I was sitting in a boardroom in Singapore as an outside observer.

The account team had spent 10 years building a relationship with their most loyal customer. A decade of conversations, deliveries, and trust.

Their slides were polished, the data was tight, and the roadmap looked ready to execute.

But something felt off.

So I asked one question.

“How much of this plan has been co-created with the customer?”

The room went quiet.

That’s when I said something that made a few people uncomfortable:

Account planning without customer validation or CxO triangulation isn’t a plan. It’s a hallucination.

Account planning isn’t what you do in the office. It’s what you do with the customer. So we shifted the conversation entirely.

Instead of asking, “How do we present this plan?”

We started asking, “How do we build this together?”

That meant:

→ Getting the plan in front of the customer’s senior executives.

→ Gaining their input on what mattered most.

→ Aligning on a joint roadmap.

→ Establishing shared projects, shared metrics, and shared announcements.

→ Creating accountability that flowed in both directions.

The team took the courage to walk into that customer conversation.

And here’s the part most sales teams fear.

The customer challenged it. They pushed back. They reshaped it.

And that was the best thing that could have happened.

Because what emerged wasn’t their plan or our plan.

It was a plan both sides had truly co-owned, that was built on real alignment, not internal assumptions.

That deepened the relationship in ways no internal presentation ever could.

One year later, that account yielded close to $100 million.

Here’s the perspective shift I want to leave you with:

The most valuable account plans aren’t the ones that live in your CRM.

They’re the ones your customer has helped build.

When customers help author the plan, they don’t just approve it. They defend it. They prioritize it. They sequence it inside their own organization.

That’s where the pipeline becomes inevitable.

So as you walk into your next account planning cycle, ask yourself:

How many of your current account plans have actually been validated by your customer’s CxOs?

If the answer is “not enough,” that’s not a problem.

That’s your biggest opportunity for the next quarter.

*** 

If this was helpful,

1.Subscribe to the CxO Sales Playbook

Every week, I share 1 actionable tip to get your sales teams to over deliver and quickly move deals over the line even in a slow economy.

2.Take Our Deal Review Quiz

Drawing from our work with multiple Fortune 500 clients, It’ll give you the exact probability of winning your deal & highlight specific areas of risk and concern – in under 90 seconds.

3.Review Our Clients & Case Studies

We’ve coached the sales teams of Fortune 500 & 100 companies such as Microsoft, SAP and Google.

Next Step 

Subscribe to the CXO Sales Playbook Newsletter.

Every Friday morning, I’ll email you 1 actionable tip to get your sales teams to overdeliver. (other benefits include a big bonus and company-wide recognition :).