Executing Your Account Plan in Salesforce

Summit Blog Executing Your Account Plan in Salesforce

Since a living account plan is an ongoing, dynamic document, the final step in ensuring its usefulness to your organization is to continue modifying the plan, measuring results, and reassessing your strategic direction throughout the sales cycle. Wash, rinse, and repeat some sales managers would say.

An account plan creates wins of up to:

  • 75% better closes
  • 72% improved customer understanding of your offerings
  • 58% shorter sales cycles
  • 55% higher customer loyalty
  • 49% higher deal sizes

Clearly, a well built and executed account plan can be a critical tool for ongoing revenue.

Here are a few suggestions from Summit LLC on how to keep things moving forward after Q1 implementation.

Check In Regularly

It’s impossible to have weekly or monthly conversations with all of your contacts, but you can focus on the most strategic accounts. Routinely reach out to your best customers, being sure to let them know you’re interested in their success and there to help.

Grow Your Partnership

Up-selling and cross selling can help your business become more profitable as well as offer opportunities to create additional connections outside of your customer base. When talking to customers, be sure to capture key conversations or interest that may signal that your account may be interested in moving into an additional vertical, expanding their current footprint, or wanting additional capabilities.

Reassess Your Strategy

Account planning offers the ability to understand an account from all angles and prioritize various tasks based on goals and requirements. As you execute your plan throughout the sales cycle, it will become easier to see the big picture and understand where the biggest rewards will be.

The way we work is changing, and it’s time to reimagine sales processes for a more digital future. Get your selling team off to a fast start by embedding account plans inside Salesforce with Quip. By bringing your living account plans into Salesforce, your reps have the entire context of the account right next to the live CRM data that they work with on a regular basis.

Plus, account plans in Quip can be easily shared with team members who might not have a Sales Cloud license so that they can view and collaborate without using disparate apps like chat and email that cause information to get lost.

With Quip, your sales team can:

  • Log calls and tasks right from the account plan
  • View, update, and share live Salesforce data
  • Get real-time alerts when records change or are updated
  • Comment in the context of the data and context of work
  • Standardize workflows and selling motions with templates

A well built account plan makes it clear for everyone involved in the success of the customer relationship to see what needs to be done, the timeline for completion, who is responsible for the attainment of milestones, how success is measured along the customer journey, what the plan of action is if anything goes wrong, what roles everyone plays, and how to reach your goals. It is all in one place. It is actionable. It reflects SMART goals. It is measurable. And most importantly it serves as a duplicatable road map for success.

Equally as important to account management, the account plan provides a road map for opportunity planning as well. With a solid plan for documenting new opportunities as they arise in a relationship with a client you can monitor and manage opportunities from within your Salesforce CRM.

Preventing opportunities from falling through the cracks or getting left on the table as a backlog item in a project means happier customers and more revenue. Your account plan should be your blueprint for ongoing success in continuing to meet your clients’ needs.

A quick search online for an account plan or account management blueprint will yield a large variety of tools to choose from. At Summit our account plan blueprint is just that – a suggestion for one method of managing your key accounts. Working with your sales and marketing enablement professionals at Summit will provide you with a customized account plan that is built on your business model and is designed to grow at scale as your business does.

Just like the Salesforce platform you do business on, the enablement partner you do business with should be the best Salesforce partner for you and your business. Talk toSummit today and see how we can be a part of your account success team!

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Northwoods worked with Summit to help migrate our Microsoft Dynamics CRM system to Salesforce.  Mike and his team were extremely knowledgeable, thorough, and easy to work with.  They were able to help us configure the system to handle complex business processes while making the system easy for end users.  They were also able to migrate all our legacy Dynamics data to the new Salesforce system.  Summit helped train our technical team on Salesforce administration while keeping the project on time and under budget.  I highly recommend Summit for any Salesforce-related project.

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As a leader of a small non-profit aimed to scale rapidly and efficiently, I knew it was critical to transition from antiquated spreadsheets to a sophisticated CRM. We dabbled in Salesforce on our own the year prior. To put it mildly, I was terrified to go there again. Mike and his team at Summit met my apprehension with confidence and reassurance. They were timely, efficient and positioned us to utilize Salesforce in ways we hadn’t imagined. Every day I’m in awe of what Salesforce can do; to Mike’s credit for imparting his wisdom. Summit has positioned us for unprecedented opportunities at Walk with a Doc. Thank you!

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We went through 3 consultants before finding Summit. The difference was night and day, and the cost was very reasonable. They helped us get our Communities up and running in less than a week (after 2 other teams essentially dragged their feet for 9 months - yes, 9 months!). We are ecstatic! We also have Managed Services with them, for a few hundred bucks a month they are our go-to for anything Salesforce. The team is INSTANTLY responsive - like within 2 minutes. I have experienced other consultants and can tell you, there is no comparison. Hire Summit!

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Paige B.

We have primarily been using Salesforce for our sales team. Recently we decided to bring our support team on and Summit did an awesome job helping us get everything set up the way we needed.

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Great experience with Summit. They are very knowledgeable about Salesforce and their turn around is outstanding. I am looking forward to working Part 2 of our plan with them.

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Kay W.

The skill set and knowledge that Mike Leibrand has brought to this project far surpasses our initial expectation- especially since our initial contact with Salesforce corp. was challenged in regards to utilizing training videos to suit our scope and need. Mike has been helpful in supporting our team with a custom solution in order for us to be able to serve our community better. He is timely and professional, and eager to learn about the why before telling us the what.

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Matt S.

Mike and his team at Summit Tech made our Salesforce dream a reality. As a small non-profit on a limited budget with very specific CRM needs we were challenged to find a suitable Salesforce partner. Fortunately we were introduced to Summit Tech, and from day one they made the formidable task of implementing Salesforce doable (and even enjoyable!). Mike is a pro, from his accessibility and communication to industry knowledge and attitude, he never said 'no' to a request. When we encountered hiccups along the way he took the time to trouble shoot and make fixes, even when it was outside the original scope of the project. We didn't deviate from the project timeline or budget, which says a lot considering our custom needs for data collection/reporting, donor communication, and third party plug-ins. If you are considering implementing Salesforce or have any Salesforce needs, I highly recommend Mike and his team.

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