What is account planning?
Account planning is deciding how to help a customer reach a goal and how your team will earn the business. A useful account plan connects what the buyer wants to the people, decisions, and actions needed to get there. It gives the sales team a shared plan for the next conversation and the work that follows.How to use the account planning template in Excel or Google Sheets
- Import the blank CSV and use one sheet per account.
- Add the company, account owner, planning period, and next review date.
- Write the customer’s goal. If you have not confirmed it with the buyer, mark it
hypothesis. - Add the people involved, what you know about the decision, and the questions still open.
- Give the next action an owner and due date. Copy rows as you need them.
What should a sales account plan include?
A plan needs enough detail for another rep to understand the account and pick up the next action. HubSpot’s account planning template covers initiatives, relationships, buying process, risks, and actions. Atlassian’s guide also includes a review date and actions with owners and deadlines. This template keeps those basics together with the source behind each finding.
Use
confirmed for something a source supports, hypothesis for an idea to test, and unknown when you do not have an answer. A buyer confirming a problem does not confirm budget. Keep the question open until someone answers it.
Sales account plan example
In this fictional example, AE Maya Chen sells software that assigns incoming leads to sales reps. Her prospect is Example Labs. Maya wants to agree on a pilot by November 6, but the buyer has not accepted that date. The team will review the plan on October 16.
The completed download includes these items plus contact and risk rows. All people, conversations, and records are fictional. Use it to see how a plan can be useful before every question has an answer.
Map the people involved in the purchase
A relationship map should tell the team who matters and how to reach them. A title alone does not tell you who controls budget or will argue for your product. In the example, Riley has spoken with Maya and offered an introduction to Jordan. That makes Riley an engaged contact. Maya still needs to learn whether Riley will support the pilot internally. Jordan may evaluate the technical setup, but the team has not spoken with Jordan yet. The budget owner is unknown. Write the next step plainly: “Maya asks Riley to introduce Jordan.” Update the map after the meeting, when you know more about Jordan’s role.Account research vs. account planning
Account research gathers information about a company. Account planning turns it into decisions and actions. Research might find that a prospect is hiring an operations team. The plan turns that into a question: “Will the new team own lead routing?” After the call, add the buyer’s answer and adjust the next step. For an existing customer, start with the outcome they bought, how they use the product, and any unresolved problems. An expansion plan needs to account for work you still owe the customer.Keep your account plan current with Deepline
An account plan goes stale when new calls, contacts, and company changes never reach it. Deepline provides research and enrichment tools that your agent can connect to a spreadsheet or a custom account planning app. Your team sets the fields and decides which changes to accept. Attention’s customer story describes an internal account based marketing system that uses Deepline enrichment, technology data, and profile signals in Snowflake. The team uses it to check which people it knows across a buying committee. It is one example of using outside data in a company’s own sales app. Noah Adelstein’s report on Lovable’s sales intelligence system describes keeping the customer’s statement and timestamp behind a proposed deal update. The article is sponsored by Attention. Apply the same idea to your account plan: keep the buyer’s words beside the change you propose.
Show the old value, the suggested change, and its source. Let the rep accept or edit it. Keep their notes on refresh, and show when a lookup fails instead of making old information look new.
Start with either of these public workflows:
- Account signals workflow: turns dated company updates you supply into suggested questions and actions.
- Sales meeting prep workflow: uses meeting details and past conversations you supply to draft an agenda and questions.
Make this work for our account planning process. Ask what we sell and which fields our reps need. Use our CRM notes and account research to suggest updates. Keep the source beside each change, and let the rep check it before saving.The Deepline quickstart helps the builder connect the tools. Keep credentials on the server and restrict CRM notes to the people who can already access them. See internal GTM apps for other ways to use the same data in a sales app.