A comprehensive account management platform built natively on Sales Cloud for a global engineering services firm — where 150 strategic account managers serve automotive, aerospace and industrial product clients with fewer, deeper engagements across 12 countries.
Countries on one platform
Strategic accounts under plan
Cross-sell pipeline growth in 12 months
Less manual account-prep time
A single Salesforce-native rhythm that turns strategic accounts from yearly slideware into a living operating system across 12 countries.
Hover any pillar to see what lives inside a single strategic account page.
The client is a global engineering services company with a 150-member strategic account management team across 12 countries. Their customers are automotive, aerospace and industrial product firms — fewer in number but far deeper in engagement. Account growth involved not just account managers but design engineers, program managers, bid teams and delivery pods. Because they provide design services, the pre-bid stage demanded heavy involvement from multiple groups. Program managers held critical account knowledge and insights, yet there was no unified view. Account plans lived in slides, contact maps in spreadsheets, seeded ideas in email threads, and budgets in finance systems no one opened. There was no single system of record for how a strategic account was being grown.
We designed and built a Strategic Account Management (SAM) application natively on Sales Cloud — unified with the client's opportunity, delivery, marketing, and finance data. Every strategic account got a living workspace covering plan, people, plays, money and risk, with AI surfacing the next move.
Sales Cloud was extended with custom objects for Account Plans, Contact Maps, Seeding Ideas, Cross-Sell Plays, Investment Ledger and Risks. Marketing Cloud Account Engagement powered the ABM journeys. Einstein delivered forecasting and next-best-action. Agentforce + a news-ingestion service converted external signals into prescriptive tasks for the account team.
A single canvas per strategic account capturing vision, white-space, SWOT, share-of-wallet and 1-3 year growth thesis — owned by the account lead and reviewed in QBRs.
Org-chart visualisation with decision-makers, influencers, blockers, champions and economic buyers — including relationship strength scoring and red-zone alerts when key contacts leave.
Role-based touch cadences (CXO, LoB heads, procurement, technical) with auto-generated next-touch tasks, meeting prompts and quarterly executive sync rhythms.
ABM journeys synced with Marketing Cloud Account Engagement — bespoke content tracks, 1:1 microsites, intent-data triggers and joint sales-marketing scorecards per account.
A kanban of seeded ideas per account with hypothesis, value driver, sponsor, maturity stage and conversion-to-opportunity tracking — so seeding becomes measurable, not anecdotal.
Competitor footprint per account, displacement plans, battlecards, win/loss reasons and share-shift goals — visible to the account team and exec sponsors.
Service-line × account heat-map showing penetration, cross-sell whitespace, and quarter-on-quarter movement with owners, target dates and revenue targets per play.
Captures every executive sponsor touch — KVP and customer leadership — with cadence rules, escalations and a visible heat-map of leadership engagement health.
Plan-driven tasks (not just opportunity tasks) with weekly progress updates, blockers, asks and a rolling narrative timeline auto-summarised for QBRs.
Account-level risks (relationship, delivery, commercial, competitive) with mitigation owners, plus nurture plans for dormant or at-risk accounts with re-engagement triggers.
Budget to manage and grow each account — events, travel, executive time, marketing spend, pre-sales hours — tracked against actuals with ROI per account.
Revenue, margin, share-of-wallet and CSAT targets per account with monthly actuals, variance, and predictive close projections.
Cross-functional pod per account — sales, delivery, CSM, SME, exec sponsor, finance — with roles, RACI, and rotation history captured in CRM.
Einstein-powered account forecasting, propensity scores per cross-sell play, and next-best-action recommendations surfaced in the account home page.
PO register, contract milestones, renewal dates, burn-down vs commitments and revenue-recognition view — tied to opportunities and delivery projects.
Skills required to grow each account (industry, tech, language), gaps in the current pod, and training/hiring plans owned by practice leads.
Daily news, filings and social signals per account, summarised by AI and converted into suggested actions — congratulatory note, meeting request, risk flag or new play.
Time-zone aware collaboration across 12-country sales pods, with bid-support SME marketplace, follow-the-sun activity feeds and a single global account view.
Custom objects for Account Plan, Contact Map, Relationship Strength, Seeding Idea, Cross-Sell Play, Investment Ledger, Risk Register, PO/Contract — all hung off the Account record with Lightning App pages per persona (Account Lead, Exec Sponsor, CSM).
Per-account ABM journeys, 1:1 microsites, engagement scoring rolled up to the Account Plan, and intent signals creating tasks for the account lead.
Account-level forecasting, next-best-action recommendations, propensity-to-buy per cross-sell play, and an Agentforce assistant that drafts QBR narratives and meeting prep briefs.
Daily ingestion of news, earnings, leadership changes and filings per account, summarised and posted to the account feed with one-click actions — congratulate, schedule, flag risk, or open a play.
Two-way sync of budgets, actual spend, POs, invoiced revenue and margin per account so the team sees true investment-vs-return without leaving Salesforce.
SME marketplace with skills, availability and time-zones so any country pod can pull the right experts into a strategic pursuit within hours.
Instead of bolting on a separate account-planning tool, KVP made strategic account management a first-class citizen inside Salesforce — connected to opportunities, marketing, delivery, finance and AI. Account leaders stopped maintaining a parallel universe of slides and started running their accounts from a single system.