How AWS Sales uses generative AI to streamline account planning
Every year, AWS Sales personnel create detailed strategy documents for existing AWS customers to align with their growth plans. These documents, known as account plans (APs), help the sales team collaborate on long-term growth ideas with customers. By focusing on forward-looking strategies, the sales team can better support customer growth and align with their objectives. This process enables a proactive approach to customer relationships and ensures alignment with customer goals for enhanced collaboration.
Introduction
Every year, AWS Sales personnel draft in-depth, forward-looking strategy documents for established AWS customers. These documents help align the AWS Sales team with customer growth strategy and collaborate with the entire sales team on long-term growth ideas for AWS customers. Referred to as account plans (APs) internally, in 2024, this activity took an account manager (AM) up to 40 hours per customer. This, combined with similar time spent for support roles researching and writing the growth plans for customers on the AWS Cloud, led to significant organization overhead.
AI-Powered Account Planning Draft Assistant
To help improve this process, in October 2024, an AI-powered account planning draft assistant was launched for AWS sales teams, building on the success of Field Advisor, an internal sales assistant tool. This new capability uses Amazon Bedrock to help sales teams create comprehensive and insightful APs in less time. Since its launch, thousands of sales teams have utilized this AI-powered assistant to draft sections of their APs, saving time on each AP created.
Business Use Cases
The account plans draft assistant serves four primary use cases:
- Account plan draft generation
- Data synthesis
- Quality checks
- Customization
User Experience and Testimonials
AMs reported reduced time to write documents, allowing them to focus more on high-value activities. Testimonials from some AMs highlighted the time-saving benefits and the ability to engage more with customers due to the assistance provided by the AI-powered assistant.
Building the AI Assistant
The account plans draft assistant's architecture, components, and data management process were detailed, showcasing the use of various AWS services and technologies to streamline the AP creation process effectively.
Future Plans
Future plans for the account plans draft assistant include enhanced personalization, improved collaboration features, and expanded use of recommendations to provide better services to customers.
HONESTAI ANALYSIS
The account plans draft assistant, powered by Amazon Bedrock, has significantly streamlined the AP process for AWS Sales teams, enabling the creation of higher quality APs in less time. Ongoing enhancements aim to further improve customer service and success in the AWS Cloud.
If interested in similar solutions for your organization, reaching out to your AWS account team to discuss available services is recommended.
Authors: Saksham Kakar, Vimanyu Aggarwal, Krishnachand Velaga, Scott Wilkinson