What is an Account Plan?

Simply put, it’s the game plan to win. A good account plan can be one or two pages in an MS Word document following the template. Sales reps confess that it only takes one to two hours to complete a good account plan following this template:

Account Plan for _____
Date Updated: ______

1. Opportunity:

• Which products are expected in this sale?


• What is the deal value (initial order and long term potential)?


• What is the expected close date?


• Is there a confirmed budget?


• describe the customer's painpoint


• and why is it urgent to address this pain?

• Who's who in purchase process? Specifically, delineate decision-makers, approvers, influencers, users, and other stakeholders.


• What’s the win for each of these key people?


• What is the attitude of each of these stakeholders (e.g. friendly, neutral, averse)


• How have you established relationships from executive level on down?

• How will they evaluate different options for this project?


• What are the vendor selection criteria? How is the short list decided?


• Who gets a vote?


• Have you influenced the selection of these criteria?

• Which other vendors are being considered?


• What other options are being considered?


• What’s our strategy to beat the #1 competitor (including “do nothing”)?

• Formalize vendor requirements


• Investigate and select short list of vendors


• Setup and do proof-of-concept


• Analyze results


• Compare/assess all options considered


• Identify top two vendors (#1 and backup)


• Check references


• Make final recommendation to executive decision-makers


• Engage purchasing/legal to negotiate and contract

• What are all the potential inhibitors to deal closing?


• What's the plan to address each of these risks?

Why is an Account Plan useful?
Three reasons to have your sales reps write account plans—1) Avoid surprises, 2) increase the likelihood of success, and 3) ensure smart resource allocation. As sales reps begin to consume more company resources as the deal unfolds you’ll use the account plan to ensure there is good justification for burning resources such as pre-sales systems engineering time, equipment/software loaners, executive relationship building, etc.

When is an Account Plan needed?
The best time to have a sales rep write an account plan is after the initial qualification meeting with the customer but before you approve heavier resource commitments. Have the sales rep review the account plan template before their qualification meeting to ensure that they gather the right information from customer visits. Sales reps should be able to build a good business case for you to feel comfortable authorizing more company resource deployment. You ought to know all the risks and potential returns of every deal worthy of executive attention.

So, in summary, we recommend that sales managers underscore the importance of good account plans. Tell reps exactly why you need account plans and what you expect of them following the template above. Even devote part of your weekly sales meetings to go over one account in depth to show them how important this is to you. By insisting on good account plans you will help reps do a better job leading the sales process and helping yourself do a better job managing resources, setting expectations with other executives, and ultimately in winning the business.