A Salesforce Admin’s Guide to Account Planning in Salesforce

Account planning refers to the process of identifying and understanding key accounts, analyzing their needs and challenges, and developing targeted plans to build and nurture relationships. From improving client relationships to driving long-term customer retention and revenue growth, account planning is a necessary part of today’s sales process – but it’s not always easy to manage in a complex B2B sales process. 

When asked in a recent Affinity survey if customer relationships help them make sales, 51% of respondents confirmed that relationships are a significant part of their sales process. Account planning is an effective way to maintain those key relationships, but how can Salesforce be optimized for more effective account planning?

In this article, we’ll explore ways you can augment Salesforce for more strategic account planning to drive CRM adoption and positively impact revenue.

Optimize CRM Data Management and Processes for Account Planning

Account planning relies on quality data, and your CRM should be the irrefutable source of that data. 

Problems can occur when your CRM contains bad data. This may be the result of outdated information, errors due to manual data entry (e.g. typos and misspellings), inconsistent formatting, low or inconsistent CRM usage, or a combination of these factors. Automation can help. 

Automating your activity tracking process and implementing tools that instantly update and further enrich your CRM records ensures your customer data is always fresh and timely. It also takes the burden of manually capturing data away from the sales team, which saves over 200 hours of CRM work per user every year and streamlines reporting.

In addition to reducing manual effort – and the errors that come with manual updates – automating record updates and enrichment ensures your sales team never loses the context they need to drive deals forward.

“Being able to go into an account that is new or hasn’t been worked in nine months, and see the running history of that account because everything has been automatically logged is hugely beneficial,” says Ben Maxwell, Strategic Account Executive at Affinity. “If you can easily see what kinds of meetings took place in an account a year ago, what kinds of emails were exchanged, that provides you with a level of context so you can make informed outreach to specific contacts. It allows your outreach to be much more relevant based on the information that was automatically logged.”

Pro tip: When evaluating activity tracking tools, ensure captured data is stored indefinitely and can be used in Salesforce’s native reports and dashboards.

Source and Close More Deals With Network and Relationship Insights 

Along with providing valuable deal context, tracking engagement activities across your organization can help sellers identify stronger pathways into conversations with decision-makers.

“In today’s corporate landscape, everybody’s inboxes are inundated, and it can be hard to break through the noise,” Maxwell explains. “So, when we’re talking about how to strategically plan to make an impact, using the existing relationships within your company’s network is the future of where technology sales is going, regardless of what industry you’re in.”

Successful Salesforce account planning involves understanding the connections between your colleagues and key contacts at prospective and current customer accounts. Relationship intelligence tools can help with this, mapping and assessing your organization’s network so you better understand the strength and nature of every relationship. 

“People buy from people they know and trust,” Maxwell elaborates. “When you aren’t starting from scratch with a new customer – and you can be introduced through someone in your company – that’s going to be the easiest way to get a seat at the table with these key account stakeholders.”

How Does Relationship Intelligence Work? 

Relationship intelligence is a category of insights about an organization’s professional network that is built on the capture and analysis of data to reveal overlooked connections and opportunities. 

Relationship intelligence tools analyze your entire company’s network and engagement history to calculate relationship strength scores based on the recency and frequency of interactions between your colleagues and their external network of connections.

This lets sellers quickly identify which of their colleagues has the strongest relationship with the prospect or contact they want to engage with. Affinity data shows that warm introductions can help you close deals 25% faster. 

Surface Actionable Insights for Sales Teams 

You invest a lot of time and effort in collecting and maintaining your company’s Salesforce data, so getting the most value from that data is important. 

When it comes to account planning in Salesforce, sales leaders and AEs are looking for ways to identify new opportunities faster and monitor key accounts more easily. You can help by setting up relationship-focused triggers, reports, and dashboards. 

Here are a few examples to consider:

• Create triggers to alert sellers when relationship scores drop below a specific threshold or key account insights change so they know when to reach out.
• Run a report to monitor accounts that need engagement so sales managers can reprioritize accounts and identify potential gaps.
• Build a relationship trends dashboard that sales leaders can use during team meetings to check in on the status of recent opportunities and review accounts that need engagement.
• Report on opportunities with the highest relationship scores to make it easy for sellers to prioritize deals with a higher likelihood of closing.

Optimize Salesforce for Account Planning

Affinity for Salesforce was created to help you get the most from your CRM data with the help of relationship intelligence and data enrichment. With Affinity, you can improve your activity capture process, surface relationship insights, and generate triggers, dashboards, and reports that support the account planning process.

To implement, Salesforce Admins work with Affinity’s onboarding team to ensure all necessary Salesforce features are enabled prior to installing the Affinity for Salesforce managed package. Once installed and set up, you will have access to pre-built reports and dashboards your sales team can use to assist in account planning efforts.

Additionally, Affinity’s Google and Outlook extensions make Salesforce more accessible. With extensions, sellers can access key insights, add notes, or create new contacts, accounts, and opportunities without leaving their inbox or web browser. This allows sellers to quickly move through research, qualification, and outreach as they browse company websites, review LinkedIn profiles, and respond to emails. 

Summary

Effective account planning in Salesforce involves a blend of data efficiency, relationship-centric insights, and strategic thinking. Your CRM should be optimized to help sales teams identify when and where to focus their time, and which accounts and contacts they should prioritize. 

With Affinity for Salesforce, you can easily augment Salesforce to streamline sales processes and increase Salesforce adoption.