Executive sponsorship is one of the most effective ways to close deals, foster stronger customer relationships, and improve retention. But securing the time and effort of the busiest people at your company will always be a challenge.
An executive sponsorship program that produces maximal results with minimal waste of effort requires clear oversight and tight planning.
Here’s how you can use Planhat in order to create and manage executive sponsorship programs that serve both your objectives and executives.
Initial steps
Segment: To start, use Planhat filters to identify high-value accounts for the program. You can build your own filters or use existing ones based on factors like ARR or geographic location.
Assign: To ensure the impact of your program, pair executives with customers using a custom field, like industry expertise or region. A relevant relationship increases the likelihood of success and makes best use of the executive’s skills and experience.
Define: Set clear expectations for engagement (e.g. quarterly calls, joint dinners, email check-ins) directly in Planhat. This reduces the burden on the executive to be proactive, and increases alignment between the executive and the CSM.
Track: Once the program is live, there are several ways you can use Planhat to keep it running smoothly and measure its success. Planhat’s Conversation Types and conditional fields allow you to log and track executive interactions, and you can build dashboards to track executive engagement, highlight at-risk accounts, and monitor the impact on renewals and upsells.
Automate: In order to make the program easy for executives to execute, set up automated reminders either to their email or Slack based on your pre-defined engagement expectations.
Pro tips
Start small – assign executives a maximum of three accounts each, starting with the 10-20 top customers, to avoid overwhelming workloads.
Use Planhat’s AI to send pre-meeting summaries or customer insights directly to executives.
Foster internal collaboration by aligning executives with their counterparts at the customer organization (e.g. CTO-to-CTO, CCO-to-CCO).
You have the knowledge, you have the tools, and you have the will (otherwise you wouldn't still be reading). Now all you need is to do it. Good luck.
Senior Copywriter
Planhat
Andrew is a seasoned creative with over 10 years of experience creating content for industry-leading SaaS companies. As Senior Copywriter at Planhat, he blends strategic clarity with a strong editorial voice to craft content across every channel. He’s held senior content roles in-house at Celonis and Hotjar, as well as The Drum's B2B agency of the year winner Velocity Partners—and brings a distinctive approach to tone and rhythm shaped by his early career as an actor, including the West End production of War Horse.
