Account planning
Pieces tagged account planning across all sectors and formats.
Explained / SaaS / 28 July 2026
Account-based sales for UK mid-market: where it works and where it fails
Account-based sales (ABS) was promoted heavily across UK SaaS through 2018-2023 as a structural answer to broad-volume outbound. By 2026 the picture is more nuanced: ABS works at specific deal sizes and team scales, fails predictably outside those, and many UK mid-market teams adopted it for the wrong reasons. A practitioner walkthrough.
ABS works at deal sizes above 75-100k pounds ARR with cycles 6+ months and named-account lists of 30-100 per AE. ABS fails at smaller deal sizes (the per-account investment doesn't pay back), at very large deal sizes (the buying centre is too wide for one AE to map), and at teams without ABS-trained marketing partnership.
Snapshot / SaaS / 20 July 2026
Customer Success as a sales discipline in UK SaaS in 2026
CS in UK SaaS in 2026 is shifting from a post-sale renewal function towards an active sales discipline. The shift reflects the maturity of the SaaS market: buyer-side procurement teams have hardened, churn risk has risen, and renewal isn't automatic. The CS function that survives 2026-2027 is the one that runs commercial discipline.
CS Managers in mature UK SaaS now carry retention quota and (increasingly) expansion quota. The pure 'relationship-only' CSM role is dating. Comp pattern is shifting towards 70/30 base/variable (from 80/20 historically), with variable tied to gross retention and net retention combined.
Explained / SaaS / 18 July 2026
Account expansion as a sales discipline in UK SaaS in 2026
Net retention is the single most-watched SaaS metric for growth-stage and public companies, and yet account expansion sits in an organisational no-man's-land at most UK SaaS firms: too commercial for CS, too relationship-led for AE, structurally under-invested in. The case for treating expansion as its own sales discipline with dedicated headcount, comp design, and process.
Net retention above 110 percent typically requires an explicit Account Manager / Expansion AE function with quota tied to expansion ARR. Bolt-on responsibilities given to CS or land-AEs without comp realignment produce flat NRR. The dedicated function pays back within 12-18 months at most UK SaaS scales above 100 customers.