Follow these 5 best practices to easily set and enforce your Sales / Success process, and ensure your standards are met.
Key Takeaways
- Adoption: It Starts With You
- Customize your Dashboard
- How to Read an Accord
- Use Accord During Deal Reviews.
- Continuous Iteration & Improving Your Process
1. Adoption: It Starts With You
Adoption starts and ends with the front-line manager.
The first few Accords will feel awkward but quickly become a valued tool in your and your team's tool belt. If you don't get your team over this hump they will not take the plunge.
Ensure your team knows exactly when an Accord is required. There can not be any confusion over when an Accord should be introduced, and what deals need an Accord.
To effectively create the process change you must bake Accord into your management process: including, weekly team meetings, deal reviews, and one-on-ones.
2. Customize your Dashboard
The Accords dashboard gives you a 10,000 foot view of your team’s Accords.
Fine-tune this page to get a quick overview of your team’s Accords.
We recommend creating a custom view for your team, and adding a few filters to quickly understand how each of your rep’s deals are progressing. Be sure to configure the columns you want, as well as the filters you need.
Once this main view is set you can filter in and out each AE / CSM during one-on-ones and deal reviews.
3. How to Read an Accord
Accord helps you set your Sales and Success standards and you want to ensure your reps are following the process. Your goal as a Manager is to ensure the process is being followed and Accord makes this easy.
A few things to think about when viewing an Accord:
- Dates and Step Owners
- Have dates been selected – have owners been assigned? Specifically the milestone step, and upcoming steps.
- Stage appropriate customization of the Accord.
- Your process probably involves some early customization of the Accord – whether it is the Summary or Next Steps or milestone date.
- Execution Score
- Which Execution Criteria have been completed? Which Execution Criteria have yet to be marked as complete?
- Customer engagement
- How many clients have been invited vs. accepted. If you have a late stage deal and no customer has accepted that signals weak buy-in on the process.
- The Team page will tell you who has been invited, who has accepted, and the last time they have been in your Accord.
- You can also view the Engagement page to see what your customers are doing in your Accord.
4. Use Accord During Deal Reviews
Since Accords are shared with customers, you get an objective view into each deal that is not possible without Accord. And it’s customer validated!
During deal reviews have your AEs / CSMs walk you through the Accord. Understanding the narrative of each deal helps you to understand if your standards are being followed, and see how clients are interacting.
If it’s not easy for your rep to explain or convey the narrative of the deal, how will your customers understand?
Pro tip: you can leave internal comments on steps that only your team will see – these are called Discussions. This allows you to get contextual information and share feedback on each Step if you wish.
5. Continuously Iterate and Improve Your Playbook
We encourage teams to aim for 80% completion of their Playbooks when launching a new process. This means they will not be perfect to begin with. And that is okay.
Encourage your reps to share feedback around how the Playbook can better fit your process or become more inspectable.
Share this feedback with your Playbook owner regularly. Something is wrong if the Playbook is not updated weekly when a new process is launched.
Bonus: Following an Accord
For your largest deals, you can follow an Accord and get all notifications sent directly to your inbox.
This will allow you to see how your customers are engaging with the Accord and how your reps are working the deal.
Additional Resources
Check out 5 Accord Best Practices (AEs & CSMs) for more tactical tips on how your team should be using Accord throughout their Deals.