All Account Managers should be asking this question to themselves: Do I know the 3 primary goals for my customer? More often than not, the answer is going to be no. Keep reading for an explanation as to why this is not sustainable, and what you can do to change it.
Why This Is Important
Account Managers are flying blind when it comes to knowing their customer’s goals and most often times fail to align their strategies with the expectations of their customers. Knowing your customer’s goals and expectations will inevitably decrease churn and increase retention rate. About 80% of a company’s revenue is generated by only 20% of its customers. That being said, losing even one high-value customer to churn is not an option.
What causes customer churn?
- The customer didn’t get results they expected
- There is a lack of trust in the human-to-human relationship
- The vendor isn’t seen as proactive
Addressing these issues demonstrates value to the customer by understanding and committing to their goals and expectations. Having clear expectations of one another and transparency into your accounts decreases miscommunication and letdowns.
What You Can Do
The goals for your customers are circumstantial to their internal KPI’s and unique business climate. Each customer has distinctive needs and expectations when it comes to their account. Although they might have different goals, you should implement a seamless process to manage the expectations of all your customers.
Implement a Joint Success Plan (JSP)
A Joint Success plan is software that creates a win-win situation by aligning your high-value customer’s priorities with yours, so that their success is your success. A JSP allows you to gather info around customer needs & business goals to better support their business and become an essential strategic partner, not just a vendor. This gives you the power to facilitate and streamline data capture by prompting you to input data like customer goals, needs, and objections.
Use a tool, such as the JSP found in Kapta, to align your tasks with your customer’s expectations by defining which actions are taking place to meet goals. Becoming a trusted advisor to your customer, not just a vendor, requires proactive communication and transparency.
- Open Communication and Feedback Loops
This is an excellent way to monitor and update the health of your accounts. By automatically defining daily tasks based on the goals of your customers, there is no room for miscommunication. Send Interactive Customer Reports to your customer; this encourages customer input, creating a channel for richer, timelier feedback. The Joint Success Plan keeps you and your customer on the same page.
Use a dashboard that monitors multiple account health indicators, that you’ve identified as a team, so you are able to track your progress towards your customer’s goals. Doing this allows you to ID at-risk accounts and avoiding the risk of a customer not renewing.
Become a Trusted Advisor
Knowing your customer’s specific needs will allow you to become a more efficient and proactive Account Manager. Make sure you determine the 3 primary goals for you customer and apply a repeatable process to fulfill those goals.
No more miscommunication. No more dropped balls. No more surprises.
Join us for a live demo of Kapta’s Account Management Software to learn more about our proprietary Joint Success Plan, and start giving your customer the service they deserve.
