That’s actually pretty crafty,, but I think I just found something even more effective; a Displacer Deformer! Figuring out the set up was a bit tricky but it works something like this for anyone who’s interested:
I put a material on Mr.Snake with proximal shader set to respond to the Sphere in the color channel. I then grouped up all the assets for the Snake (including the Spline Wrap) into a Null and gave it a displacement deformer. I then pointed the shading of the deformer to the proximal material, set the object to spherical, set the falloff to spherical and conformed the size and position to my sphere. After a lot tweaking the settings my snake has a nice soft belly that conforms to the shape of the sphere.