Key Account Management
Insights and Best Practice

It doesn’t matter what line of work you’re in; time can be costly. When you think of labor hours and how long it takes to get a project done, you calculate that into the cost. How about when you’re implementing new tools?

For most, they don’t really budget for time when they’re implementing a new key account management tool. Instead, they think about how much it is going to cost them to license the software and what their annual subscription will be. The thing is, time is money, and although it can be easy to get caught up in the weeds about how much money something costs, when you start accounting for time, you might be amazed at how much money you can save even with a more expensive product.

Today, we’re going to take a look at a few reasons why budgeting time is equally, if not more, important than budgeting money. Hopefully, by the end of this article, you’ll come away with a better perspective on the buying process and consider more than just the price tag.

Don’t Believe Us? Conduct An Internal Audit

So, some of you might be a little bit skeptical about the idea of treating time and money as equal considerations in the buying process, and that’s okay. When you’re shopping around for tools to make your team’s roles easier, it becomes pretty simple to just look at the price and review of software rather than a bigger perspective of time.

Here’s a simple exercise that you can do: open up a spreadsheet and start jotting down different time considerations and add it up again. Treat it the same way that you would budget for money, but instead of dollars and cents, it’s minutes and hours that you’re measuring. Think of every stage in the buying process and how long each of them takes. Go from researching the different products to chatting with sales reps to getting the budget approved to implementing the tool all the way until it’s a daily platform your team uses—the time starts to add up.

In just the financial approval process alone, you’ll find that it can take weeks sometimes depending on how large your organization is just to get the sign-off from accounting. With so many days spent on this project, it becomes pretty clear that time is an investment, so sometimes it’s best to consider it first before looking at the price tag.

How Long Does it Take to Build the Habit?

Even after you’ve installed the new tool on all of your team’s computers, there’s still a time price to be paid. Unless you work with a team of tech wizards, they’ll likely need some time to learn how to use the program, integrate it into their daily workflow, and build the habit of turning to it first rather than looking for the old platform.

In many cases, it takes around 66 days to create a habit, which is a little over two months out of the year. That’s half a quarter! Two months can fly by, but when your team is busy learning how to use a new program, your clients will notice. While there isn’t really any getting around the learning and habit-building phase, it’s pretty clear that it’s always better to choose a platform that has a quicker pick-up time than one that will take forever for the team to learn—if they ever do!

If you can find a key account management tool that is easy for the team to start using right out of the gate, then you can save a tremendous amount of time all while keeping your clients happy during the initial phase. Once they get the new system into their daily workflow, they’ll hopefully be more efficient, and your team will be optimized to deliver results time and time again for a significant return on your investment.

It’s Time to Get Organized

How can you go about budgeting time for a new tool? Like every great project, you need to make sure that you are organized and using your existing tools to track and manage specific data sets, time being the key metric in this case. You do this so you can split the total time between departments and determine which of the tools will save you the most.

Think about all of the phases that you’ll go through until the tool is implemented and try not to skip a step. Even something as seemingly small as working with the developer’s customer service to find the right enterprise package can take some time, and if you forgetfully leave it out of your plan and time budget, it’ll sneak up on you.

From identifying the factors you are looking for in the new tool to researching your options, scheduling a demo, negotiating an enterprise price, and training your team to use it and waiting for it to become a habit, you should track all of these time expenses. Mark them down in your budget and keep the following sections in mind.

Who Will Use the Product?

Start with an organization chart of the people that will actually use the product on a daily basis. While there might be higher-ups that have a stake in the effectiveness of the tool, it’s the people that will use the product on a daily basis that matter the most. It doesn’t matter if we’re discussing a key account management relationship tool or we’re talking an email client because the sentiment is the same: the workers that use the tool carry the most say in the decision.

You should conduct a poll among the team that will use the product to determine not only what they want to get out of it, but their experience level with similar tools or experience with your select choices. This can help you get a more accurate estimation of the time it will take for them to pick up the habit of using the tool and benefit from it in their daily workflow.

Make sure you aren’t leaving anyone out of the poll as that could affect the averages that you calculate based on estimated time. While you’ll want to keep cost in mind, you should come up with an estimation of average time to adopt for these tools and rank your choices based on that factor.

Who Will Benefit from the Product?

Secondly, besides who will actually use the product, you want to consider who will benefit from it. In a key account management sense where your relationships with clients are paramount, you’ll want to add your clients into the mix if they are ever going to see the product or the results of it. Hopefully, the product greatly benefits them, either directly through their use or indirectly through the results your team can create with them.

List all of the important key players that will benefit from the project once it’s implemented. Understanding the people that are rooting for the project to be a success and the potential return on the investment can help to sway you towards a product that you might otherwise had not considered. For example, if you were to lean towards a product that might take less time to implement on your side but the results wouldn’t be as great, you might want to reconsider when you think of time as an investment. You also don’t want to choose a product that your team will never understand because it has so many features it makes their heads spin.

The key is to find a balance between effort, time, and money, which can be tricky. You need to invest your time in researching and trying a few different tools that work for your team.

Make Time to Review

Once you have a solid list of the tools you think will work and understand the budgeted time for each of them, you can start reviewing them. Typically, the best developers will offer you a personal demo of the product where a rep for them will answer any questions and show you the unique features that mostly apply to your organization and goals. If you feel like you are left to figure out a platform on your own, you are looking at the wrong tool.

The review period of its own can take a significant amount of time so you want to make sure you’re using your budgeted time wisely and avoid wasting your own energy demoing products that won’t work. Skip the tedious work and create a list of the most important features that will save you and your team the most time all while delivering better results for your customers. This will help you see past all of the flashy colors and slick UIs and instead focus your eyes on the price, so not only your time but the monetary investment isn’t wasted.

Once you have a new tool selected and you’ve signed up for the subscription, it’s time to implement it, use it for a week or two, and determine whether your team thinks you made the right choice.

Gather Feedback After Implementation

While you might use the new software from time to time, it’s the rest of your team that will use it in their daily workflows, so you need to make sure that it’s working for them. Too often, managers get married to their selected software and will do anything to make sure that it works, even if it means that they aren’t looking at the bigger picture with unbiased eyes. It’s understandable, but you need to ensure that you are neutral and willing to listen to feedback from the team.

The most significant part of this is the time that it takes for your team to start using it and your clients to start seeing results. You want the implementation process to go as smooth as possible and if you spot any red flags, don’t be afraid to make changes. Continuous optimization is key to running a smooth account management department, and minimal downtime is the goal. After a week of using the new tools, hold a meeting, and gather feedback from the rest of the team to understand their thoughts on using the tool. Ask if their clients have made any notice of the new tool even if they have no idea you’ve switched to a new system (an effective tool will have ripple effects throughout the relationship, so if it is effective, clients will notice).

Continue to look for new ways to improve your processes and optimize your team’s workflow. In a competitive sphere like yours, having the right tool could be the difference between keeping a client and losing them to a competitor and picking a good one that saves your organization time, effort, and money can be the difference-maker towards delivering better results for your clients.

How Kapta Can Help

As an all-in-one enterprise key account management platform, Kapta allows you to do more for your organization’s biggest clients. By getting your account managers out of the spreadsheets and onto the phone, you can focus more on the relationship that you develop with your top 20% of clients rather than pushing digits around. Kapta features a selection of innovative account management tools like Voice of Customer (VOC) Insights, account health score, and account plan templates so you can generate more revenue, build relationships, and achieve your customer’s goals almost automatically. See where you stand with its visualization tools and streamline your workflow with Kapta.

Schedule a free demo of Kapta and see for yourself here.

Using Customer Journey Maps to Create Effective Account Plans

July 21, 2019/in Key Account Management /by Alex Raymond

How do you create your account plans? Do you start from scratch every time or have a template? Are they chronological with specific points along the journey, or do they read more like a checklist of goals? Whatever the case may be, if you’re creating account plans or at least want to make yours better along the way, you’re already on the right track, but lately, we’ve found that borrowing from the marketing matrix can help you better format your account plans.

Today, we’ll take a look at how you can use your customer experience journey, map it, and integrate it into your account plans for a more precise, accurate, and predictive plan. If you do it correctly, you can better predict what your customer might do next based on the actions of preview clients and even influence them at the right time for more premium services.

Why Map the Customer Experience?

If you don’t already have journey maps in place in your organization, you might wonder what they are in the first place. In many cases, marketing departments make use of the customer journey maps because they follow them from initial contact all the way through to their purchase. For marketing efforts, it’s crucial to understand the customer journey and set checkpoints along the way so they can consistently optimize their efforts and find new ways to make the buying process easier for the customer and the selling process easier for them.

It’s no secret that key account management and marketing are two entirely separate things. While marketing is concerned with reeling in new customers, you’re more concerned with keeping your clients happy and their goals moving forward. However, just because you two are working towards different goals doesn’t mean that you can’t borrow each other’s tools to help you get there.

A Customer Journey Map will help you create more streamlined account plans that realistically reflect the steps, pain points, goals, and needs of a customer as they develop a relationship. If you can get your art of relationship building down to a science with this new, revamped account plan, you’ll have better odds of repeating that success with future clients. Let’s take a look at some of the components of a typical customer journey map and how they can relate to your key account management efforts.

Components of a Typical Customer Journey Map

In a typical Customer Journey Map, you’re going to find a few of the following components:

First, you’ll have buyer personas, which are essentially a representation of your target customers (in your case, your current customers) that includes details about their demographics, age, job title, experience, etc. Depending on your services, you might want to track different demographic metrics, and things such as job title and experience will be more important than their age.

Second, you’ll have the most important component when related to key account management, and that’s the customer stages segment. Before you can map out the entire process from pre-sale to delivery, you’ll need to figure out the various stages that your customers go through to get to your brand in the first place. With a better understanding of all of the stages along the way, you can better influence the customer’s behavior, improve your services, and provide them with more value in your account management work.

Third, in order to create an account plan based around the customer journey map, you need an in-depth appreciation and understanding of your customer’s goals and how they relate to your products and services. Key account management is all about delivering the win-win outcomes that will practically guarantee success time and time again. With this in-depth understanding, you can create a winning game plan that you can use to replicate for success organization-wide.

Fourth, you should have a clear-cut timeframe in mind for the account plan. While nothing in life ever stays on schedule 100% of the time, having at least some way to measure the time that’s passed between each step will ensure that your customer is moving through the purchase cycle smoothly and you’re delivering the right results and the right advice at the right time.

Finally, you need to leave room in your customer journey map for your customer’s emotions. Key account management might be all about business on the outside, but in reality, it’s a very emotional experience on both ends. You need to make sure that you are keeping your customers satisfied and impressing them time and time again with your products and services. With these emotions, you also need a backup plan for the times they are upset with you, and if you have worked with clients before, you know they can get pretty upset from time to time.

With all of these components, let’s consider the actual stages that your customer goes through during the journey.

The Phases from Pre-Sale to Delivery

So, to fill out your new account plan, it’s best to fill in the top line with at least a few of the important phases that your customers go through from pre-sale to delivery and beyond. Typically, it all starts with awareness, but rather than thinking in the marketing sense where your customer is first becoming aware of your company, since they already work with you, it’s more related to their awareness of new products or services that your company is offering.

After awareness, they move into the consideration and decision stage. They’ll be weighing their options and deciding whether, based on their past experience with you, the new product or service is worth the extra investment. Before your client gets to this stage, you need to have a strong argument and a record to brag about to them to showcase their wins, growth, and how you have helped their organization become better.

The final stage is conversion and retention where they will agree to add these new services or products to their subscription, and you keep them on as a client, with just more revenue coming from them every month. With this final stage complete, you can then essentially start the entire journey over again and rinse and repeat.

Using a customer experience journey map for account planning can help you become more predictive of how your customers respond, but these phases are just a high-level view of how it all works. The reality is, there are still a few blanks that you need to fill in to ensure that your key account management team is a well-oiled, smooth-running machine.

What Are Your Customers’ Pain Points?

The first set of blanks that you want to fill in with your account plans are the pain points that your customers experience along the way. Every organization will have different customers, and these customers might have wildly different pain points as well. It’s crucial that you understand not only what makes your customers happy, but what their annoyances have been in the past. Whether they have complaints about you or other service providers, with a better understanding of their pain points, you can better target them and sell more effectively.

You should consider the pain points for every phase of the buyer journey and how you can capitalize on them and help your customers overcome them throughout the process. For example, during the initial awareness stage, your customers might have found in the past that they couldn’t ever learn about how a product or service directly relates to their organization and goals. Instead, they were met with a pushy salesperson that promised anything and everything it took to get them to sign up. To overcome this, you do what you do best, and come to them as their Trusted Advisor that knows about their business, goals, challenges, and hopes for the future, and you can present your premium services as the specific solution.

Understanding these pain points of your customer will enable you to speak their language and really reach out without having to push too hard. Your job is to listen, and if your account plan is tight and holds water, you can predict when if the best time to sell to them along with objections they might have, and what they are most worried about in the process.

How Could the Process be Easier for Your Team?

While your customers’ pain points are important to understand, you also want to consider the internal pain points of your team. How could their lives be easier? Being a key account manager is a pretty stressful job, and there are a ton of moving pieces. What snags do you always hit when trying to work with your clients? For some, it might be that they don’t have enough insight into their clients, for others it could be that their technology and tools aren’t up to date, leaving them to do their job the hard way.

Consult with other members of your team and listen to determine ways that your internal processes could be improved. Specifically, you want to know the pain points associated with account plans and how they improve their relationships. Whether it means you need to invest in a new account management package with included Account Plan Templates or it means that you need to reduce the time it takes to onboard a client, track all pain points and incorporate fallback plans into your account plans.

Make Your Account Plans Actionable

Along with laying out the phases of the customer journey and what you plan to do for your customer in each one, you need to make sure that your account plan is actionable. You should be able to jump to any point and see a clear set of instructions on what to do next. As you’re writing and building out your account plans, consider what would be a good step for you to take, no matter how big or small.

For every action item, you should list who is in charge along with ideal delivery dates to keep the entire process moving forward and on time. You want to set your sights high but also keep everything in perspective, so you aren’t overpromising your clients anything and setting yourself up for failure. Make everything actionable and more like a to-do list so you can ensure that you never miss your opportunity down the line to either bolster sales or grow the relationship at the minimum.

Continually Make Improvements

Finally, it’s important to remember that your account plans aren’t written in stone. You should always look for new opportunities for improvement and update them as your clients’ needs and wants change, and as they move through the buyer journey. This proactive approach will keep things fresh and prevent you from making the same mistake again and again.

If you at any point identify an area that isn’t quite working, don’t just keep doing it over and over again with hopes you’ll have different results and fix it! With that in mind, you also don’t need to reinvent the wheel whenever you onboard a new client or one moves through the customer journey. Using Kapta, you’ll be able to reuse old account plan templates and repeat your success with every client.

How Kapta Can Help

Schedule a free demo of Kapta and see for yourself here.

Invest in Key Account Management Software, Not your CRM

July 15, 2019/in Key Account Management /by Lesley Poladsky

Without the right tools, you can’t be nearly as effective, efficient, and successful. Whether you’re building a house or a relationship, you can’t be your best if your tools of choice aren’t correct. In the account management world, all too often we see that companies would rather jerry-rig their CRM platform to do high-level account management work, and it’s hurting them and their customers in the end.

Although CRMs do have their place in parts of your organization, once the client has signed on, the best way to deliver on your promises and make them successful is to export their data to a different platform. If not, you could be running around in circles, putting out fire after fire, and spreading yourself too thin because your account management system provides little to no insight, and doesn’t allow you to be as strategic as you need to be in a highly competitive field.

Are you still using a CRM platform for all of your key account management tasks? It’s time to stop. Here’s why:

CRMs Have Their Place – It’s Just Not in the Account Management Department

CRM platforms have their place, and a few years ago, they were practically the gold standard when it came to tracking and managing a client or contact as they moved through the sales funnel. What they mostly have going for them is their dead-simple functions that pretty much anyone can log on and start using with minimal onboarding.

Before the sale, when there really isn’t much to track besides a name, phone number, email, last contact, and general notes, CRM platforms are fine enough. If you want to put all of the heavy lifting on the back of the sale rep, having this digital Rolodex can help them make sure they’re calling the right number and speaking to the right person.

What if you want to do more than that, however? What if you want to see how a relationship has grown and progressed over time? What if you want to plan the next steps and future steps after those steps? What if you want to keep track of wins and losses? Well, it is kind of possible with a CRM and a selection of other tools, but it’s not nearly as effective as you might think…

Fixing Something That Will Never Work

More times than not, we’ll see that organizations are using way too many software tools to get the job done. In a way, their key account management department is held together with digital duct tape, which can lead to trouble down the line when it all falls apart, or a client asks a question about something that isn’t in the notes tab. If all you care about is selling the product to the customer and then leaving them hanging until their QBR, by all means, use a CRM platform. If you want to actually become that customer’s Trusted Advisor and learn their business inside and out with the promise of growing the account, cancel your CRM subscription immediately.

The market is very competitive, and you need to separate your company from being just another vendor to being your customer’s Strategic Advisor that they can ask about anything and everything. CRM tools are far too limited to help you attain that title not to mention you’re wasting money on a subscription to multiple platforms jerry-rigged together. The hard fact is the CRM platform is outdated and can’t handle the demands of the modern customer and key account management team. It takes too much effort to get them to work like they are supposed to and account managers end up spending most of their time trying to play computer programmer than their actual role and talking to clients.

Relationships Matter More than Sales

As we enter uncertain economic times, you might be thinking that taking away your sales platform is the exact opposite of what you should do. You need to focus on hunting more and more clients to brace for impact, right? While you shouldn’t ever stop growing, in tough times, landing more brands and clients can be a waste of resources, especially since your strategic accounts can make up 70% of your organization’s revenue.

Strategic accounts are the ones that have been there for you for years, and over that time, you’ve come to know their business, goals, needs, and challenges inside and out. The problem is, if the account management and sales teams are using the same ad-hoc CRM platform, you won’t be able to fully deliver on your promises or make any real headway on the account (at least not as much as you could.)

With a fully-optimized key account management platform, you’ll be able to better manage your accounts and ensure that your key accounts are happy and ready to continue investing in your services. Remember, your key accounts are more likely to buy premium services from you and likely spend more on your services and products every month than other accounts. Take care of them, and they’ll take care of you, and the relationship will always trump new clients.

You Must Be Precise

To take care of your key accounts, you need to be precise. While your strategic clients tend to be more forgiving than newer accounts, you still can’t be sloppy and make mistakes in their account management. A CRM, unfortunately, won’t be very forgiving, and when key account management teams rely on CRM platforms, mistakes are bound to happen. Whether that’s a missed meeting because the platform doesn’t schedule them or a missed note that leaves you unprepared at the next review, your platform can do more damage to your relationships than you might think.

You don’t want to run into any surprises when it comes to your biggest accounts, but your CRM isn’t built to tell the future. It’s built to manage contact information and pipeline data and not much else. Your clients turn to you as their Trusted Advisor so you must understand their business and industry to the fullest. A CRM won’t provide you with the insight that you need to see where you stand with your clients. Instead, you’ll just know that you talked to X person a month ago and they haven’t called so everything must be fine.

A successful key account management department doesn’t operate on uncertainty, so it’s crucial that you know where each account stands at any given moment. While the CRM will tell you basic information and update you about the accounts, when there are better, more in-depth tools available, your clients are depending on you to use them.

Bring Your Account Management into the Future

These days, everyone is online. Whether updating their LinkedIn feeds or looking at funny cat pictures, your clients are always connected. Why isn’t your account management team? Anything can happen at any time, and although we don’t welcome uncertainty, we have to know whenever an emergency is imminent.

Because we’re all so connected, we’ve come to expect it in a variety of areas from food delivery to account management. If your team is using a platform that hasn’t seen any major changes in the last five years, you might as well be using a typewriter to handle your accounts. The modern key account management team requires modern solutions that can adapt and do all of the heavy lifting.

The days of being bogged down in spreadsheets, emails, and pipelines are long gone, and instead, the best teams have autonomous programs handle all of the technical work while they work with people. In a way, by using modern, cutting edge technology, the modern account management team is taking everything back to its roots: relationship building.

Your customers will also notice when you bring the team into the future. You’ll have faster response times, better ideas, and your strategy will be so thorough and forward thinking that they’ll think you are some sort of mind reader when you predict their account’s future. The right tool can do all of this and more.

What the Right Tools for the Job Look Like

So, now that we’ve bashed CRM platforms for almost an entire post, what does a reliable, effective KAM platform look like? Well, there are a few uncompromising attributes that you need.

First, it needs to be easy to use. If it isn’t easy to use, the account management team won’t want to use it, and you’ll have a hard time convincing them to abandon their suite of CRM and other platforms. Getting the buy-in from the whole team is crucial, but if they can try it out and experience the workflow for themselves, they’ll soon come to your side.

Next, it shouldn’t be just a one-trick pony and should instead combine all of your favorite features and tools into one. Kapta includes many features that account managers use daily including the Account Planning tools to help make the process a breeze, Voice of Customer Insights, along with visuals so you can see the information that you need at a glance.

The platform should also foster collaboration and help you build relationships first and foremost. Being a successful key account manager means that you work well with others, and you can practically weave a strong relationship with somebody out of thin air (given enough time). Many CRM platforms, although called customer relationship management, aren’t very relationship-driven. They are more there to see how much money someone has spent and whether they are worth your effort—that isn’t good key account management.

Your key accounts always deserve your time and attention, that’s why they are your key accounts, and your KAM platform should reflect these priorities. In addition, you should build relationships with people on the rest of your team and collaborate to improve the workflow, processes, and results of the entire department. A rising tide raises all ships, so if your platform has room and tools to collaborate, it’s the way to go.

Summary

Having the right tools for the job can be the difference-maker in your account management duties. The problem is, too many organizations assume that the “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it” strategy applies to everything, including their department. Look, CRMs have their place, and sales teams across the world use them daily to great success. But, a KAM team has different needs, and their customers deserve better.

Bring your account management team into the future with a platform that was made for you, by account managers that know the common challenges and pain points of the modern-day key account management team.

How Kapta Can Help

Kapta is an all-in-one enterprise key account management platform that enables you to do more for your biggest clients. Rather than being stuck switching between app to app, Kapta offers all of the tools that key account managers need in one place. With this convenience in mind, by integrating Kapta into your daily workflow, you can spend less time bogged down in spreadsheets and more time talking to your clients and building and nourishing your relationship with the people that matter most to your business. Built for key account managers by key account managers, Kapta takes the CRM model and elevates it with premium features like Voice of Customer (VOC) Insights and the account health score feature, so you know where you stand with your accounts at any moment.

To try a free demo of Kapta, schedule one here.

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How Strategic Account Managers Should Approach Value Co-creation with Top Customers

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How Do You Co-Create Customer Value?

Transforming Your Client Management is About More than just Software

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Don’t Believe Us? Conduct An Internal Audit

How Long Does it Take to Build the Habit?

It’s Time to Get Organized

Who Will Use the Product?

Who Will Benefit from the Product?

Make Time to Review

Gather Feedback After Implementation

How Kapta Can Help

Why Map the Customer Experience?

Components of a Typical Customer Journey Map

The Phases from Pre-Sale to Delivery

What Are Your Customers’ Pain Points?

How Could the Process be Easier for Your Team?

Make Your Account Plans Actionable

Continually Make Improvements

How Kapta Can Help

CRMs Have Their Place – It’s Just Not in the Account Management Department

Fixing Something That Will Never Work

Relationships Matter More than Sales

You Must Be Precise

Bring Your Account Management into the Future

What the Right Tools for the Job Look Like

Summary

How Kapta Can Help

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Key Account Management
Insights and Best Practice

What Sets the Good Account Managers Apart from the Great Account Managers