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

1. 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. 

2. 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.

3. 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. 

4. 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.

5. 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).

We hope you find this guide useful. If you have any suggestions for how it could be improved, please reach out to me at andrew.london@planhat.com.