Sales & CRM

How to build a strategic account plan as CPG Founders

Sales & CRMFor CPG Founders2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You're heading into a buyer meeting at a regional grocery chain and your 'account plan' is a mix of a Notion doc nobody's updated since Q3, a Gmail thread with the broker, a Shopify export you pulled last week, and a spreadsheet tracking their deduction disputes. You spend 45 minutes before the call stitching together velocity data, trade spend history, and their door count — all manually. When the buyer asks about sell-through on your last promo, you're guessing. CPG founders running three or four key retail accounts can't afford a Key Account Manager, but they're also competing against brands that have entire trade marketing teams building polished account plans in Salesforce. You need the same output with none of the overhead.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Sales & CRMFor CPG Founders2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A living account plan for each retail or distributor relationship, pre-populated with deal history, deduction log, and email thread context — so you walk into every buyer call knowing exactly where things stand

An AI-powered prompt interface that answers questions like 'what's our velocity trend at this account over the last 90 days?' or 'what promos have we run with them and what was the lift?' without manually digging through spreadsheets

A Presentation Agent deck you can push out before each QBR or line review, built from your actual account data — not a blank slide template you fill in from scratch every quarter

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

CRM Presentation Agent

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule so the CRM pulls in full email thread history with each buyer automatically. Connect Shopify from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live to pull velocity and order data into account records. Starch automates distributor portal pages through your browser — no API needed — to capture deduction notices and payment status from UNFI, KeHE, or whichever distributor portal you log into.

Prompts to copy

Build me an account plan CRM for my retail and distributor relationships. I need fields for: account name, buyer contact, door count, SKUs listed, current velocity (units/week), trade spend committed, open deduction disputes (with amounts), last contact date, next review date, and pipeline stage. Pipeline stages are: Prospecting, First Meeting, Submitted Line Review, Approved, Shipped First PO, Active, At Risk, Churned.

For the Whole Foods Mid-Atlantic account, show me all email threads from the last 6 months, a summary of deductions we've disputed, what promos we ran and when, and flag any commitments I made that don't have a follow-up task yet.

Build me a 10-slide QBR deck for Whole Foods Mid-Atlantic. Include our velocity trend for the last two quarters, the promo lift from our February endcap, our deduction dispute status, and three things we're asking for in the next period: expanded SKU count, a secondary placement, and a co-op marketing credit.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Start from the CRM starter app in the Starch App Store, then describe your CPG-specific schema: buyer contact, door count by region, SKUs listed, case pack size, velocity in units/week, trade spend committed YTD, open deduction dispute total, and last buyer interaction.

2 Connect Gmail via Starch's scheduled sync so every email thread with a buyer or broker is automatically associated with the right account record — no manual logging.

3 Connect Shopify from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can pull live order and sell-through data when you open an account record or ask a question about velocity.

4 Set up browser automation to log into your distributor portals (UNFI, KeHE, or similar) on a schedule and capture any new deduction notices — Starch reads the page and logs the deduction amount, reason code, and status directly into the account plan.

5 For each active account, prompt Starch to summarize your relationship history: 'Summarize my last 12 months with this account — promos run, POs received, deductions disputed, and any open commitments from email threads.'

6 Ask Starch to flag at-risk accounts: 'Which accounts haven't placed a PO in 60 days, have an open deduction over $500, or where I haven't had a buyer touchpoint in 30 days?' Get a prioritized list, not a canned report.

7 Before each buyer meeting, prompt Starch: 'What should I know before my call with the Sprouts buyer tomorrow? Pull recent email context, velocity trend, open deductions, and what I committed to last time.'

8 After each call, dictate or paste your notes and let Starch update the account record — new commitments get turned into tasks, deal stage updates, and a summary appended to the account timeline.

9 When a line review comes up, prompt Starch to pull together all the inputs: velocity by SKU, promo history and lift, incremental door opportunity, competitive set context — then hand it to Presentation Agent to build the deck.

10 Use Presentation Agent to generate the QBR or line review slide deck from a text description referencing your actual account data — output to PDF or PowerPoint for the buyer meeting.

11 Set a weekly automation: 'Every Monday, pull a summary of all accounts with a review or PO due in the next 14 days, flag any with open deductions over $1,000, and Slack me the list.' You walk into every week knowing where to focus.

12 As you win new accounts, add them to the CRM immediately with the initial door count and SKU count — the account plan grows with your distribution footprint instead of lagging behind it.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

Q1 2026 line review — Sprouts Farmers Market, Southwest region

Sample numbers from a real run

Sprouts Southwest — active door count	47
Avg weekly velocity (units/store/week, top SKU)	6
Trade spend committed Q4 2025 (demo + TPR)	18,400
Open deduction disputes — invalid MCB claims	3,200
New doors requested in line review	23

You have a line review with your Sprouts buyer on March 12. The night before, you prompt Starch: 'Summarize my Sprouts Southwest account for tomorrow — velocity trend, promos we ran in Q4, any open deductions, and what we discussed in our last call.' Starch pulls from your synced Gmail thread, your Shopify order history via live query, and the deduction log it scraped from the Sprouts vendor portal. It surfaces that your top SKU is averaging 6 units/store/week — up from 4.2 in Q3 — that the November TPR drove a 38% lift over the base period, and that there are two outstanding MCB deductions totaling $3,200 you've disputed but haven't heard back on. It also flags that in your October call you committed to providing a planogram recommendation before the next review, which you haven't done yet. You fix the planogram issue, then prompt Presentation Agent: 'Build a 10-slide line review deck for Sprouts Southwest. Highlight the Q3-to-Q4 velocity improvement, the November promo lift, our proposed 23-door expansion with projected incremental revenue at $6 units/store/week, and a slide requesting resolution of the $3,200 in disputed deductions.' You have a polished deck in under 10 minutes. You walk into the meeting with numbers you trust, a clear ask, and no Sunday-night scramble.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Velocity per store per week by SKU (units/store/week), tracked by account

Trade spend as a percentage of gross revenue per account

Open deduction dispute balance by distributor or retailer

Days since last buyer touchpoint per active account

Door count growth quarter-over-quarter across all active retail accounts

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

HubSpot Sales Hub

Powerful pipeline management, but the default schema has nothing CPG-specific — no door count, no deduction log, no velocity fields — and you'll spend weeks configuring it or pay a consultant to do it for you.

Salesforce + a trade promotion management add-on

The enterprise standard for large CPG, but starts at six figures and assumes you have a Salesforce admin; overkill for a founder managing 10-20 accounts.

Notion or Airtable account plan templates

Flexible and free to start, but purely manual — no email sync, no velocity data pulled from Shopify, and no AI to flag at-risk accounts or prep your buyer briefing.

Google Sheets with a broker email chain

Zero cost, infinite flexibility, and a guaranteed mess by account number 8 — no single source of truth, no deduplication, and critical context lives in someone's inbox.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — crm, presentation agent all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Can Starch actually pull my velocity data from Shopify into the account plan?

Yes. Connect Shopify from Starch's integration catalog and the agent queries it live when you open an account record or ask a velocity question. It's not a scheduled snapshot — it pulls fresh data each time, which means you're always looking at current numbers, not last week's export.

What about deduction data from UNFI or KeHE? They don't have an API.

Starch automates those portals through your browser — no API needed. You log in once, Starch learns the navigation, and it can pull deduction notices, reason codes, and payment statuses on a schedule. The data lands in your account record automatically.

I have broker relationships managing some of my accounts. Can I track those too?

Yes. Describe the broker layer when you set up your CRM schema — 'add a broker contact field linked to each account, and track broker commission rate and last broker touchpoint separately from the buyer contact.' The schema adapts to how your sales motion actually works.

Is the Presentation Agent available right now?

Presentation Agent is currently in development. You can request beta access to get notified when it launches. In the meantime, Starch can output a structured written summary of your account data that you paste into your existing slide template.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I'm handing it Gmail access and distributor portal credentials.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified yet. That's worth knowing if you're in a regulated environment or if a retail partner asks. Most CPG founders at the seed-to-Series A stage make this trade-off knowingly; it's on the roadmap.

What if my account data is split between Shopify for DTC and a separate wholesale order system?

Connect both. Shopify connects from Starch's integration catalog. If your wholesale order management system has a web portal you log into, Starch can automate it through your browser to pull order history — even if it has no public API. Describe both data sources when you set up your account plan and Starch wires them together.

Can I use this for distributor relationships, not just direct retail?

Yes. The CRM schema you describe can include distributor-specific fields — depletions by market, distributor margin, open deduction balance, blitz schedule, and rep contact info. It's the same product; you just describe your distributor sales motion instead of a direct retail one.