That roadmap is your Account Plan.
An Account Plan isn’t just a planning tool—it’s your battle map for winning and expanding business with a specific customer or prospect. In this guide, we’ll give you the ultimate account plan template, complete with detailed sections you can fill in, examples of what to include, and best practices for making it work in the real world.
Why You Need an Account Plan
An account plan helps you:
- Understand your customer’s business inside and out.
- Spot opportunities and risks early.
- Tailor your solution to their exact needs.
- Align sales, marketing, and customer success teams around a common strategy.
- Execute a consistent, repeatable sales approach that increases win rates.
The Ultimate Account Plan Template
Below is a comprehensive, ready-to-use structure tailored for B2B sales professionals, SDRs, and BDRs. You can copy and paste it into your CRM, a document, or a spreadsheet—and update it as your account evolves.
1. Account Summary
Capture the essentials so anyone in your team can quickly understand the account.
- Customer Name
- Company Bio: What they do, their mission, market position, type (public/private), year founded, industry, HQ, locations, size.
- Financial Health: Revenue, funding rounds, M&A activity, recent investments.
2. Business Challenges & Opportunities
Identify the problems you can solve—and the growth opportunities you can help them capture.
- Key Challenges/Opportunities: Pain points or major changes impacting the account or industry.
- Impact of Problems: How these challenges affect revenue, cost, efficiency, or competitive position.
- Budget & Resources: Do they have budget allocated or willingness to invest?
- Urgency: How critical is it for them to act now?
3. Solution Fit
Assess whether this account matches your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and how your offering fits.
- Account Fit: Alignment with your ICP, company, products/services.
- Existing Solutions: Current tools/vendors they use to solve the problem.
- SWOT Analysis:
- Strengths: Your advantages.
- Weaknesses: Gaps you need to address.
- Opportunities: Events or needs you can leverage.
- Threats: Competitive or internal risks.
4. Goal, Strategy & Value Proposition
Shape a clear, compelling reason for the account to choose you.
- Account Goal: Your strategic objective for this account.
- Proposed Solution: Tailored to their needs.
- Unique Value Proposition: Why you’re the best choice.
- Key Benefits: Quantifiable ROI, cost savings, revenue growth, efficiency gains.
- Use Cases: Specific ways they’ll apply your solution.
- Differentiation: How you stand out from competitors.
5. SMART Account Goals
Turn strategy into measurable, time-bound outcomes.
- Specific: Exact results they can achieve with your products.
- Measurable: Success metrics and milestones.
- Achievable: Realistic based on resources and timelines.
- Relevant: Directly tied to their challenges and opportunities.
- Time-Bound: Clear deadlines for each phase.
6. Stakeholder Management Plan
Map out the people who influence the buying decision.
- Decision-Makers: Have budget authority and final say.
- Influencers: Can advocate internally.
- Blockers: May resist your solution.
For each, note:
- Name
- Title & Role
- Department
- Background & Experience
- Key Motivations
- Potential Objections
- Engagement Strategy
7. Engagement Strategy
Outline how you’ll connect, influence, and move the deal forward.
- Discovery Plan: Remaining information to uncover & how.
- Demo/POC Strategy: How you’ll prove value.
- Pricing & Negotiation Strategy: Your approach to value-based selling.
- Referral Strategy: Leveraging introductions or champions.
- Content Strategy: Case studies, references, or tailored assets to support the sale.
8. Timeline & Milestones
Track progress at a glance.
- Key Dates: Meetings, demos, proposal deadlines, close date.
- Dependencies: Internal/external factors influencing progress.
9. Resources Needed
Identify what you need to win.
- Internal Resources: Sales engineers, exec sponsors, marketing support.
- External Resources: Partners, consultants.
- Budget: Marketing, travel, PoC costs.
Pro Tips for Making This Template Work
- Keep it dynamic—update as you learn more.
- Share it with your cross-functional team for alignment.
- Use social listening and sales intelligence tools to spot buying signals.
- Focus on quality over quantity—deep planning for top accounts yields better results than surface-level research for many.
⚙️ Like the template and want to use it in a ready to use Account Plan Builder? Here you go:
📄 Prefer a downloadable Word document instead? We got you
Download Ultimate Account Plan Template [MS-Word]
How intellisell can Help You Build Account Plans in Minutes
And finally for the really smart sales professional - Manually researching and filling in this template can take hours. intellisell.ai automates the process—pulling data from LinkedIn, company websites, news sources, and social media—to instantly create a complete account plan with stakeholder maps, buying signals, SWOT analysis, and engagement strategies.
This means you can spend more time selling and less time researching—while still delivering a highly personalized experience for each account.Save me the hours - Sign Me Up (PS: its Free)
FAQs
An account plan is a structured document outlining key information, strategies, and actions for winning and growing a specific account.
Ideally, after every significant account development—such as a new stakeholder, funding event, or strategic shift.
Absolutely—SDRs can use account plans to target high-value accounts more effectively and tailor outreach.
Sales intelligence platforms, CRM systems, LinkedIn, and AI tools like intellisell.ai can automate research and provide actionable insights.
Account planning focuses on sales strategy for a single account, while ABM is a marketing approach targeting a set of high-value accounts.