This article covers best practices and tips for taking your Accord playbooks from 9/10 → 10/10.
Your playbooks are the foundation of the Accords you’ll create to engage with your customers – so it’s important to set your deals or implementations up for success with a solid playbook.
Here are seven best practices that will take your Accord playbooks from 9/10 → 10/10.
1. Keep it simple!
The goal is to capture everything your customer needs to know to complete their journey – without overwhelming them.
a) Aim for 3x3 to 3x5 (3 stages with 3-5 steps each).
Tip: use subtasks within each step to help you further break down larger tasks.
b) Include a 1-line step description on each step.
Learn more about building the Next Steps page in your Accord playbooks.
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2. Draft a compelling summary
The Summary page is the #1 reason your buyer will engage with and invite other stakeholders to your Accord.
Think of your Summary as a running doc where you'll add information gained during discovery and throughout the sales process. You'll align with your buyer on their pain points and how your solution solves that pain, arming them with the necessary information to sell on your behalf.
a) The Summary should tell a compelling story about the value your solution can bring to the customer.
b) Your champion should be excited to share it with their senior leadership.
c) It should answer all the questions your champion will need answered when sharing this information with their team, while still being concise (try to keep it one page or less).
3. Create a Recommended Timeline
It's important to uncover a compelling event and do a work-back plan with every customer, so you can control the deal or implementation timeline.
a) Pick a milestone (usually the day the customer gets to value).
b) Work backwards and assign relative dates to key steps in each stage leading up to the milestone.
4. Guide your customer to value, not their signature
Your customer doesn’t care about signing the deal – they care about solving their problems.
a) Orient your Mutual Action Plan around a go-live, value, or success date, not a close date!
b) Even if you’re not handing off the MAP to your CS team, include an onboarding or implementation stage so your buyer can see what the post-sale process includes.
5. Assign an owner to every step
While many stakeholders will be involved in the deal, you are making a commitment with your champion, and holding them accountable.
a) Most steps should be owned by you (the AE / CSM).
b) The rest should be owned by the champion.
6. Organize & share helpful resources
Along with the Summary, Resources are a common reason buyers will engage with your Accord. Make life easy for them by centralizing everything they need in the Resources tab.
a) Include every resource to be shared during the process.
b) Organize resources into folders based on resource type.
c) Pin the most important resources & folders to the top. (Tip: this may change throughout your deal or implementation.)
d) Connect resources to the steps where they belong.
Reminder: you’ll also get notified when buyers access resources in Accord!
7. Define key stakeholders
Use the Team tab in Accord to uncover all the stakeholders who need to be involved for the deal or implementation to go successfully.
a) Represent the stakeholders who need to be involved by creating placeholders for them.
b) Refer to stakeholders by their title within the organization or their role within the deal (eg. CRO vs Exec Sponsor).