales teams can harness the power of their data to find, manage, and close more high-quality deals.
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2. Identify your existing customer accounts
While you might have a good handle on your existing customer accounts, the first step of account planning is to learn everything there is to know about your customer accounts.
Start compiling metrics for each account—revenue, growth, geographical location, profitability, and which of your products or services they’re using. Then, look into the relationship metrics—who has worked with the customer? When did they last speak? Include any other notable events that may affect how you approach the customer.
An excellent framework to help you conduct your customer research is MEDDPICC. This sales qualification methodology enables you to qualify leads and can be equally effective on your existing customers. MEDDPICC looks at eight elements to help sales teams prioritize the right opportunities to ultimately drive revenue:
- Metrics
- Economic buyer
- Decision criteria
- Decision process
- Paper process
- Identify and implicate pain
- Champions
- Competition
Read more: Setting deals up for success with MEDDPICC.
With Affinity for Salesforce, relationship metrics are automatically captured so you have a clear picture of the history of each of your customer accounts.
Once you’ve gathered this information, you’ll have a better understanding of the existing customer relationship as well as the business.
3. Determine potential future revenue
When you conduct your account planning in Salesforce, your deals team can clearly understand where there is space to grow their accounts. They’ll be able to see where there is potential to upsell and cross-sell to all accounts that are represented in Salesforce.
Imagine seeing your active sales pipeline and existing business under contract, as well as a new potential pipeline—all within the CRM you’re already using daily.
Having a complete view can make it easier for your team to identify where they can find potential future revenue opportunities from your existing customer base.
4. Understand customers’ needs
How do you find the accounts that you could add value to? By understanding their needs.
Your customer’s needs will help you see how you can add value. Think about any challenges, problems, or concerns that may have come up during your research. How can your business solve those problems for your customers?
If you can tailor your solutions to your customer’s needs, you will create a mutually beneficial relationship that helps both you and your customers. When you take the time to understand your customers’ needs, you’re able to better see those areas where your business can help foster a relationship that helps everyone involved.
5. Identify the key players for each account
Once you know how to solve your customer’s problem, you need to know who to contact to close the deal quickly.
Understanding the relationships behind a customer account can be the difference between a deal sitting unseen in an inbox versus closing a deal in record time. A big part of account planning is understanding the relationships between your and your customer’s teams.
Because you’re account planning in Salesforce, you’ll have quick access to historical customer data through tracked sales activities. And if you’re working with a relationship intelligence tool like Affinity for Salesforce, you’ll benefit from relationship insights that can help identify warm introductions to help you close deals 25% faster.
Affinity for Salesforce automatically maps your business’s network, analyzes every interaction to establish the strength of each relationship, and provides you with your best path to a warm introduction.
6. Keep your Salesforce data up-to-date
As you move through a deal, keeping your Salesforce data up-to-date in your account plan is essential.
With Affinity for Salesforce, your data syncs in real-time from your email, calendar, and events, so you can be sure your data is helping you build better relationships and close deals faster. Additionally, when you connect Affinity for Salesforce, your historical engagement data will appear in Salesforce, giving you long-term context on relationships without hours being spent on manual data entry.
The role of automation and relationship intelligence in Salesforce account planning
Affinity for Salesforce uses automation to generate the insights that become relationship intelligence. It captures all your email, event, and calendar data and automatically syncs it in Salesforce. You not only get a clear, historical picture of every account; you’re also freed from manual data entry, so you can spend more time being face-to-face and presenting with your customers.
In addition to automatically creating and updating Salesforce records, Affinity for Salesforce takes data enrichment to new heights by delivering relationship insights that uncover warm introductions and new opportunities throughout your organization’s entire network.
Want to close deals faster through effective account planning in Salesforce? Try Affinity for Salesforce.
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Account planning in Salesforce FAQs
What is the purpose of account planning?
Account planning aims to understand important details about your existing customers so you can develop a strategy to meet their business needs by upselling or cross-selling. It involves tapping into relationship data to help you get more from the connections between your two businesses.
Why should you conduct account planning in Salesforce or another CRM?
One of the best reasons to conduct account planning in a CRM like Salesforce is because it is where your sales reps are already spending their time. It’s a tool they’re familiar with, and because of that, they are more likely to use it and get the benefits of account planning. In contrast, if you keep your account planning in a spreadsheet, for example, it is unlikely to be used as often.
What’s the difference between strategic account planning and strategic account management?
The difference between strategic account planning and strategic account management is in the implementation. Account planning is the process of creating strategic account plans to build relationships with customers to better understand their business needs with the goal of retention and increasing revenue.
Strategic account management is the framework used to implement and manage the account plans created during the account planning phase.
What account planning tool can you use to improve account planning in Salesforce?
You can use many account planning tools and integrations to improve account planning in Salesforce. The novel use of relationship intelligence makes Affinity for Salesforce a powerful account planning tool. Affinity for Salesforce gives you the critical network insights you need to effectively map relationships across your organization. Additionally, the integration enriches your Salesforce data and provides up-to-date paths to opportunities for warm introductions.
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