Building an account chart from scratch
Getting started with visual account management is easy with vizrm. To make it even smoother, we collected some best-practices for you from building thousands over thousands of org charts.
Doing the research
When initially building a (visual) account plan, you will have to do your research, collecting all the relevant information you require for building your initial plan. Having that information in your CRM is a great plus, because it makes it easy to access, update & collaborate on. There is a couple of things you might want to have a look at with regards to the account organization:
Corporate Website
Annual Reports
Also you might want to look at your contacts you already have created on your account in Pipedrive. On top of that, Pipedrive allows you to build corporate structures with “related organizations”.
Starting from the top
When starting building your org-chart in vizrm, it is advisable to start with the top-line of contacts. Typically these are the people you know, or find public information about and then also they are likely to be on your target list as decision makers. Also this will make it easier to build the chart by dragging their direct reports onto them on the chart.
Some pro-tipps for easy building charts in vizrm
Use the pin to keep the sidebar open
Go by organization so you can collapse them once done and have better oversight of the chart
Use your browsers search function (ctr+f) to search for a name or function (e.g. “marketing” will highlight you all contacts in the sidebar with the word “marketing” in their title)
Handling gaps
No matter, how good you did your research in step one, it is likely you will have gaps in your chart. This is the first benefit you get from visualizing - you find the gaps. And these are to act on. There is multiple ways to address this - for us it is a best practice to create a place-holder for the person’s name, a useful job-title and add a task to that person in Pipedrive to identify them and make contact. This can be done in multiple ways - check out our best practices for managing the account plan.