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!
