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More times than not, reps frantically assemble account plans at the start of the year, before an executive business review or whenever leadership asks for them. Knocking out these plans is often treated like a compliance exercise—something to hastily get out of the way (and forget) before diving back into deals.
But here's what account planning should actually be: a way to enforce consistent, always-on value selling.
Account planning is the foundation that transforms your reps from order-takers into trusted advisors who anticipate customer needs, navigate complex buying committees, and position themselves as indispensable partners (rather than just another vendor).
Today's buyers don't want another product pitch. They want partners who genuinely understand their business and help them achieve their goals. The sales teams that win are the ones having strategic conversations about the customer's future, not just tactical discussions about features and pricing.
As a result, the best account planning isn't treated like a compliance task. It's an ongoing strategic process that changes with your customers' needs and your product's evolving capabilities.
That's exactly where Accord comes in. Our AI-powered Playbooks transform account planning from static busywork into a competitive advantage that up-levels your reps into the strategic partners your customers actually want and drivers of their own pipeline.
How Accord Helps You Build AE-Driven Pipeline
Playbooks That Enforce “What Excellent Looks Like”
With Accord, sales leaders create custom Playbooks that become the step-by-step workspace where account planning happens.
Every required action and best practice is laid out in sequence. From initial research to stakeholder mapping to value hypothesis development.
Reps don't have to guess what excellence looks like; they follow a proven methodology that guides them through each phase of strategic account planning.
These Playbooks integrate seamlessly with your Salesforce Account Objects, eliminating duplicate work and maintaining data consistency for your team. Account plans aren't separate documents living in isolation. They're embedded in your daily sales workflow. Update something in Accord, and it automatically syncs with Salesforce.
Better Collaboration Across Your GTM Team
Account planning doesn’t happen in a silo—it’s a team effort. Your reps need support from BDRs, marketing, exec sponsors, CSMs, etc.
Accord’s Playbooks enable this collaboration, seamlessly. Clarify who owns what by assigning each step in your account planning Playbook to specific team members.
BDRs handle initial research and stakeholder identification, AEs own account objectives and executive meetings, Marketing creates targeted content and ads, while executive sponsors manage C-level relationships.
Every team member gets full visibility into each other's work throughout the account planning process.
Plus, handoffs become actual steps built into your Playbook. Instead of hoping context gets transferred, you can require formal transition steps where each team documents their insights before the next takes ownership.
This creates true account-based orchestration where every team member works from the same strategic plan. No more dropped context or duplicated effort.
Real-Time Execution Scoring that Drives Accountability
Accord automatically tracks and scores completion rates for each step in your account planning Playbooks.
Sales managers get instant visibility into which reps are following the process and which accounts have comprehensive strategic plans versus surface-level documentation.
This creates a feedback loop where reps can see exactly where their account planning needs improvement, while managers can coach specific gaps rather than giving vague guidance about 'better planning.'
Hours of Research Saved by Embedded AI
Traditional account planning requires extensive manual research: analyzing company financials, mapping organizational structures, researching competitors, and identifying key business initiatives. Incredibly time consuming.
Accord Intelligence is AI built into your account planning Playbooks. It synthesizes three sources of information to help your reps generate high-quality, detailed account plans:
- Playbook context added by your team (company descriptions, value props, differentiators)
- Information in each individual Accord (stakeholders, notes, steps)
- Third-party data (publicly available company information, news, articles, etc.)
This enables reps to ask smarter questions that demonstrate genuine business understanding.
🎥 Watch how one of our reps, Mo, prompts Accord Intelligence to build a hyper-detailed account plan:
➡️ Get the Accord Intelligence prompts that Mo uses to build detailed account plans.
Every Stakeholder Mapped & Accounted for
Missing a key stakeholder can make a deal drag out across months (or worst scenario, kill it entirely) when an unknown decision-maker suddenly emerges in the final stages. B2B purchases now involve 6-10 stakeholders on average, and manually mapping these relationships is time-intensive and often incomplete.
Accord enables your team to map out key stakeholders as part of their account research (no extra tools needed).
Coming soon: Accord Intelligence will analyze account data and organizational structure to recommend stakeholders your reps might have overlooked, before it's too late.
Internal Account Plans Become Mutual Action Plans
The best account plans become shared frameworks that align your team with your buyer's team. With Accord, your team has the option of transforming internal strategy into mutual action plans that customers can directly access and collaborate on.
Share timelines, success metrics, commitments and supporting content with key stakeholders. When customers contribute to the planning process, they become invested in mutual success—shifting your reps from vendor to strategic partner.
Account Plans that Stay Current, Not Forgotten
Unlike static documents that become outdated the moment they're created, account plans in Accord remain live and current throughout the entire customer journey. The account plan is simple to update as new upsell opportunities emerge or stakeholders change.
This creates a living, breathing roadmap that evolves throughout your entire relationship with each customer, and leaders get real-time visibility into strategic progress across all accounts, while reps focus on execution rather than documentation.
Transforming Account Planning for Your Team
The reality is that most sales teams know account planning is important—they just struggle to make it stick. The key is building it into your regular workflow rather than treating it as a separate project.
The optimal time to build your strategy for next year isn't during the first couple weeks of the year. It's now, when you have the bandwidth to think strategically about your most important accounts.
Start with your highest-priority accounts. Pick 3-5 accounts that represent the biggest growth opportunities and focus on building comprehensive plans for those first. Expanding to more accounts becomes much easier once your team sees the impact on pipeline, deal velocity and win rates.
The most successful teams we work with treat account planning as an ongoing conversation, not a document. They update plans after every significant interaction, adjust strategies based on new intelligence, and use their account insights to drive better discovery calls and more strategic conversations.
Account planning works best when it becomes part of how your team thinks about every account, not just something they do when reminded.
Ready to see how Accord can transform your account planning process? Get started by talking to our sales team.
