3 Truths About Salesforce and Account

Planning
by pqpress | May 16, 2019 | Account Planning, Account-Based Marketing, Account-Based
Selling, Digital Content Management, Key Account Management, Sales Enablement | 0
comments

With more than 100,000 customers using Salesforce globally, it’s safe to say the platform is
the world’s most popular customer relationship management (CRM) system. This should
come as no surprise. The tool is used by savvy medtech sales professionals literally every
day. The CRM system increases revenue. It automates the tedious tasks that sales
professionals face. And it provides teams with copious amounts of invaluable customer
insight.
Despite its capabilities, however, Salesforce requires some effort to optimize. Account
planning is a valuable sales motion that maximizes revenue—but the process is often
completed outside of Salesforce with disjointed apps and manual procedures.
Complex buyers and groups, less time with buyers, and global competition… this all sounds
familiar, right? These reasons have made it more difficult than ever to sell medtech
solutions. So, why make your job any harder than it already is?
Read more to understand some truths about Salesforce and account planning.

Account planning is a process traditionally

completed outside of Salesforce.
Account planning is an invaluable sales process. But it’s traditionally completed with
disjointed apps and manual processes. While there are numerous account planning
approaches—including PowerPoint, Excel, and third party apps—these require integration
with different user interfaces. This has left teams to piecemeal strategies together, resulting
in a fragmented user experience and lost opportunities.
These outdated approaches simply don’t optimize the value of account planning, or
Salesforce. With native apps, strategic account planning turns this process on its head by
empowering teams to accomplish goals within an account. It evaluates which accounts are
essential to a company’s growth. And it enables sales teams to hit their targets in an
increasingly complex, challenging sales environment.
 Account planning should help discover
what you know—and what you don’t.
Account planning coordinates internal sales efforts to prepare for future accounts. And it
provides a comprehensive overview of current customers. However, in order to understand
account planning, it’s essential to uncover as much as possible about your customers,
competitors, and your company.
To beat your competition, you must understand their offerings, in addition to your own.
While Salesforce can help capture important information, it’s essential to know what to
track. Uncovering the unknown isn’t all smoke and mirrors. To help, ask yourself the
following questions about prospects:
 What are their business goals and expectations?
 What is their buying process?
 What are their desired solutions?
 How many business units do they have?
Evaluating prospects requires a little introspection (and honesty!). It’s important to place an
equal emphasis on positive and negative sentiments. Leveraging data within Salesforce
helps teams gain a comprehensive overview of their current situation. However, using
efficient, reliable resources enables you to spend more time analyzing valuable data.

Account planning is an ongoing process.

Keeping your plan current is just as important as your initial development efforts. How so?
Customers change—and it’s important to update your plans accordingly. So, adapting to
new situations ensures that your plan is tailored around each account’s potential and your
customer’s priorities. Tracking news and social insights can help teams capitalize on trends.
And at all times, it’s important to consider the following:
 What does your customer care about?
 What is your customer counting on to grow or improve?
 Who are the leaders within your customer’s organization?
Aligning executives, product teams, marketing teams, and extended sales teams around
goals and objectives shows the influence and impact of team members. Identifying key risk
factors and defining parameters and priorities help teams coordinate around activities. And
aligning teams around key objectives helps prioritize activities and tasks—so you can
promote revenue growth or support other key performance indicators.
Making sure your Salesforce and account planning efforts are synched around actionable
items enables you to track progress. It also increases accountability. Make this an ongoing
process with quarterly conference calls so that you can see how the actions are going and
re-evaluate the key activities.
A seamless Salesforce account planning
process gets better results.
Salesforce’s CRM capabilities propels customers through the majority of the marathon that
is account planning. But enabling your sales teams with apps that help them plan their
content will launch them across the finish line. Salesforce offers a multitude of apps in their
AppExchange. However, while these non-native apps may sound great in theory, they often
require integration into your systems and processes. And often, teams don’t have the
technical know-how to integrate these solutions.
For account planning to be effective and efficient, it must be native—not integrated—to
Salesforce. It must be seamless to end users so that running account plans becomes part
of their day-to-day. In doing so, teams can clearly understand responsibilities, updates, and
progress of accounts.
The best software is designed for sales teams to make the most of Salesforce. These native
apps fill the gaps and unlock the value of Salesforce in CRM. End to end, platforms enable
medtech sales teams to plan, execute, and adapt key account plans more effectively and
efficiently—and with better outcomes. Outmaneuver your competition, accelerate and
automate your efforts, and increase your bottom line with these native, cloud-based
solutions.

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How to Build Powerful Key Account

Plans In Salesforce
by Gary Smith | Jul 28, 2015 | Account
Planning, salesforce.com, Targets

In every business there are customers and prospects of strategic

importance.
These are the customers that generate a disproportionate share of
revenue and profits. They are the prospects who will become the income
stars of the future.
These customers and prospects need proactive management. That
doesn’t just happen by chance. It requires robust account plans to set
targets, define actions and track outcomes.
But there’s no Account Planning tab in Salesforce. So here’s how to
create a key account planning tool that enables these strategic
 accounts to undergo the proactive planning and management that’s
warranted.
Essential Account Planning Features
To be effective, the account planning tool must:
 Identify the strategic customers and prospect accounts.
 Track revenue against target for each strategic account.
 Define the account management strategy, business development
initiatives and actions planned for each account segment.
 Identify the risks and threats in achieving the targets,
manage competitors and specify support required from colleagues.
 Enable the need for corrective action to be identified.
Key Account Plans in Salesforce
First you need a custom object, related to the Account. In our example
we’ve called it Key Account Plan but it can be called Business Plan,
Account Development Plan or any other term that is relevant to your
business.
For each strategic Account, the Account Owner creates an Key Account
Plan for each period of time. That period of time might be monthly,
quarterly or annually depending on your business.
Here are some examples of fields you might create on the Key Account
Plan. Again, other fields might be relevant in your business.
 From Date. The start date of the period of time to which the Account
Plan relates. Typically this will be the first day of the month, quarter or
year.
 To Date. The last date of the time period. The last day of the quarter for
example.
 Sales Target. The sales revenue that is targeted for this account for the
given time period.
 Objectives. The account management objectives for the period of this
account plan.
 SWOT Analysis. Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats in
achieving the Revenue Target.
 Stakeholder Management Plan. The approach the Account Owner will
take to achieving the Sales Target.
 Support Required. The internal resources that will be required to
achieve the Sales Target
 Sales Achieved. The value of Closed Won opportunities.
 Sales Pipeline. The total value of Pipeline opportunities.
 Weighted Pipeline. The Pipeline opportunities multiplied by the
Probability.
 Total Expected Revenue. The value of Closed Won opportunities plus
the Weighted Amount of pipeline opportunities.
Actions planned to achieve the objectives are attached to the Account
Plan using the standard Open Activities and Activity History sections.
In the example below I’ve deliberately left the fields in the Strategy
section empty in order to display the Account Plan in a single
screenshot.
The Key Account Plan records the approach the Account Owner is
taking to achieve the sales target. In many businesses, the Account
Owner updates the Account Plan midway through the period based on
expected under or over performance of the revenue target.
And of course all Activities that relate to achievement of the Account
Plan are recorded under the Open Activities and Activity History section
of the page layout.
The KPI section summarises the value of Closed Won and Open
opportunities for this account, for the duration of the Key Account Plan.
The in-line chart gives a graphical view of how revenue on the account
compares with the Sales Target. This pulls directly from the metrics that
measure Closed Won Opportunities and Weighted Pipeline against the
Revenue Target. This clearly shows whether the sales target for the
Account in this Quarter will be met.
 Link Opportunities the Key Account Plan
Each time an Opportunity is created or edited, a code based trigger links
the Opportunity to the relevant Account Plan.
The same piece of code then ‘rolls up’ the value of all the Opportunities
that are linked to the Account Plan. It’s this function that enables the
performance against target – based on both Closed and Pipeline
Opportunities – to be calculated.
The same approach can also be used if you import orders into
salesforce. Create a trigger that automatically links each order to the Key
Account Plan
Get in touch with us if you’d like help creating or deploying this trigger.
Management reporting on Key Account Plans
Let’s look at a management report on sales performance against Key
Account Plans for multiple accounts. It shows the:
 Sales target.
 Sales achieved thus far for the target period.
 Weighted pipeline value.
 Total forecast sales, and
 Forecast variance against target.
The dashboard chart and underlying report enable managers to quickly
see that two accounts are forecast to be below the Sales Target for this
quarter (the purple bar on the chart). The report also shows that overall
the business is forecast to be above target for its strategic accounts for
this quarter (the green shaded number on in the bottom right of the
report).
This powerful information means that executives and Account Owners
can identify the remedial action they need to take to achieve sales
targets. For those accounts that are forecast to be above target, review
the Key Account Plan to determine what additional steps can be taken to
increase revenue further. And for added impact, combine strategic
account planning with activity reporting on key accounts to measure and
track value-adding activities on these essential customers and
prospects.
Summary
Key Account Planning is a crucial aspect in the management strategic
accounts. Without it, account activity becomes piecemeal, ad hoc and
reactive.
We’ve demonstrated here the approach to account planning that many
of our own customers (and we ourselves!) use every day. It creates
simple, measurable plans that can be shared across the team, and gives
the visibility of necessary to identify when remedial action is required.
Customized demo
If you’d like a customized demonstration of how key account planning
can work in your specific business then simply get in touch using the
form below. We’ll get in touch to arrange a short web demo.
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What is Key Account Management and

How Does it Drive Sales Results?
by Natalie Ciel | Sep 4, 2019 | Account Planning, Key Account
Management, Uncategorized | 0 comments
Strategic accounts are the key to your company’s success, which is why key account
management use has been skyrocketing. When done properly, key account management is
a launchpad to grow critical customer relationships and increase win rates.
But to make sure you implement key account management properly in your organization,
let’s take a step back and understand exactly what it is and why key account management
is important.
We’ve got your top questions about key account management answered.

What is the definition of key account management?

You’ve most likely heard the term Key Account Manager, or KAM, used as a title. But what
exactly does a KAM do?
Key account management is the process of effectively building and maintaining customer
relationships with key accounts in order to grow valuable relationships and drive more
business. Therefore, KAMs are responsible for seeing these steps through and are an
integral part of your company’s success.
What’s the difference between account planning and
key account management?
Account planning is more focused on how to choose the best accounts for your sales team
to chase deals with. Strategic account planning is the process of evaluating existing
customer accounts and strategically selecting major accounts that can yield the most
potential revenue.
Account management, on the other hand, has to do with developing the relationships in
those selected accounts. As stated above, key account management is the process of
effectively growing strategic accounts, also referred to as key accounts, that meet the
predetermined criteria.

How do I get started with key account management?

Start by identifying top accounts with the most potential to expand. For example, if one
business unit within an enterprise company has purchased your product, this would be a
great key account to chase. Having champions on the inside of an account to help promote
your product’s strengths and capabilities is an extremely valuable and effective way to
garner buy-in.

Why is key account management important?

With a key account management program, your sales team focuses their time and effort on
accounts that are more likely to give you their business. This makes sales more productive
and more likely to reach their goals.
Learn more about how key account management can help you with your sales goals.

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 3 Sales Playbook Must-Haves
by pqpress | Jul 25, 2019 | Account Planning, Digital Content Management, Key Account
Management, Sales Enablement | 0 comments

We’re halfway through the year and it’s time for a check-in. Is your sales team making
quota?
It can be a challenge to keep your team agile and energized when today’s intelligent buyers
are making a decision in minutes. Reaching an increasingly diverse group of leaders and
stakeholders requires defined, repeatable sales processes.
Sales playbooks are designed to compile these sales processes as well as the content,
tools, messages, and strategies your team needs. The best playbooks are a collection of
proven actions based on previous sales engagements. They take an overwhelming amount
of product information and marketing content and distill them into a series of logical steps.
Successful sales playbooks shorten sales cycles, increase win rates, and ramp up sales
teams. To help optimize your overall performance, here are three sales playbook must-
haves.

Key Account Management Strategy

No two customers are the same, so no two solutions should be the same. As the old adage
goes, 20 percent of your customers produce 80 percent of your sales. It can be tempting to
try to please all your customers, but it’s far wiser to focus on the most lucrative ones.
Key account planning helps sales teams do just this. It enables teams to focus on the
accounts key to your organization’s growth and success. Key account planning is necessary
for closing complex deals.

Empower your sales reps to sell more with less administration. Download this free sales
playbook.

It’s important that your playbook has a process for defining and identifying the right
accounts. Key accounts should synchronize around your established sales processes.
Below are some criteria to help outline accounts:
 The history of the account
 Goals your customer hopes to achieve
 Your customer’s perception of your company
 Your customer’s available budget
Furthermore, a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) helps
identify the strongest accounts, minimize threats, and take advantage of available
opportunities. This helps identify where your team has a competitive advantage, what your
team needs to guard against, where opportunities exist, and what could potentially cause a
rift with the client.
Technology Processes
When sales team members are on the road, they depend on mobile devices and digital
tools to access information and close deals. Your playbook needs to establish clear
guidelines on how tools are to be used, and it should explicitly outline training procedures to
set your reps up for success.
Your playbook should leverage sales enablement technology to empower your team to sell,
in any location, and on any device. Technology requires strong senior sales leadership to
champion the project and front-line sales management to ensure compliance.
Successful CRM implementation often depends on your ability to not only understand tools
but to effectively utilize them. The technology you have in place should be working for you
and your end users. As a sales leader, it’s important to make sure that your technology
processes, including your CRM system, are helping your reps sell more.

Content Compliance Strategy

If your content is not discoverable, then it’s essentially useless. However, if it’s out-of-date
or, even worse, non-compliant, it’s potentially harmful. Your playbook must outline a content
compliance strategy that helps users gauge when it’s the right time to send approved
content and what content is appropriate at that time. It must also track updates in real-time
so that sales teams know what content to leverage.
Digital tools help ensure that sales reps are providing customers with customized, compliant
information. Intuitive technology enhances sales engagements with discoverable, branded,
trackable, and compliant content. These tools enable teams to find, send, and share
compliant sales and marketing materials—and understand the ways that salespeople
search for the information. Mobile content libraries enable reps to access the content that
they need when they need it, without having to navigate through multiple systems.
Maintaining consistency and effectiveness in regulated industries is a challenge. Paired with
the right tools and technology, sales playbooks work to reduce the complexity of the med
device industry by aligning sales and marketing efforts. Sales enablement software unlocks
the value in your organization’s CRM and provides an end-to-end system to manage
compliant content development and drive account-based sales.
Create a playbook for the unique demands of your sales team. Download this free
playbook and drive results today.

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