Business Plans have been available in Partner Relationship Management for quite a while and I always wished we could use it on accounts or opportunities too ….. well now we can !
Account Business Plans
The exact same functionality as for partner business plans has been made available for managing business plans focused on accounts:
- SWOT analysis
- adding objectives
- splitting objectives over time or by product, …
- relating activities and notes
- …
But instead of linking the plan to an partner, we link it to an account.
Business Plans for All
But business plans do not have to stay limited to partners and accounts only. There is actually a standard ‘Class’ field that you can expose on the business plan layouts in order to choose which kind of business plans you would like to create.
If you only want to use business plans uniquely for accounts or partners, you can default the class field to whatever you want and hide it, but if you want to use it for multiple purposes, you simply make it available and use dynamic layouts and the conditional required property of fields to adapt the business plan object to however you want it to be used for each object
e.g. why not use business plans to define opportunity strategies? 
Or why not business plans related to a set of accounts instead of just a single account. Why not business plans on territories, or on sales teams, or a new product introductions, or …?
Business Plans has become yet another feature that just begs to be used in creative ways 🙂
