Stop 2 of 9 · Weekly
The account plan
One named account turned into a plan: services in place, dates, the people, a growth thesis in one sentence and three plays with owners.
The account plan is a weekly artefact, not an annual one
Most account plans are a slide deck written in January and never opened again. Wael's version is one page per account, rebuilt in fifteen minutes whenever something moves, and reviewed by his manager against the same five headings every time. The value is not the document. It is that the document is current when the customer calls.
He runs this on the top twenty from stop 1, one or two a week, until the tier has a live plan each.
The five headings
| Heading | What it has to answer |
|---|---|
| Position | Which services are in place, at how many sites, ending when |
| People | Who decides, who influences, who blocks, who has left |
| Thesis | The one sentence bet, with a date in it |
| Plays | Three moves this quarter, each with an owner and a date |
| Risk | What kills this account, and what you would see first |
The thesis is the heading people skip and the one the manager reads. "Riverside is opening two clinics in Q4 and their current carrier does not serve either address" is a thesis. "Riverside has room to grow" is a wish.
Attached: the account row from my export, the service inventory with end dates, and four quarters of case history for this account: [attach the three files]. Build the account plan under five headings: Position, People, Thesis, Plays, Risk. Position lists every service with sites and end date. People lists each named contact with their role, what they decide and when I last spoke to them, and flags any role with nobody in it. Thesis is one sentence containing a date and a change happening in their business, drawn only from what is in these files. Plays are three moves for this quarter, each with an owner and a target date. Risk names the single thing that loses this account and the first signal I would see. Mark anything you inferred rather than read as inferred. Produce no rates, totals or savings.
Reading the history for the thesis
Ticket and case history is the part of the CRM nobody mines. Four quarters of it tells you where the service actually hurts, and that is usually where the next order lives. Three failovers at one site is a conversation about diversity. A run of after-hours voice tickets is a conversation about managed voice.
Here are four quarters of case history for this account: [paste or attach the case export]. Group the cases by site and by service, then tell me the three patterns that a customer would recognise if I said them out loud. For each pattern give me the case count, the months it clusters in, and the one question I should ask the IT director about it. Do not recommend a product yet. I want the patterns first.
Where the plan goes
Back into Salesforce as the account plan field, and into the Carrier Project as a file named for the account. Both, not one. The Project copy is what makes the next stop's stakeholder messages sound like somebody who knows this account, and the Salesforce copy is what survives Wael being on holiday.
Here is the account plan: [paste the plan]. Compress it to under 200 words for the Salesforce account plan field, keeping the thesis sentence intact and every date. Drop the reasoning, keep the conclusions. Then give me a second version of six bullets for the manager's review, where each bullet is a play with its owner and date.