Your Account Planning Tool Might Be Making Your Sellers Worse

Here's something 've noticed after a lot of years working with sales teams: most account planning tools have turned into fancy reporting systems. They're great at pulling information out of people's heads and putting it into dashboards, but they're doing almost nothing to help sellers actually think better.

The result? Sellers fill in every field, tick every box, and submit their plans on time. But six months later, they're no better at thinking strategically than when they started.

The Real Problem

Walk into most companies and you'll see the same thing. Account planning is just another admin task. Sellers fill out templates, managers review them, everyone moves on. The whole focus is on getting data, not on helping people think.

Research shows that 55% of sales leaders think their programmes work, but they don't see real results. That gap tells you everything. The tools do what they're supposed to (boxes get ticked), but they fail at what actually matters (people get better).

Here's the thing. Every time a tool does the thinking for someone, it takes away a chance for them to build that skill themselves. When everything is laid out step-by-step, sellers never learn to figure things out on their own or adapt to different customers.

What Needs to Change

Be clear about the tool's purpose from the start and making sure incentives reward better thinking, not faster completion.

We need to completely flip how we think about these tools.

The old way: tools exist to pull information from sellers and show it to management. Success means everyone completes their forms and the data looks clean. 

The new way: turn tools into platform to help sellers think better. Success means people actually get stronger at strategic thinking over time.

This is a big shift. Research on how people learn tells us that our brains can only hold so much at once, and that good learning tools should push us to think deeper, not just make things easier.

Three Big Ideas

Struggle is good. When sellers wrestle with tough questions, they get better at thinking. When tools make everything easy, those skills never develop. A recent MIT study highlights this by suggesting, the more people rely on LLMs like ChatGPT, the weaker their neural connectivity becomes, mainly impacting the alpha and beta brain networks essential for learning and problem-solving. This suggests a potential downside in cognitive engagement if AI tools replace rather than supplement human thinking processes.

Tools should guide thinking, not do it for you. The goal is to help people see their own thought process and make it better, not to automate thinking away. Sellers need to build their own skills, not lean on the tool to be smart for them.

Every customer is different. Tools should help sellers dig into each specific situation rather than pushing cookie-cutter approaches that don't quite fit. It also feels bureaucratic. Yuval Noah Harari in his book Nexus describes how bureaucracy organises the world into rigid categories or "drawers," which can solve problems but also produce narrow thinking. I feel many tools we are given in sales do exactly that.

Eight Things That Actually Work

After decades working with sales teams, we've figured out eight principles that turn account planning from a checkbox exercise into real skill building.

1. Give guidance, not answers. Give sellers a structure to follow, but don't hand them the answers. Help them work through the thinking without doing it for them.

2. Make people show their work. Require sellers to explain their logic. Make them connect the dots between what they know and what they're recommending. Get their assumptions out in the open.

3. Push back first, approve later. Question sellers' first ideas. Create moments where they have to defend their thinking or spot the holes themselves.

4. Build in pause points. Prompt sellers to check their own thinking at key moments. What are they assuming? What would make them change their mind? Help them get better at catching their own gaps.

5. Show progress. Let sellers see how their thinking has changed over time. Make that growth visible - it motivates also.

6. Make coaching easy. Design tools that help managers coach thinking, not just sign off on forms. The conversation is what matters, not the completed template.

7. Make it harder as they improve. As sellers get better, ask tougher questions and give less hand-holding. Keep the challenge matched to their skill level.

8. Connect thinking to wins. Track which ways of thinking lead to closed deals. Make it obvious how better thinking leads to better results.

All of the above are easily supported by good coaching.

Measuring What Matters

Most metrics track completion rates, time spent, fields filled. These tell you about compliance, not capability.

If you want to measure thinking, look at different things:

How deep do they go? Do sellers dig into multiple layers of analysis? Or do they stay at surface level?

Does their logic make sense? Can sellers explain why their strategy works? Is the connection between what they know and what they recommend clear?

Do they adapt? When new information comes up, do sellers adjust their thinking? Or do they stick to their first idea no matter what?

How do they handle pushback? When questioned, do sellers engage and strengthen their thinking? Or get defensive?

Are they getting better? Over time, does their analysis get more sophisticated?

What predicts wins? Which thinking patterns show up in closed deals? Are sellers picking up those patterns?

These take more work to track than simple completion rates. But they measure what actually drives performance.

The Barriers You'll Hit

A few things will get in your way:

People resist new systems. Sellers often stick with what they know even after new tools launch. Studies show that 87% of training gets forgotten within a month. Just using tools doesn't create lasting change.

Experience breeds overconfidence. Veteran sellers may think systematic planning is unnecessary. They trust their gut over structured thinking.

Wrong expectations. When tools are sold as time-savers, sellers expect less work. When tools actually require more thinking, frustration follows.

Manager habits. If managers just approve plans instead of coaching, tools reinforce checkbox behaviour instead of development.

What You Can Expect

Companies that successfully put thinking-based tools in place typically see a few things:

Sellers develop strategies that hold up under scrutiny because they're based on real customer understanding, not surface-level observations. They get more confident challenging conventional approaches when the situation calls for it.

Thinking skills compound over time. Sellers get progressively better at analysing complex situations and adapting to different customers.

Reliance on the tool decreases as sellers build their own thinking patterns. The tool stays valuable as a framework, but people develop their own capabilities.

Coaching conversations focus on thinking quality rather than form completion, leading to more meaningful development.

The shift from compliance to thinking represents a real change in how companies approach account planning tools. It puts long-term skill building ahead of short-term admin efficiency.

And that's worth doing.