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Account Team Alignment with Coda AI
How to use Coda AI to drive expansion within new accounts
Account Team Alignment Template
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How to use Coda AI to drive expansion within new accounts

Use this doc as inspiration to eliminate friction in account transitions
Kay Diaz-Ferrigno
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Jason Allenstein
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This 📖 10 minute read 📖 is meant to be ✨inspirational✨. Learn how to modify this doc for your account teams’ flow with help from your Coda Account Team!
➡️ Check out the template here
Account Team Alignment Template
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In the ever-evolving landscape of B2B SaaS, where competition is fierce and success hinges on effective teamwork, one aspect often overlooked is the crucial importance of account team alignment. Just as in theater, where a well-coordinated team can make all the difference between a standing ovation and tomatoes thrown on stage, a harmonized account team is critical to closing more business and setting customers up for success.
As with every framework, however, there are challenges to planning and executing this well. Use this doc as a guide to help set your account teams up for success with account transitions.

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Current Challenges:

Complex Sales Cycles: B2B SaaS sales cycles are intricate, involving multiple stakeholders and lengthy decision-making processes. Misalignment within the account team can lead to confusion, delays, and missed opportunities.
Evolving Customer Needs: With customer demands constantly changing, it is imperative that account teams adapt quickly. Lack of alignment can result in delivering mismatched solutions or failing to meet evolving expectations.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Successful B2B SaaS companies require seamless collaboration among various departments, such as sales, marketing, and customer success. Misalignment can hamper coordination, leading to inefficiencies and customer dissatisfaction.

As an industry, we’ve landed on the alignment meeting to:

Establish a shared vision and common goals for the account team. It ensures that everyone understands the broader objectives and is working towards the same endpoint.
Communication and Information Sharing: Through open dialogue, team members can exchange valuable insights and information, aligning their understanding of customer requirements, challenges, and expectations.
Role Clarity and Coordination: An alignment meeting clarifies individual roles and responsibilities, promoting better coordination within the team. It helps prevent duplication of efforts and ensures that each team member knows their specific contribution towards achieving shared objectives.
Strategy Alignment: The meeting enables the account team to align their strategies and approaches. It fosters consensus on the best course of action, ensuring consistent messaging and a well choreographed “dance” when engaging with clients.


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Although we recognize the importance of an alignment meeting, the work to make it happen is often manual and time consuming, with Coda we can ease that pain and keep account teams moving to hit their next account cue. 🎹

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Let’s make alignment easier by taking account handoffs to the next level using the Salesforce pack ☁️ and ✨Coda AI ✨.

Jump to the template
here
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. Keep reading to get a breakdown of how this doc works.


The Pack Card

Pack Cards allows Packs, like the
Salesforce pack
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, to present data in a visual and engaging format. Paste your SFDC opportunity link or ID into the card and watch your doc write it self! Note that every Salesforce instance is different, so you will need to update the template to accommodate your team’s unique Salesforce fields. Check out our
dynamic Salesforce Pack documentation
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to sync in your own custom objects.
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AI Summary

One way to use AI in coda is right on the document canvas. A magic canvas block like the one below lets you combine natural language prompts with other context in your doc - like other pages, tables or even formulas.
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Getting ready for the meeting:

As you may have noticed, with the AI summary and the Salesforce pack card pulling everything into one place, there’s not a whole lot left to do before your alignment meeting. Before, you may have had to copy the account information from several different places for folks to review, now it’s easy breezy and beautiful, just like your account notes. 😉
#r1
Billing Terms
Amount
What did they purchase?
Product Management
Close Date
Renewal Date

SPICED

Situation
Pain
Impact
Critical Event
Decision Making Criteria
Other Details
Competitor
Mutual Action Plan
1 of 1
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During your meeting:

Run through the discussion topics below adding notes and next steps as you’re meeting. You can even choose to pre-fill some of the information before the meeting.
These questions are general questions that we’ve encountered through our experience working with enterprise accounts, feel free to adjust the topics and questions to suit your teams’ needs.
As you enter your notes, watch as ✨Coda AI ✨ pre-fills relevant next steps for you, no more having to sift through pages of notes to understand the next actions to take on your new account.
Once the meeting’s over, your team will be aligned and you’ll have an action plan ready for your customer before you even meet them, talk about doing more with less!

Alignment meeting discussion topics

Discussion Topic
Discussed
Questions
Notes
Next Steps
Our company & competitors
3
Why did this company choose to purchase our product?
Open
Discuss implementation plan for training and onboarding employees.
Determine use case for marketing team.
What competitors were we up against? How and why did we win?
Open
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What other tools are part of our company’s tech stack?
Open
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Key Use Cases
7
What are our key use cases on the account?
Open
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What are our timelines for standing up these use cases?
Open
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Did they purchase professional services?
Open
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Have we scoped out our professional services engagement? What does it look like?
Open
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How are we measuring success in this account?
Open
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Which SKUs did they purchase? Why?
Open
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Are there any SKUs that they haven’t purchased now that they intend to explore later?
Open
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Key Contacts
3
Who are our key contacts?
Open
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Who are our champions, line of business sponsors and exec sponsors?
Open
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Who are our detractors?
Open
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Implementation and Onboarding details
6
What is the implementation plan?
Open
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How quickly are we rolling out to new users/teams?
Open
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When does the customer want to launch? How do they define “launched”?
Open
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What will the customer look to integrate for launch? Single Sign-on, active directory, integrations?
Open
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How many users are we rolling out to during implementation?
Open
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Are there any specific timelines around these goals that we should be aware of?
Open
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Expansion Plan
4
What is our strategy to expand within the account?
Open
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How are we going to leverage cross functional teams in expanding the account?
Open
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Are there any professional service opportunities?
Open
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What (if any) are potential risks at this stage?
Open
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Account team alignment is the backbone of B2B SaaS success, ensuring that the company operates as a cohesive unit, prepared to tackle challenges head-on.

Use this doc to make your planning sessions as smooth as a Tony winning performance!
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