What is account planning? A definition for technical sales

Short answer: Account planning is deciding, for each account you sell to, whether it fits, who matters, why now, and what you will do next, then writing that down and keeping it current. In technical sales the plan rests on dated public evidence. Account planning software helps you build and update those plans.

Account planning is the work of deciding, for each account you sell to, whether it fits, who matters there, why now, and what you will do next, then writing that down and keeping it current. The written result is an account plan.

That is the whole idea. Most of the confusion comes from the words around it: territory plans, call plans, strategic plans, success plans. This article defines each one in plain terms, shows what a technical seller's plan has to answer, and explains what account planning software should and should not do.

What an account plan answers

A good plan answers six questions about one account. If a line doesn't help answer one of them, leave it out.

• Does it fit? Does the account look like the customers you serve well, and what is the evidence?
• Who matters? Who feels the problem, who owns the team, and who can block the deal?
• Why now? What changed recently, and how old is each fact?
• What don't I know? What are you guessing, and what still has to be found out?
• What next? One action, one person, one date.
• What happened? A dated log, so the plan reflects the last contact and not the first one.

The account plan template turns those questions into seven sections you can copy. The account plan example shows the same sections filled in.

Account planning, territory planning and call planning

The kinds of planning get mixed up because they use the same accounts. They differ in how many accounts they cover and how far ahead they look.

You do them in that order. Territory planning ranks the list, so you know which accounts earn a plan. Account planning writes the plan. Call planning takes one slice of the plan into a meeting; the pre-call brief is a call plan. For the longer-range version, see how to build a strategic account plan.

Why technical sales needs its own kind of plan

Selling to engineering teams changes three things about the plan.

The buyer is several people. The person who tries your product is rarely the person who approves it. A plan for a technical deal has to name the engineer who feels the problem, the owner of the team, and whoever reviews security or architecture. A stakeholder map holds that.

The evidence is public and it ages. Engineers leave traces: job posts, talks, repositories, status pages. Those make good evidence, and they go stale. A plan that says "hiring a reliability engineer" is worth little without the date. The guide to buying signals shows how to read a signal's age.

The stack decides the pitch. What a company already runs changes what you say first. Finding that out is part of planning, and where to find out what tools a company runs covers where the clues are.

What account planning software should do

Account planning software is any tool that helps you build and keep these plans. A spreadsheet counts. A tool earns its place when it takes over the slow parts: ranking a long list, finding the people, and collecting the evidence. Judge it by five things:

• Sources. Can you open the source behind each point?
• Dates. Does each source show when it was published, and does the tool say so when it doesn't know?
• Guesses. Does it separate what it found from what it inferred, and from what you told it?
• People. Does it check that a person still works at the company before showing them?
• Your notes. Can you add what you learned on a call, and does the plan change?

The same five points sit behind what trustworthy account intelligence looks like, which also gives a one-minute test for each. Software should not decide for you which accounts matter to your product. It can rank, and you still own the call. If you are comparing tools, this comparison covers what ZoomInfo, Apollo and Repclose each say they are for.

How to start

1. Rank your accounts. Pick the top ten or twenty. Everything else gets a watch note.
2. Copy the template and fill it in for the first account, using the 15-minute research checklist.
3. Write a next step for each plan. A plan without one is a research file.
4. Review the plans once a week, and log every contact.

Try it on one account

To write your first plan now, use the free account plan generator. It runs in your browser and needs no sign-in.

Where Repclose fits

Repclose is account planning software for sellers of complex software to engineering teams. You upload your accounts and describe who you sell to. It ranks the accounts, lists about 10 people for the top-ranked ones (the top 10 by default), and gives the top 5 a profile check and a short card on why they might care. Each point links to its source, with the publication date where one is available, and a point that is a guess is marked as one. You add your own notes in plain English, and they stay labeled as yours.

See a finished plan in the sample brief, or start with your first 5 plans free.