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Salesforce Account Plans: The New Feature Your Sales Users Will Love

By Andreea Doroftei

Effectively managing account strategy, related goals, and stakeholder involvement is something every account manager has to do in order to nurture customer relationships during the sales cycle. Supporting the account planning process in Salesforce generally entails a custom implementation, using general-purpose tools such as spreadsheets or presentation decks or even a third-party tool – this assumes that local documents and slides are no longer used, although it may still happen, right?

In this post, we’ll deep dive into the new Account Plans, what they entail, how you can get started, and, of course, what kind of customizations are possible to make this feature your very own.

The ‘Why’ Behind the Change

Account-based selling strategies imply cross-team collaboration at all stages, in order to not only achieve common goals and revenue outcomes but ultimately maintain a productive relationship on both ends of the deal, proving to be a favorite approach across all industries and company sizes. This is where proper account planning comes into play too, as collaboration should happen seamlessly while ideally being measured and tied to measurable goals.

From a customer’s perspective, having Account Plans in Salesforce has been an ask for quite some time, as there was previously no out-of-the-box mechanism or dedicated space to support this process. More often than not, this request resulted in the use of third-party solutions, in-house custom solutions, or Salesforce’s own Quip templates embedded into Salesforce records. While these options could initially get the job done, significant limitations, such as disconnected systems, stale information, lack of automation capabilities, or perhaps budget constraints, were something companies always had to keep in mind – this is no longer the case!

By including the new Account Plan functionality into the core Salesforce Sales Cloud offering at no extra cost for Enterprise editions and above, Salesforce aims to empower customers to adopt an in-app account-based selling solution while having out-of-the-box features readily available in their toolkit.

As always, the main advantage of a standard feature is the ability to enable or set it up and start using it while also having the option to customize most of its aspects to reflect your bespoke process, all while having Salesforce as a single source of truth. Even more so, using an out-of-the-box option means you will be able to seamlessly integrate future innovations Salesforce will bring to the platform. That does sound like we’re in for a treat, doesn’t it?

Set Up the New Account Plans

While the feature itself is not yet available in preview orgs, sandboxes, or Enterprise edition 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. Similar to many other Salesforce features, you will simply have to toggle the switch on, add the related list to layouts and record pages, and you’re good to go!

Optionally, you can head to Object Manager and start customizing your Account Plans from the get-go. Following the feature being turned on, you will notice that three new standard objects appear in your org:

  • Account Plan
  • Account Plan Objective
  • Account Plan Objective Measure

Once Account Plans are enabled in the production instance, you can also request a sandbox refresh to try it out in a test environment before deciding if it’s the right tool for your use case or what further customizations may be needed for it to mold exactly to your team’s needs. It should go without saying that any metadata changes should be built in sandboxes, tested, and only then deployed to production.

Note: Object and field-level permissions should also be reviewed and enabled on the permission sets used by your sales team, for example, or you could also create new permission sets and add them to existing permission set groups.

As Account Plans are actually Salesforce records, you can easily customize the record page itself for your organization’s needs using Lightning App Builder. If certain components or their position do not work for you or if you’d like to embed other items on the page, feel free to adjust what works best for your teams!

An optional feature you can also enable at this point is the Buyer Relationship Map, which will become available within the Account Plan record if you choose to use it. Since this feature is also included with Enterprise editions and above, you should definitely try it out and see how easily your users will be able to build fully interactive stakeholder hierarchies related to either accounts or opportunities.

READ MORE: Salesforce Relationship Selling: The New Way for Your Sales Team to Engage Stakeholders

Meet the Account Plan

Now that the setup is done, the time has come for your internal users to enjoy this feature day-to-day! With the plans being accessible from individual accounts, this can certainly count as an enhancement to both the functionality and the user experience.

The Account Plan Record

The good news for both admins and Salesforce users is the fact that Account Plans are actually individual records, meaning that not only will the captured data be stored in fields, but you can also build granular reporting using native Salesforce reports and dashboards. These can be leveraged by Sales leadership during reviews and QBRs to track progress and dive into the latest updates made to Account Plans.

When creating an Account Plan, the only mandatory field by default is the Account Plan name. After entering it, account managers can save and continue working on the plan right away. At the top of the page, the out-of-the-box dashboard displays key information from opportunities related to the Account Plan, specifically the Stage breakdown as well as the Win Rate. If needed, you can customize the record page as mentioned in the setup section above and switch this dashboard to another one of your choosing.

Following the dashboard and highlights panel at the top of the page, similar to any other Salesforce record, the Account Plan includes fields and field sections, as well as related lists on the right-hand side. We will explore the objectives in more detail in the next section.

The Account Plan includes all the fields you need for a SWOT analysis (which many companies use as a framework to determine their market position) and a dedicated Competitive Landscape section. Of course, your organization can choose to use a completely different framework or further customize these sections – it is entirely up to you.

While Account Plan records are private by default, account managers can choose to share their Account Plans with their team or other colleagues using the sharing settings on the Account Plan record page. As expected, you can change this behavior by updating the organization-wide defaults if extended access is needed as soon as plans are created rather than relying on granular record-by-record sharing.

Objectives and Measures

In general, account planning is a strategic process involving collaboration and customer conversations to align on different goals, needs, and next steps. When it comes to the execution, however, having the possibility to track the various steps and take action accordingly becomes paramount – Salesforce has got you covered in this regard as well!

Selling will always remain a team sport, especially in large organizations with a longer sales cycle, and this means that multiple internal or even external collaborators will be involved. Account Plan Objectives allow you to create as many objectives as needed per Account Plan, regardless of their nature, so that the effort that goes into executing the plan can be tracked accordingly.

These objectives can be assigned to different individuals, and each record has a Start Date and End Date that are mandatory right from the get-go. During the creation, your team can determine if the objective is measurable or not. If it is, they can choose between currency, percent, or number as a unit of measure. The Current Value and Target Value will also have to be input for progression to be accurately displayed directly on the Account Plan.

Salesforce Account Plan Objective also offers the flexibility to add the measure afterwards, even if the information was not available initially, to make it as easy as possible for account managers to get started and come back later with any additional changes.

Planning Your Way

As mentioned above, all three new objects – the Account Plan, Account Plan Objective, and Account Plan Objective Measure – are available within the Object Manager for you to further configure based on your stakeholder’s requirements.

Customization, however, does not solely mean creating new fields, validation rules, and customizing layouts. Since all three objects also support triggers, this means that, for example, you could easily build a flow to notify the account team from the related account that a new Account Plan has been created. The same flow could just as easily update the account fields.

Even better, if you are lucky enough and your organization has already purchased the Einstein for Sales add-on, you could easily use the Account Plans related list as a resource in your Prompt Templates for rich grounding. This option can be especially useful in scenarios when multiple Account Plans exist and the account is transitioned to a new account manager. All in all, the sky is the limit when it comes to the number of use cases!

Availability

At this time, Salesforce communicated 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 in late November 2024. This change will apply to Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Einstein 1 Sales editions.

The Buyer Relationship Map, however, was launched in the Summer ‘24 release, so you have a head start in exploring it before Account Plans become available. Familiarize yourself with how it can benefit your sales team!

Salesforce is committed to offering a fully streamlined out-of-the-box experience for account planning, as this step encompasses the bulk of the work account managers do when planning and executing the company’s account-based selling strategies.

While we will see the first iteration of Account Plans, as presented above, going live shortly after Winter ‘25, the enhancements will not stop here. Improvements to this out-of-the-box feature will continue through the next few releases as well. Please note that the features we will refer to below are subject to change, and you should make all purchasing decisions based on readily available features.

  • Account Research: Allows you to summarize strategic account information and subsequently update the Account Plan with a click of a button.
  • Automated Objectives: Enables your team to track their success metrics automatically.
  • Strategic Tracker: Helps you monitor all Account-Plan-related activities for the entire team.

To learn more, check the Dreamforce presentation on Salesforce+.

Summary

Out-of-the-box Account Plans have been a long-awaited functionality, and surely, a lot of Salesforce professionals will dive right in as soon as possible following its release. By removing the need to acquire third-party tools or build a custom solution from scratch, the Account Plans, alongside the customizable metrics and objectives, can supercharge how your team works and further enhance your organization’s account-based selling initiatives.

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.

The Author

Andreea Doroftei

Andreea is a Salesforce Technical Instructor at Salesforce Ben. She is an 18x certified Salesforce Professional with a passion for User Experience and Automation. 

Comments:

    Eraaj Khan
    October 18, 2024 3:41 pm
    Don't know why this feature is least talked or socialized in the salesforce community groups when this is actually an amazing functionality that Salesforce provided with W25 release. Coupled with Buyer Relationship Map, this is great out of the box solution. Strategic Account Planning or Key Account Management or Account Based Selling is a core CRM function that was long missing from Salesforce unless we customize it or leverage with Third-party tool.
    Xander Plain
    October 19, 2024 8:22 am
    Thanks for this informative article. Could you please provide a little more detail on the Account Plan Objective Measure Object and its relationships?
    Ken
    October 22, 2024 10:07 pm
    Agree. Great write up. I do wish there was more details on 'adding a measure'.
    Patrik
    October 28, 2024 6:40 am
    Can someone explain how the Account Plan feature operates for an account that has subordinate child accounts within an Account hierarchy?

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