Last week, my colleague Niro mentioned how we created Salesforce for Miro app and the Sales Account Planning with Salesforce template after working to solve one sales team’s problems.

After working with the sales team, we learned that account planning is vital for sales teams. It helps them understand their accounts, align resources, and create clear strategies to grow and retain key relationships. As a key player in the EPD (Engineering, Product, and Development) area, we realized that this sales account planning process could benefit from the Agile methodology that we’re familiar with.

Here’s a quick rundown on Agile sprints, which originated from software development: They are organized, time-boxed work periods designed to help teams make steady progress, stay flexible, work together, and keep improving. Sales team can mirror the iterative nature of sprints by breaking down sales goals into manageable tasks such as weekly targets or pipeline reviews.

Just as Agile emphasizes flexibility to adapt to changing priorities, sales teams can refine strategies based on customer interactions and market trends. Collaboration thrives through frequent team meetings and problem-solving sessions, similar to daily stand-ups or sprint reviews. And finally, retrospectives in Agile align with performance reviews in sales, enabling continuous improvement through analyzing successes and setbacks.

So, based on this, we designed one area of our Miro template to serve as a strategic roadmap for sales teams. Here’s the section of the template where stakeholders can have an idea of the roadmap for key accounts with one quick glance:

Here’s a quick explanation of each column and how it helps with account planning:

• Deal stage: What stage the account is at.

• Opportunities: What accounts to prioritize for greatest growth

• Next step and Blockers: What to do to address customer's needs, goals, and the challenges to close the deal.

• Next step, Internal owner, External Owner and Do you need help?: Align work internally between departments like sales, marketing, and other stakeholders.

• Health status and Blockers: Identify risks or gaps so that sales teams can address them before they derail an opportunity.

However, as we only have insights from one sales team’s workflow, we wonder if we’re missing something.

For those of you who regularly do sales account planning:

• What else do you see as part of the process? Has the framework you’ve used worked for your team or does it improvement?

• If you're using a Miro board for account planning, what elements do you add? What has been helpful, and what do you feel is often missed?

It’ll be great to hear your feedback if there are other areas we can cover with our template.