Most Customer Success professionals are familiar with success plans, but internal-facing account plans? Not as much.

Where a success plan is a customer-facing document that explains how your business will help a customer achieve their goals with the products or services they’ve purchased, account plans are behind-the-scenes playbooks that are only for your teammates’ eyes. These documents clearly and succinctly outline what your goals as an organization are for each account.

In other words, an account plan is an internal resource that answers this question: “What are we trying to achieve, both right now and in the future, with this customer, and how are we making that happen?” Done well, account plans bring alignment to entire organizations, and by proxy, satisfaction to customers.

Do Account Plans Actually Make a Difference? 

Now, I bet I know what you’re thinking: Do CSMs really need another thing to create, update, and maintain quarter after quarter? No, not if they don’t save revenue that would otherwise be lost. Great account planning isn’t busywork; it’s strategic and one of the most valuable things a CSM can do.

Case in point, one of the CS professionals I chatted with for this article said that last quarter, she created an account plan for a slightly-on-the-rocks, high-value account. It directly led to a growth in trust within the account to retain their business. Someone who she reviewed the account plan with internally knew a POC at the customer’s organization, and because of that, they were able to set up a call, smooth some ruffled feathers, and restore trust. This customer is healthier and happier today than they otherwise would’ve been without an internal account plan.

 So, let’s talk about what makes a worthwhile account plan that gets results like that. Treat this article like a conglomeration of the top advice we’ve heard rather than a step-by-step guide to drafting an account plan. 

Here are the experts from our Success Network I leaned on for this article: 

• Virginia D. Bloom, Manager of Customer Experience at Aclaimant 
• Diana De Jesus, Founder at Strategic CS Labs
• Mimi Marani, Senior Customer Success Manager at Vitally
• Sarah Cunningham-Scharf, Head of Customer Success at Great Question

#1. Involve Other Departments

This first piece of advice is from Virginia: Don’t create your account plans in a vacuum. “Make sure you involve Sales, Implementation, and anyone else ‘upstream’ from you in creating even the first iteration,” she said. Folks from these teams often have more knowledge than you do on the “why” behind specific customer goals because they heard about their needs during the sales and initial building phases of the customer journey. 

Especially if there have been stakeholder or contact changes, or if you have a long implementation and onboarding, the customer may have lost track of why they are doing all of this in the first place, but your counterparts can help. 

Watch this video for ideas on improving cross-departmental collaboration in your account planning and other CS motions.

#2. Clarify If You’re Creating Living Documents or Picture-in-Time Plans

Next up, some sound advice from Mimi: The best account plans are standardized across CS organizations. Everyone uses the same template, and they either update the fields in that document each month or quarter and treat it as a living document, or everyone creates net-new plans from a blank template each month or quarter to create a moment-in-time glimpse of what’s happening right then.

In her words, “There’s no right or wrong way to set up your account plans — just be thoughtful about establishing them as either living or point-in-time documents. The drawback to point-in-time documents is that you have to redo the doc every single time, but the drawback to a living document is that you can’t easily see what the plan was in the past with that customer.”

Being able to see your historical answers to “Would this customer renew today?” or “What are you working on with this customer?” is valuable, but so is having a living document that populates fields based on information in other places. Choose what makes the most sense for your book of business. (Pro tip: Whether you use them for account plans or not, auto-populating fields are super handy for CS teams. Keep that in mind if you’re evaluating your current software or searching for a new Customer Success Platform.) 

#3. Assign Owners to Each Goal or Metric in the Plan

The best account plans have a few, clear goals, each with customer stakeholders and internal individuals tied to them; not just for the tasks that need to happen to achieve goals, but for the people who are ultimately responsible for the success or failure of that goal. This allows CS leaders to quickly pivot and reprioritize if they lose a stakeholder or CSM and to prioritize work based on who they really need to keep happy. 

Virginia makes a great point here: “If you have a stakeholder who becomes disengaged [but you have clear goals in an account plan for that person], you know what their specific priorities are and how to reel them back into the conversation.”

#4. Make Your Account Plan Helpful for YOU

If you’re reading this as a CSM, you know better than anyone that you’re the expert on your accounts; you’re more in the loop than anyone about what’s going on in each relationship. Therefore, you should lead the way in the creation (and execution) of an account plan, and you need to make sure the information it includes is helpful to you so you can be proactive vs. reactive in your work. 

Likely, this means your account plan is succinct, scannable, and according to Diana de Jesus, quick at answering these questions:

• What do I know about this customer today? Who are the stakeholders? What are their goals? How’d they become a customer? What came up in commercial conversations pre-sale? How did implementation go?
• What do I not know? What would I like to know that I plan to ask about?
• What are my ultimate goals for this account? What do I want to accomplish personally with them?

For example, if you have a churn risk account, your account plan should capture why they’re a churn risk, a list of questions you want to find out the answer to this month or quarter, and have a goal of “retain them” rather than “land a massive upsell.” 

#5. Include a Classic SWOT Analysis

SWOT analyses are a quintessential business tool, and they’re perfect for account plans. Identifying a customer’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats isn’t flashy or exciting, but as Virginia says, “It’s so dang helpful!” 

You and your team get to see very plainly what the barriers are to achieving your goals and what strengths you can leverage in your plans. You can even use it to pinpoint goals your customer should have so you can really be their expert partner and make thoughtful recommendations for ways they can better leverage your products or services.

#6. Design an “Account Map” for Team Alignment 

“From a sales or AM perspective, the most important part of an account plan is the account map,” says Sarah. For her, that means thinking through and answering the following questions:

• Who have we already sold to and onboarded?
• Who else do we know at the organization that would benefit from our tool or products or services?
• Have we been introduced?
• What are the use cases that would be most beneficial to each of these other teams?

Since different teams or departments will have different needs, each of these relationships must be treated differently. As Sarah explains, “Without an identified map to understand the dependencies and connections between different teams, you run the risk of crossing wires or angering a key point of contact by reaching out to someone they don't want you to.”

To that last point, you should always be sure to let your initial champion know when you're planning to reach out to others in the organization. “You wouldn’t want to step on their toes or follow a process that could have negative blowback on them,” Sarah says.

Final Advice: Spend Time Account Planning to Skip Time Scrambling

If you want to start building account plans for your book of business (or re-commit to account planning regularly), steal a page from Mimi’s book: 

• Set aside one day a month. No meetings, no email, no distractions.
• Go through your book of business account by account.some text
  • Note: That may or may not be reasonable for the number of accounts you’re in charge of. If it’s not, focus on your top 10 highest-value accounts.
• Create or update each account plan based on the past month of work together. Set aggressive, but attainable goals. 
• Present your account plans to your manager, someone from Sales or Account Management, and any other departmental leaders you feel could help you execute and enhance your plan.
• Repeat each month or quarter.

Best of luck account planning! If you want to learn more, don’t hesitate to connect with Virginia, Diana, Mimi, or Sarah on LinkedIn or to peruse our Success Network for podcast episodes, blogs, blueprints, and more resources to support your work.

—

Vitally is a fan-favorite Customer Success Platform that makes it simple for CSMs to create meaningful, effective account plans (and do lots of other things, too). Take a tour of the platform or schedule time with our team today.