Account Managers: Did You Hit Your Q1 Goals?
It’s the first day of Q2, so it’s a good time to look back…
April 1, 2019/by Alex RaymondHow Do You Co-Create Customer Value?
Imagine a partnership with your customers where both of you are…
March 28, 2019/by Alex RaymondTransforming Your Client Management is About More than just Software
Too often in the client management space, organizations will…
March 25, 2019/by Lesley PoladskyPreparation is Key: How to Protect Your Business With a Recession on the Horizon
Right now, the economy is up. Business is booming. And isn’t…
March 21, 2019/by Lesley PoladskyAre You Purposeful With Your Account Plans?
Being purposeful can mean a variety of different things to different…
March 18, 2019/by Lesley PoladskyHow to Get Your Client Success Program to Stick
Client Success is an integral program that can make or break…
March 14, 2019/by Lesley PoladskyGreat Key Account Management Resources, Coaches and Training Programs to Consider If You Want to Up Your Game
It doesn't matter if you've been a key account manager for a…
March 11, 2019/by Alex RaymondCustomer Segmentation Strategies for Key Account Management and Customer Success
How are you segmenting your customers? If you ask any key account…
March 7, 2019/by Alex RaymondKey Account Managers: Here’s How to Hit your Goals for this Year (and Beyond)
Having goals is important. If you don’t have a measurable and…
March 4, 2019/by Alex RaymondThe Software is Just the Start: How to Kick your B2B Customer Engagement into High Gear
B2B customer engagement is complex. Unlike in B2C industries,…
February 28, 2019/by Alex RaymondHow to Protect Your Revenue During a Recession
Over the last few years, business has been blessed with record…
February 25, 2019/by Alex RaymondUpcoming Key Account Management Conferences and Events You Should be Aware Of
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February 21, 2019/by Lesley PoladskyCategories
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The Basic Formula for Creating a Metric for Customer Success
/in Customer Success /by Lesley PoladskyThere are a lot of intangible factors in key account management, your customer’s idea for success or failure being one of them. All of your customers likely choose to use your products or services for different reasons and because of this, what they expect/demand out of your product is going to be different from company to company.
While one client is fine using your tools as a quick way to save time and free up some much-needed staff, another client might choose your product as their exclusive software in their company. When companies use products differently, it’s easy to see how their expectations can be different.
Although challenging, measuring your customer’s success with your product and putting a numerical value to it is crucial to nourishing and growing your relationships with key accounts. When you can practically guarantee success and overdeliver time and time again, then it becomes harder and harder for them not to renew every year.
So, how do we go about creating this metric and tracking the success of your customers? Believe it or not, it has less to do with looking at spreadsheets and more to do with the customer’s personal definition of success.
What’s Important to Your Customers?
So, how do you figure out what’s important to your customers? The easy way to find out is to ask them, but you can’t just flat-out ask them a simple question like that because more times than not, the answer is a little bit more complicated. In addition, you’ll also find that customers themselves have a difficult time putting their finger on what really matters to their organization and will instead opt for the easy answer like “make more money” or “grow our customer base.”
While these kinds of answers are better than nothing and can provide you with a touch more insight into their needs, wants, dreams, and goals, if you can dive a bit deeper, you’ll have better luck attaching a specific numerical value to what they want and you can work to meet their highly-specific goal.
We recommend that you look for more probing questions that allow you to get deeper into their expectations from your company and what they foresee happening in the future. Ask them what their best-case scenario is while using your product. Ask them where they want to be a year from now with the help of your product. Ask them how their business would be different if they didn’t use your product or one of your competitors’ either. These questions provide a deeper understanding of what’s going on in your client’s head and will give you something clearer to work with and thus a better chance of reaching their end goals.
Finding a Customer Impact Identifier
Once you have a clearer understanding of what your client ultimately wants to get out of your services and benefits, you can start working towards the metrics you want to set and the specific goals you must meet at specific time points in the account plan. Just like you have KPIs for the sales you make, you should also have set Customer Impact Identifiers for each account to make sure that they are on track and your actions are having a real impact on their account.
Impact is a crucial component of the work that you do daily, and whether you recognize it or not, the impact that you have on a client’s organization will determine whether they renew with you or go to a different provider. Creating and making impact can seem tricky at first, but with the right knowledge of what your customer really wants, turning their goals into a formula is simple.
Consider how they derive value from your services. Maybe you’re able to grow their revenue through your work. Perhaps your company is excellent for generating awareness and driving organic engagement for their company. Whatever the case may be, talk to your clients to learn more about why they work with you and choose your products over the competitors, and you’ll have a deeper understanding of how they justify the cost of your services.
With this in mind, you can start jotting down a list of ways that you have and will make an impact for the client. This serves essentially as the unit in your equation for customer success. Once you have the right unit – be it engagement, % of revenue growth, etc. – you can start getting hyper-specific with a number that you must shoot for in the account plan.
Get Specific
What is one of the primary goals of a Customer Success Manager? To provide and enhance value for the customer. We are the ones that will drop everything to answer a question about their software or provide information about their industry. It’s that added value that is the icing on the cake and the reason that they stick with us and not the other guys.
When it comes to tracking and measuring the overall impact that your work had on the account, it can be hard not to get lost in the weeds measuring the wrong metric that is only a symptom of your work but not the actual value.
Remember that we are not interested in tracking value that we’ve enhanced for the client (i.e., with our help, an already valuable area of their business improved) but we want to know the exact value that we created for them and delivered. Tracking enhanced value for the customer doesn’t really do much good to change their overall outcomes and goals and simply rides the coattails of an already existing program or initiative at their company.
The real value that you bring to your clients largely depends on what their goals are and why they chose to work with your organization in the first place. For example, the clients that found you and are looking for ways to improve their efficiency will have more value in time saved and budget saved in relation to their output. If you can prove that your software tool increased their overall productivity by X%, that will be a win for you and your organization and will show that you not only provided value to the client, but you also had an organization-wide impact.
Again, you must talk to your customer and fully understand their needs, wants, goals, and objectives. As with everything in KAM, knowing these things will help you as you create their account plan, but will also keep you on track for the life of the account. If after reading this you struggle to think of a specific value you provide to your clients it’s time to jump on the phone and start asking some more thoughtful and probing questions. Some clients might seem a bit secretive about why they want to use your software but in the end, the more that they can tell you about their business, the more that you can do to help them get to where they want to be.
It Must Be Measurable
As the old saying goes: what gets measured gets managed. You might have been wondering why we’re making such a big deal about finding a customer success metric in the first place. As long as the client keeps on with your company, that’s all that matters, right? While it is true that simply having the client renew year after is a primary goal, it’s how you get them to renew that matters the most because it provides you with insight into your own processes and you can work to make it repeatable for other clients.
When you measure specific metrics of an account, you’ll be more likely to manage the data and derive meaningful insights from it and make changes along the way to make sure that the account is on the right track and well on its way to crushing its goals. Keep in mind that while collecting data is better than not collecting data in most cases, it’s what you do with it that matters the most.
If you’re just collecting a ton of data from every angle and dimension of the account and you aren’t measuring it over time or taking insights from the numbers, you’re not doing much. You simply have a collection of numbers from the account with no meaningful actions to complete next. For this reason, it’s crucial that you use a KAM platform like Kapta that can make the entire data management and metric tracking process seamless and automatic. Rather than doing things the hard way, the software will do that for you and provide you with clearer insights into the data you collect from your accounts.
Also, one thing worth mentioning is that more times than not, you’ll have to depend on your client to provide you with this data and because some of it is likely confidential such as their number of customers, sales, etc., a few clients might be apprehensive to share it with you. It’s important that you relate to the customer why you want to track and manage this data and how it will benefit them in the long run. With that information, they’ll get on the same page and will likely be an open book moving forward.
Summary
To summarize, the steps to finding the metric of customer success for your clients are as follows:
When you break it down into five easy steps, then the process seems like a walk in the park. However, once you put this strategy into practice, you’ll quickly realize that there are potential bottlenecks and obstacles in your way, most likely regarding access to information and the how much your clients are ready to tell you about their company.
Remember, without a way to track and manage the impact that your product or services have had on the client’s organization, it’s almost impossible to improve your results. If the client’s goal was to have 50% of their customers sign off on their plans, it’s pretty easy to tell whether you met the goal or not. If you didn’t, it’s back to the drawing board, but if you did, you could add that to the list of things you helped do for the client and can set your sights on what comes next.
It all comes down to finding irrefutable evidence that you are the best KAM that your clients could have chosen to work with. You have a real impact on their bottom line, and these rock-solid numbers and metrics prove that. It’s hard to argue with 50% growth in a quarter, but it is easy to argue with “a smoother customer experience.” One of those metrics has a numerical value attached to it that is as clear as day while the other is less tangible and more opinion-based. Which of those do you think will get a client that’s already on the fence to sign on the dotted line?
Real results earn real revenue, and with this simple, dedicated formula, you can start earning those real results for your clients.
About Kapta
Kapta is less of a KAM company and more of a relationship company. Rather than producing software that keeps you in the weeds and bogs down your daily work, with the Kapta platform, KAMs can spend more time building relationships and working with their clients rather than stuck in spreadsheets. The tool features a variety of innovative features that KAMs in any industry will find practical including the Account Planning tools, relationship health score, and contact management. If you want to see how Kapta can change your KAM program, schedule your free demo here.
What Sets the Good Account Managers Apart from the Great Account Managers
/in Key Account Management /by Alex RaymondThere’s nothing wrong with being good – let’s get that out of the way first. But, there’s also no reason you should settle for “just good enough” when millions of dollars are on the line either. In the years we’ve been coaching and working in the key account management field, we’ve come to identify a few distinct attributes that separate the good KAMs from the great ones.
If you’re looking to step up your KAM game and do more for your clients, keep these six things in consideration and look for ways to implement these tips and tricks into your workflow.
A Personal Relationship that Goes Behind the Organization
No matter if you’re a key account manager or a manager at a burger shop, you want to be nice to your customers and build a good relationship with them. The difference in key account management is that the relationship goes far beyond the next sale and far beyond your organization.
Great key account managers will develop a relationship so strong with their clients that they might as well be an employee of their customer’s organization. If you look at the average account manager, you’ll notice that they’ll treat their clients as if they are doing them a favor, not the other way around.
Working with your clients from the mindset that your time is more valuable than theirs or that your company is more important to you than theirs can quickly stunt the growth of the relationship. Clients can notice, and the account manager will never really follow through on their promises because they don’t place enough value in the relationship.
But what if they were to pretend their client was their boss and what they said was final? For one, they’d be more likely to do what they ask and would expect higher from themselves while working with the account. This mindset can also produce greater results that benefit both parties.
Now, this isn’t to say that great account managers sell themselves out and will give huge price reductions and waste company resources to help one account. Instead, it’s more of a mindset and the idea of working for your client that can help you become more strategic and more effective in your daily work.
More Than the Minimum
As with many things in life, it’s possible to sit back, collect a paycheck, and get by doing just the bare minimum, but you’ll never reap the rewards of nourishing a rock-solid relationship with your customers. When your customers likely work with dozens of vendors, they start to seem replaceable.
Good key account managers might recognize this and will make sure that they always fulfill their customers’ requests, so they don’t drop the ball. Great account managers go a step further, with a proactive approach that “wows” their customers each and every day.
Understanding what you can do to go above and beyond will depend on your client, what their expectations already are, their industry, and how much time you have. Your account plan and VOC insights should paint a picture of what your clients expect of you, and all you need to do is turn the intensity up a notch.
In many cases, the little things can make a big difference in the end. For example, choosing to have a phone conversation with your customers three times a day at the minimum will add personality to your company, and they’ll see you as a person and not an email address.
Delivering things a day early impresses clients too although you should be mindful that you never stretch yourself too thin. The great account managers know that relationship building is a marathon and not a race. Do a little extra every day and your clients will notice and if they don’t, as long as you’re tracking your actions and tasks in your account plan, when it comes time for the QBR or next VOC interview, when they ask, “What have you done for me lately?” you have a laundry list of items to show them that will reaffirm your commitment to their success.
A Focus on Customer Outcomes
Great key account managers think past the next sale and focus on how their actions, suggestions, and solutions are helping drive positive outcomes for their accounts. It’s easy to get caught up thinking about your own organization and how you’re bringing in revenue for yourself, but if you have a focus on helping your clients first, the results will come for you too.
Good key account managers understand this, but when you look at their daily work, it’s obvious that they could do more to center their approach on their customer outcomes. They are often too caught up in the activities going around their office and putting themselves first. They work to better their position through new sales rather than thinking about how their overall relationship with clients is affected.
Great account managers, on the other hand, think of the customer first. They genuinely want their customers to succeed with their products and don’t recommend premium products unless they know for a fact that it will work. When they successfully pull this off, clients see them less like a glorified sales rep and more like an advisor that they can trust and come to with questions about their business.
When you can establish this trust, you’ll find that selling to existing key accounts is much easier and there is less back and forth trying to convince them that your product brings results. It can take time to develop this kind of trust even with clients that you’ve spent years with. Start small and focus on the baby steps first, and after a series of suggestions that provide tangible benefits for the client, they’ll be more open to your advice and premium features.
Understanding the Big Picture
It’s easy to get caught in the weeds in this job. Key account managers have to deal with a ton of daily stresses, and as the leader of the entire account management department, you’re the person that likely deals with basically every emergency, no matter how critical or unimportant it is.
Besides just dealing with emergencies in the office, juggling multiple accounts and multiple strategies using a variety of software applications can be a strain all in its own. If you feel like you struggle to see the forest through the trees, you might not need to be doing more, but actually doing less.
Sounds counterintuitive, right? When you consider the big picture, you can dedicate your time to more productive tasks with a clearer vision for how it will benefit the account rather than doing so much in a day that it seems like you’re just throwing meetings, schedules, tasks, and actions at the wall just to see what sticks.
The best key account managers will have a clearer understanding of the bigger picture of it all and can see how what they do today affects the account next quarter. This is essential for not only being productive but also adopting a proactive mindset that enables you to drive better results for your clients in the end.
When you take a step back and look at the bigger picture—how your client’s business affect your organization, how your business affects your client’s organization, what the industry is doing, etc.—you start to see where you need to improve and what areas of the account require your closest involvement now.
Looking Out for the Customer First
With the bigger picture in mind, the best key account managers will always put their customer and their client’s needs before the sale. While you definitely don’t want to ever give your products or services away for free, you don’t need to shove solutions (useful or not) in their faces at every opportunity.
Instead, you need to let the sales reps do their job and pretend that you’re more of an industry expert that does this work without a dollar incentive to speak of. Again, this isn’t true, but adapting this mindset can help you go from a good account manager to a great one.
Key account management isn’t a selfish line of work, yet far too often it can seem that way when account managers are jumping from client to client, ignoring the ones that don’t respond to their sales tactics and devoting their time only to the ones that do. In the end, this strategy never pays off for the company, and if they are a true strategic account, then they deserve your time regardless of when their last renewal was.
Putting the customer first will lead to more genuine results. Rather than trying to force a square peg through a round hole because it will make the company more money, you’ll know the exact piece that will fit the puzzle and solve the problem. It might not bring in as much revenue as the other solution, but in the long run, it’s the genuine results that will create the biggest waves within the account.
Start with the End in Mind
Finally, this is one that we’ve covered numerous times, but it’s an aspect of key account management that we can’t repeat enough. Starting with the end in mind is a lot like solving a maze by starting from the endpoint. It’s much easier to navigate the twists and turns if you know where the maze is going to eventually end up.
The same is true for account management. The best key account managers will obsess over their account plans and look for ways to fine-tune them so they can deliver results and get their accounts to their goals sooner. It’s this type of intensity that brings real results.
Starting with the end in mind allows you to plan points along the way where your product or services can come in handy. Rather than out of the blue pushing a premium service or an upgrade, you can plan the pitch and once they reach a particular milestone, suggest it to them as a genuine solution.
Focusing on the end goal of the account is also a practice that allows you to stay focused and undeterred by pitfalls or emergencies along the way. Goals are measurable and rather than being something that pops up that you need to take care of immediately, they are a marker to strive towards. Keeping the end in mind will keep you on task, and you’ll be more likely to exceed your client’s expectations – at least until you move the goal post.
Summary
While all key account managers are doing a service for the business world by focusing on relationship building and treating clients fairly, not everyone is the best at it – yet. The differences between good key account managers and great ones are pretty subtle, but they can mean the difference between millions in revenue growth.
So, where do you stand?
Overcoming the mental obstacles that are holding you back from serving your clients the best can seem tricky, but if you put these tips and ideas into practice, you’ll slowly build habits that can generate results practically automatically and when you’re using the right tools of the trade, you’ll have more time to focus on the important aspects of your role.
How Kapta Can Help
Kapta is a key account management platform designed specifically with the relationship in mind. Rather than bogging you down with more spreadsheets and complicated tables, Kapta offers an intuitive user interface that KAMs can use to easily track and manage important data related to their most important client. Easily create and edit Account Plans with the built-in templates, improve engagement through VOC Insights, and even track the account’s Overall Health Score all in one platform. To see how Kapta can help your KAM program, request your free demo today.
Are You Falling into These 7 Account Management Traps?
/in Key Account Management /by Lesley PoladskyAccount managers and key account manager (KAMs), listen up! You’ve got a tough job, but you might be doing a few things in particular that are making your job tougher than it needs to be. Learn about 7 traps that account managers commonly fall into, so you can avoid them for yourself.
1. Being Too Tactical
Key account management is a personal selling style before anything else. Sometimes you can get too caught up in the tactics and the data and forget to develop a strong connection with your top customers first.
If you’re too focused on moving your customers to the next step in the sales pipeline, they’re going to take notice. Using the wrong tactics at the wrong time won’t help you succeed. You need a big picture strategy to guide all your actions so you’re not just trying different tactics to convince your customers to keep buying. Build an account strategy first so you can shape your tactics and actions around that customer in a way that makes sense to them.
2. Not Picking Up the Phone
Phone calls don’t always feel like an important part of your work day, or maybe you just don’t like to make a lot of calls in a day. Phone calls may not be your favorite, but you need to pick up the phone and keep in touch with your customer contacts at the right times. Consistent communication is important. When it’s been too long, you need to place a few calls to check in on your customers.
It’s tempting to turn to less personal means for communicating, such as email. However, talking on the phone is more likely to give you a better result in the end. It helps to reduce the complexity of your messages, makes things happen faster, builds the relationship more effectively, keeps you away from misunderstandings, and shows your commitment to the customer’s success.
3. Being Reactive
There’s nothing worse for your key account customers than a KAM that’s not prepared ahead of time. While you do need to be able to react properly when something completely unpredictable happens, you can’t continually be surprised by everything. If you’re operating on plan A all the time without a plan B for every situation, you’re going to run into a lot more problems than you should.
Reactivity is not a good trait for KAMs. If you feel like you’re caught off guard too often, you need to take some time to observe what’s going on and get prepared for the future again. Don’t let time get ahead of you. Take a moment to create contingencies and make sure you’re on the right path to stay on top of upcoming challenges.
4. Unorganized (Ad-Hoc Systems)
Account plans should be unique for specific customers, but only to certain point. If you’re making it up as you go along, you’ll have a lot of trouble accomplishing your goals or helping your customers accomplish their goals.
Being disorganized also means less time to focus on the relationship aspect of your job. You can’t work to communicate with your customers and build up a better relationship if you don’t have all your information laid out, a plan in place, and your steps planned ahead of time.
Being organized doesn’t always mean doing more. You can delegate responsibilities that you’re having trouble keeping up with. You can delegate tasks like KAM system data entry to your team and embrace technology to remind you about important benchmarks or milestones you should be responding to. Organizing your time well means you’re setting aside time for the relationship-building activities you need to do for your customers rather than leaving that up to chance.
5. Lacking Follow-Through
If you’ve laid the groundwork and made a plan, you need to make sure you do your part. It’s your responsibility to follow through with your commitments without your customers having to ask you to do it. The best service you can provide is taking the initiative and making things happen for them. Following through on all your commitments to customers will improve your relationship with them and keep you in great standing.
What’s worse than simply not following through is forgetting to keep your customers in the loop when you do take actions. You need to keep your customers up to date about the status of the project and the outcome of what you’ve been doing. If your customers are coming to ask what you’ve been doing, because they haven’t been hearing from you, then you need to fix your communication strategy right away!
6. Not Managing Your Pipeline
Making a sale isn’t the end of road for a KAM. You’re not just looking for one-time purchases. For you, the sales pipeline is going on all the time. Even if you’ve just made a sale, you need to keep up with your customers to be aware and take advantage of service renewals and new purchases. You should always be preparing ahead to handle purchase times as well as possible.
If you’re not working with your customers and keeping in touch around the year, they’re not going to be as likely to talk with you once it’s time to renew or make another purchase. It’s obvious at that point that your only goal in the conversation is to make another sale, which is not an attractive quality in a long-term vendor. Instead, you should be communicating year-round so that you’ll be the first one they think about for a new purchase.
Consistent communication and after-sale service also help you keep in touch with what your customers are doing with your products or services. You’ll be able to make better recommendations and potentially upsell to grow the account if there’s something else you offer which could allow them to utilize their existing purchases better. You won’t be in a position to make that kind of recommendation unless you’re working with them consistently rather than just around purchasing times.
7. Only focused on the new sales
New sales are exciting. But, the cost of acquiring new customers is higher than the cost of retaining existing customers. If you’re putting too much time and effort into getting new customers and not enough into keeping your other customers around, you’re getting it backwards.
Customer retention is how you’ll grow your business. If you can keep more customers around, every new customer you add will be a lasting addition rather than a replacement for a customer that left. Existing customers are also more likely to spend more because they’ve already tested your products with good results. By retaining a higher percentage of customers and making repeat sales, you’ll actually be growing revenue without having to spend as much time prospecting.
Conclusion
A lot of account management problems can come about because you just don’t have the right data at the right time to guide your decision-making. Tools like Kapta help you solve that problem so you can avoid falling into traps like not picking up the phone (when you need to) or being too caught up in the tactics without a focus on your overall strategy.
In the free-for-all that is building customer relationships, there are a lot of missteps you can take accidentally. Give yourself the best chance by understanding what can go wrong and preparing ahead for it.