What are Account-Planning Tools?

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Account planning tools (APTs) help B2B sales organizations improve sales outcomes such as revenue growth and customer retention throughout the customer life cycle. APTs help sales organizations in two unique and complementary ways. First, they improve seller precision and effectiveness by synthesizing information to provide a consistent, enhanced analysis of large, complex, multifaceted accounts. Second, they improve seller scale and efficiency by aggregating data from multiple accounts, enabling sellers to identify and prioritize expansion, upsell and cross-sell opportunities as well as risks to customer retention.
Today’s B2B buying groups are often made up of many diverse stakeholders, all with their own varied perspectives on the proposed purchase. As a result, sales teams face exponentially increasing complexity when retaining and expanding relationships with existing customers, causing CSOs to struggle to drive value from account planning initiatives with their teams. APTs offer sales organizations an opportunity to improve customer outcomes while supporting their teams tasked with engaging complex customer groups.
Account planning is often static, done once a year and solely owned and completed by sellers tasked with retaining and growing accounts. As such, account plans do not reflect the evolving partnership with the customer or capture knowledge from other customer-facing functions as they engage with the account. Account managers also face difficulties in regularly updating disparate systems not embedded in daily workflows. They struggle to have full visibility into the account itself, the customer stakeholders involved, the additional cross or upsell opportunities that exist and changing customer priorities, jeopardizing retention and growth outcomes.

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