Account planning is one of the more tedious and time consuming things that salespeople do. This involves researching about the company you want to get in front of, understanding their priorities, then building a point of view on why your solution can address their needs and also manually updating tools like Quip, Altify, Prolifiq. All in all, not something salespeople love. Add in this stat that only 39% of a salesrep's time is spent selling and we have an opportunity with GenAI to provide some time back for the reps.
A typical account planning process looks like this -
We are talking about spending 8 hrs on average per account. While GenAI won't address each step in this chain, if we can reduce steps 1 and 2 from 5 hrs to 2 hrs, that is a ~35% reduction in time spent account planning.
To test this hypothesis I have been playing around with ChatGPT and recording some videos to show the possibility. My first attempt was a very rough prototype that I used to validate if this was even possible. We have all heard that ChatGPT only has data till 2022. If that is the case, how do I do an account plan based on current priorities?
What I realized was that, yes ChatGPT could help. You can upload a pdf of the latest information and it will query that and summarize the information you need. There was friction in the process (challenges with uploading the pdf etc. which would require effort that most people won't do).
My second attempt, was much better. What you need is a ChatGPT+ license. This is $20 per month and the process is as below.
If you want to see this process in play, check out this video. Not only can you do the research but you can also output it as ppt or pdf, so you save all that cut and paste time.
As someone that likes using what I build (not just prototypes for testing), I decided to use this process with a couple different accounts. Typically when I do account planning, I look at sections 1, 1A, 7, 7A, 8, 10,11 of a 10K. Often there is enough information here that helps me come up with a point of view on how my solution can address the company's strategic priorities. This worked for Workiva. For larger companies, this is much harder. So this time I uploaded the Analyst Day Presentation and this has a lot more information on their Go-To-Market priorities.
With more details on their Go-To-Market, I decided to not just ask ChatGPT to summarize their priorities but to also come up with a POV on how our solution could more directly address this, with details and also with measurable outcomes. Lastly I was able to output this entire POV as pdf.
Here is a video that talks through this process. Hopefully this article gives all salespeople and CSMs out there enough context so they can start doing this more and experiment. I feel I am just scratching the surface with the possibilities.