Taking swift action on key accounts is something that sales teams across organizations of all industries and sizes have to do in order to become, or continue being, trusted partners to their customers. Supporting the account planning process in Salesforce generally entails a custom implementation, purchasing an additional Salesforce product like Quip, or even a third-party tool – assuming the local documents and slides are no longer being used (but that can still happen, right?).
In this article, we will go through the newly announced out-of-the-box Account Plans option, which will become available following the Winter ‘25 Salesforce release, empowering you and your team to effectively build, track, and analyze the end-to-end planning process.
Set Up the New Account Plans
While the feature itself is not yet available in preview orgs, sandboxes, or trials, what we know so far is that there will be a dedicated Account Plans Setup page available where you will need to enable the functionality.
Once enabled in production, you can request a sandbox refresh to test it in a test environment before deciding if it’s the right tool for your use case.
Additionally, the Account Plans object will be surfaced within the Object Manager, where you can configure it based on your organization’s needs. Afterwards, you can add the related list to account layouts or record pages.
Get Planning
Following the initial setup, it’s time your teams get to planning! With the plans being accessible from individual accounts, this certainly enhances both functionality and user experience.
There are five main components to the Account Plan page, aside from the highlighted information at the top of the page:
- View opportunity-related details and metrics are available in a dashboard embedded at the top of the page, which includes the breakdown by Stage, potential revenue, and the Win Rate.
- Use a dedicated section for reps to quickly create a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis.
- Easily capture particular customer needs and market dynamics in dedicated fields.
- Offer teams the possibility to create clear and measurable objectives directly from the Account Plan.
- Leverage the Buyer Relationship Map to visualize key stakeholders across the different buyer groups identified from the account’s contacts.
Summary: Availability
At this time, Salesforce mentioned within the Release Notes that the new Account Planning feature is going to become available to all customers following the Winter ‘25 release, with a rollout estimated to end on October 29th 2024. This change will apply to Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and of course, Einstein 1 sales editions.
Make sure to keep an eye out for this becoming available, as we definitely will! In the meantime, take a look over the hottest Winter ‘25 features which will come to your org shortly.