{"id":9317,"date":"2020-04-27T15:00:10","date_gmt":"2020-04-27T22:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/power-platform\/blog\/power-apps\/microsoft-account-planning\/"},"modified":"2024-09-25T13:47:26","modified_gmt":"2024-09-25T20:47:26","slug":"microsoft-account-planning","status":"publish","type":"power-apps","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/power-platform\/blog\/power-apps\/microsoft-account-planning\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft transforms sales planning process using the Power Platform"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/i> \u201cMicrosoft Power Platform has been a game changer with respect to helping us identify, iterate and ultimately digitize new processes that help drive our commercial sales business\u201d \u2013 Tom Verhasselt, Director of Business Programs, Microsoft<\/span><\/p>\n
In this blog post we look at how the Business Process and Tools Team within the Microsoft Worldwide Global Sales and Marketing Operations organization (WW GSMO) used Microsoft Power Platform to digitally transform the account planning process for thousands of enterprise accounts covering an annual $80+ billion book of business. The solution uses Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Common Data Service, Azure SQL, Office 365, Microsoft Stream, LinkedIn, Dynamics 365 and Azure workloads.<\/p>\n
Account Planning is the core process by which account teams come together to develop their sales strategy for driving digital transformation across Microsoft\u2019s top enterprise customers, and securing alignment across v-teams and executive leadership. The process of putting the plan together used to take a seller one to three days to execute as they navigated multiple systems, spreadsheets and offline reports. Previous multi-month efforts to transform this process had proven to be unsuccessful. With an agile low-code approach using Microsoft Power Platform, the team was able to build and deploy an initial version within just forty-five days. They\u2019ve continued to iterate on it over the past two years, scaling adoption to where more than a thousand sellers might use it in a single day during peak planning periods. The time it takes to put the plan together is now down to a few hours, along with several additional benefits, such as a new set of business and customer insights, close monitoring of a customer\u2019s digital journey, and easy visibility of plans for senior sales leaders.<\/p>\n
In addition to the business benefits for the Microsoft sales org, the Account Planning solution has served as a showcase to highlight the power of low code and Microsoft Power Platform. We are grateful to the GSMO Process and Tools team for spending time on an almost weekly basis demo\u2019ing the solution and sharing their experience with Microsoft customers looking to learn about the possibilitie of the platform. To quote a customer\u2019s reaction after seeing the Account Planning tool in action \u2013 \u201cYou guys are the absolute benchmark and you have seen our reactions, there is a lot of value with Power Apps and you have shown it in a very practical and pragmatic way for supporting an account planning methodology.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n