Customer Engagement
Insights and Best Practice
Learn how Key Account Managers are making positive impacts, solving real problems for their customers, and building best practices inside their organizations.
Customer Engagement
How to Run A Great Client Workshop
In a world with email and text and Slack and Zoom, it’s easier…
March 30, 2020/by Alex RaymondProfile of a Great Account Manager
In a cross-functional team, Key Account Managers are the voice…
March 23, 2020/by Alex RaymondYour CRM is Not Enough: Why Companies are Using Dedicated KAM Software to Build Customer Engagement
In our line of work, we talk to all kinds of people, from all…
March 16, 2020/by Ben BlaskoCustomer Service vs Customer Centricity
At Kapta, we believe strongly in the power of a customer-centric…
March 9, 2020/by Kelly SharpIdentifying Key Accounts
If you’re new to Key Account Management, one of the first steps…
March 2, 2020/by Lesley PoladskyKey Account Management in 2020: Why It Matters More Than Ever
Customers have always been important to business—and they’ve…
February 24, 2020/by Alex RaymondWhy Ad Agencies are Investing in Key Account Management
Key Account Management is the art of engaging with high-value…
February 17, 2020/by Kelly SharpPerformance Reviews for Key Account Managers
When it’s time to do a performance review for your key account…
February 10, 2020/by Lesley PoladskyMake Your Account Reviews Count: Your guide to leading account reviews that drive client satisfaction and open the door to organic growth
Don’t just check the box. Move the needle.
Account reviews…
February 3, 2020/by Alex RaymondAccount reviews…
When Things Go Wrong: Client Communication in a Crisis
Customer engagement is easy when things go well. And of course,…
January 27, 2020/by Lesley PoladskyTeam Building Inspiration for your Key Account Managers
We talk a lot about customer engagement here at Kapta, and there’s…
January 20, 2020/by Lesley PoladskyWhy Marketing Agencies Are Investing in Key Account Management
Key Account Management is the art of engaging with high-value…
January 13, 2020/by Alex RaymondCategories
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How to Run A Great Client Workshop
/in Customer Engagement /by Alex RaymondIn a world with email and text and Slack and Zoom, it’s easier than ever to communicate with your clients remotely. And there are some real benefits to doing so—efficiency, flexibility, and consistency, to name a few. Telecommunication is an excellent resource for day-to-day deliverables.
But the more things change, the more they stay the same: Sometimes, you need a face-to-face meeting. As champions of client management, we like to pick those meetings apart, exploring what makes them work—or not.
We’ve posted before about how to run a great account review, and now we want to talk a little bit about how to run a great client workshop. So what makes something a workshop? Workshops are designed to do just that: Work. Through active discussion and participation, they generate ideas and insights while gaining alignment from key stakeholders. Examples include:
No matter what kind of workshop or meeting you’re running, there are always some ground rules. First and foremost, they’re about the client, not you. You can’t just talk at or lecture the room for an hour (or a day) and expect to be successful; you have to invite active participation, and listen carefully to what you hear. Second, the idea isn’t necessarily to solve everything in the room that day. Rather, it’s to gather insights and gain alignment so you can return to your office and put together a plan or deliverable you feel confident is going to exceed their expectations.
Now that we’ve established what we mean by workshop, let’s explore some pointers for running a great one.
Get the Right People in the Room
One of the key goals of any workshop is to gain alignment. Not only between you and your customer, but also among different groups within your client’s organization. A workshop skillfully facilitated by a trusted 3rd party (you) is an excellent opportunity to bring different points of view into the open, and hopefully even hash them out as a step towards resolution.
We’ll talk more about alignment later on, but we mention it here because the goal of alignment informs whom you invite to the workshop. Make sure you have relevant key stakeholders from different functions and levels within your client’s organization. If you’re running an assessment workshop to develop a rollout plan for new marketing technology, make sure you have more than marketing and leadership in the room. Invite someone from IT, as well as someone from training/HR and finance. Every department that eventually needs to be on board to make the initiative successful should be at the workshop you’re running.
Leadership should always be present, both from your organization and the client’s. From your side, it demonstrates commitment to the client and also gives managers a chance to understand the account dynamics. From the client side, leadership adds credibility to your meeting, and you’ll give decision-makers a chance to weigh in on the team’s thoughts and plans early on, so they are less likely to derail things down the road.
Finally, when considering whom to invite, try to create balance in the room. If there are too many of you, clients might feel outnumbered, and reticent to participate. If there are too many of them, you may not be able to track input and conversations well. If their senior leadership is present, make sure yours is, too. Nothing is a perfect, 1-for-1 situation, but a well-balanced room is more likely to be successful.
Prompt, then Listen
Remember, putting customers first means listening to customers. It’s tempting in a workshop situation to want to demonstrate your value and expertise—but this can turn into a lecture. The real goal is to unearth your client’s goals, expectations, insights, and concerns. Workshops are an invaluable opportunity to know your client better—but only if you listen.
Make sure when you’re planning your workshop (and putting the deck together) that you build in plenty of opportunities for active discussion and engagement. In fact, discussion and engagement are part of what makes it a workshop, rather than a presentation.
That said, don’t give your clients blank page syndrome. Nothing’s worse than posing an open-ended question to a room and getting…crickets. It’s always easier for people to react to something that already exists than to generate something from nothing, so do your homework and come prepared with things to react to. This could be well-informed ideas to get the conversation going, or templates for small group discussions, with examples of what you’re looking for so the client can wrap their heads around the exercise. You can even provide pre-reads or homework to get them in the right mindset, but be realistic about what people are willing to do.
An example of prompt, then listen could be a SWOT analysis. Spend time with your team prior to the workshop brainstorming 2-3 things you can add to each category (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats.) That way, when you pull up the template in the workshop, you’ll have ideas ready to include, and they’ll have something to react to. The conversation will take off from there.
Use active listening skills, including repeating back what you’ve heard from the room. “Just to make sure I understand, you’re saying…” Use workshops to get absolute clarity from your customers.
Stand Up
It’s just a true thing about people: We need to move. The longer you sit in a room, the less engaged you’ll get. As a facilitator, you can invite active participation, and you can make sure it involves movement.
Here are a couple of examples:
Look for minor ways to mix up the space and break up the day. You’ll get the blood flowing, and with it, the ideas.
Actively Seek Alignment
Gaining stakeholder alignment is one of the biggest benefits of a client workshop, so we’re going to return to it for a while here. In fact, if you sense competing factions within your customer’s organization, and you know that could be problematic for you down the line, it might be time to run a workshop, just to get everyone in a room to hash things out.
Let’s say you’re running a messaging workshop, and you’ve started with audience mindset mapping. Everyone has broken into small groups, and each group has taken on the role of a different audience type. They return to the main group to present their findings, and a rift emerges: Client leadership thinks their customer wants one thing. But the people who actually interact with customers know they want another.
For you as a facilitator, this moment presents tension, but also opportunity. Don’t whitewash over the disagreement; pause and explore. Remain neutral and observant, using active listening to repeat back what people have said. For example, “This is really interesting. I hear you saying X, and I hear you saying Y. I want to explore this a little bit more because it’s so important to understand your customers’ mindset.”
Remember, as a 3rd party facilitator, you can create a productive space for disagreements among your customers. By exploring those in a skillful way, you will (a) learn more about your customer, and (b) start to forge a path towards resolution.
Pay Attention to the Dynamics
Being in a room with your clients gives you a unique opportunity to read between the lines—but only if you’re paying attention. Who commands the room? Who influences the people around them? Where are there good relationships and connections you can leverage later on?
By observing your customers interact with each other, you can get a sense of the internal dynamics beyond what the org chart alone can tell you. But again, only if you’re paying attention—and that goes back to a main theme in running a great client workshop: Come prepared to listen.
Capture Great Notes
A great workshop is satisfying to everyone involved. Clients feel refreshed; they’re glad they came, even if it took time from their work week. Your team is refreshed; they have new ideas and insights to work with for the next deliverables. Everyone leaves on a high note.
But a lot of that work is wasted if you don’t capture great notes. The answer is pretty simple: You need at least one person in the room whose whole job is to capture notes. Whether it’s taking pictures with their phone of notes on a wall, or simply writing down what they hear in the room, they are fully dedicated to note-taking so that primary facilitators and participants can be fully dedicated to the people and the energy in the room.
Have A Plan for Follow Up
One of the most painful things that can happen in a workshop is going down a rabbit hole of detail when you don’t need to. The goal of a good client workshop is to generate ideas, gain alignment, and understand your clients better—not to wordsmith something to death.
You’ll find it’s easier to steer the conversation back to the task at hand if you have a clear plan for follow up. For example, “We’re going to take everything we’ve learned and discussed today and come back to you with 2-3 potential positioning statements. So don’t worry about exact wording right now.”
Once you have a plan for follow-up, make sure to follow through. Send notes and key takeaways sooner than later, to keep everyone’s memory fresh. Send applicable deliverables on a good timeline. The more you keep the momentum of the workshop going, the better.
Conclusion
Running a great client workshop is ultimately about making the most an in-person opportunity to engage clients, understanding them better so you can deliver even better work for them. Like anything, you can get better at running client workshops with practice, so if there’s someone at your organization who’s really good at it, make it your goal to attend workshops with them, and learn the fine art of facilitation.
At Kapta, client knowledge is the first pillar of Our KAM Process, and we provide tools—such as SWOT analysis planning—to help inform great workshops, and capture the results so the entire team can view what you learned. Because we’re champions of customer engagement, we’re also champions of great customer workshops.
To learn more about how we can support you in customer engagement, including designing and running engaging workshops, schedule your personal demo today.
Profile of a Great Account Manager
/in Key Account Management /by Alex RaymondIn a cross-functional team, Key Account Managers are the voice of the client in the room. While everyone on the team—and in fact, everyone throughout the company—should be focused on delivering for the customer, KAMs are responsible for making sure it’s happening. They do that by owning and developing the client relationship, knowing the client better than anyone in their organization—and sometimes even better than the client knows themselves.
KAMs use their client knowledge to develop and oversee action plans designed to meet the customer’s goals. The time they spend with clients becomes a key asset to the team, allowing KAMs to anticipate client feedback before the client even sees the product or deliverable. The team can proactively adjust, or at least prepare a response. Either way, through the KAM’s insight and involvement, every customer interaction can be more productive.
There are several tasks and responsibilities that go into making this happen (it is, after all, a full-time job); however, today we’re going to talk about personality traits that make a great account manager. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it highlights some things we’ve noticed in highly effective account managers across many industries. Great account managers are:
We’ll take a closer look at each of these traits in the post below. Read on to see if you—or your team—fits the profile of a great KAM.
1) Great Account Managers are Dedicated
Account managers are tireless advocates for their clients. They put their customers’ needs ahead of their own, always working to help their clients succeed and grow.
At a minimum, this takes time. It’s why we always say Key Account Managers are those with 5 or fewer clients on their roster. Any more than that, and it’s hard to put in the hours it takes to maintain clear, consistent, proactive communication.
Every good client call requires preparation, note-taking, a post-call contact report, follow-up with the internal team to share feedback or action items, and some kind of action or deliverable to close the loop. And that’s just the day-to-day stuff—good account managers are also initiating contact anytime they sense an opportunity or a challenge for their customer. Regulatory changes, competitive threats, market fluctuations—anything that could disrupt their customer’s business merits a proactive point of view and proposed plan of action.
Putting customers first also means great account managers are willing to set aside their own agenda in order to truly listen to customers. Rather than obsess over their own quotas, they listen carefully to what their clients are trying to achieve, and work to make that happen first. Rather than react defensively to client feedback, they make space to hear what clients have to say, and they think carefully before responding. Often, this is as simple as saying, “I hear your concern. I’ll take this back to the team and we’ll figure out a solution. We will follow up shortly. Thank you again for sharing your feedback.”
And finally, dedication means the obvious: Account managers are going to help their clients succeed even when it’s hard. They’re not fair weather partners who only work with their customers when the requests are easy or expected; they roll with the punches and work with their team to find creative solutions in the face of market, regulatory, design, timeline, and other challenges.
2) Great Account Managers are Detail-Oriented
In a perfect world, Account Managers are part of a cross-functional team in which everyone is detail-oriented. They have project managers keeping a careful eye on timelines and budgets and everyone is reading emails carefully and attentively.
But we don’t live in a perfect world. Account managers are the gatekeepers to the client relationship—they’re often the ones who send a deliverable to the client, and they’re also often the ones receiving feedback first hand. It’s imperative they keep careful records and double check frequently to make sure the customer is getting what they expected. Remember: Account managers are the voice of the client in the room. It takes attention to detail to make sure they’re an accurate voice.
3) Great Account Managers are Diplomatic
This is a big one. At the end of the day, account management is relationship management. And that means navigating the complicated waters of interpersonal dynamics, made even more challenging by the pervasive knowledge that customers can always choose to leave.
One thing that makes communication difficult is a mistake on the part of you or your team. We’ve posted here before about communicating when things go wrong, and we’ll summarize here:
Diplomatic people—especially those with lots of client experience—know instinctively when to accept full responsibility, and when to share accountability with the client. They know when to listen and when to push back. More importantly, they know how to push back while still moving the relationship forward.
Another instance of difficult communication that requires diplomacy is when your team disagrees with the client on the best path forward. The solution isn’t to just always, immediately, do it the customer’s way—after all, they hired you because presumably they need your expertise. Real client advocacy requires continuous, strategic thought about what’s actually going to get your clients where they want to go, even if that means pushing back. The key is to do so while still respecting the customer’s vision, ideas, and knowledge, so that even as they take your recommendation, they feel ownership and control over the process.
4) Great Account Management Teams are Diverse
There’s no one kind of client, and there’s no one kind of client manager. Leadership teams should seek a truly diverse group of account managers, where every person brings different background, insights, and outlook to the group. You’re more likely to find the right fit between clients (especially challenging ones) and the KAMs on your team if your KAMs aren’t carbon copies of each other.
Focus on finding people who are dedicated, detail-oriented, and diplomatic, with the experience you need for the title you’re hiring for. You’ll find there’s an incredibly diverse pool of talent that fits the bill—make sure your team reflects that.
Conclusion
Every account manager wants to be more than a vendor—they want to be a Trusted Advisor. To be a Trusted Advisor, you have to earn trust. That means you demonstrate time and time again that you are acting with your client’s best interest at heart. When your customer knows you are dedicated, detail-oriented, and diplomatic, they’ll be more likely to listen to your recommendations—and you’ll create a more strategic, more mutually rewarding partnership.
Kapta understands what it takes to be a great account manager, and supports KAMs along the way. Our Voice of Customer tools help reveal and record insights into what clients are trying to achieve, so KAMs can keep those goals top-of-mind as they develop action plans.
Kapta also helps KAMs keep track of the details that matter, with a single source of truth for contact reports, notes, commitments, deliverables, and more. Rather than tracking email, Slack, attachments, meeting notes, and more, KAMs have one place to go to confirm they’ve done everything they said they would do.
To see how Kapta supports great account managers, schedule a personal demo today.
Your CRM is Not Enough: Why Companies are Using Dedicated KAM Software to Build Customer Engagement
/in Customer Engagement /by Ben BlaskoIn our line of work, we talk to all kinds of people, from all kinds of companies, all day long. And we see the same thing over and over again: Most companies are not as customer-centric as they think they are. We know because there are a few tell-tale signs:
In short, most companies think they are customer-centric because they have customers and they don’t want to lose them. But they haven’t operationalized a business model that actually puts their customers first.
Meantime, the tools they’re using—particularly their CRM—reinforce existing behavioral norms. In contrast, dedicated KAM software prompts and reinforces behaviors that build strategic relationships with customers, helping you deliver on their growth goals. When you do, you achieve Trusted Advisor status, and your own growth follows.
Let’s take a closer look at why CRM isn’t enough to implement true customer-centricity, and why you need dedicated KAM software to support your people in this effort.
Transactional vs Strategic
We recently reviewed a detailed methodology for identifying Key Accounts. It starts with gathering all your accounts into a portfolio analysis, then applying a set of filters. One of the filters is this simple question: Is this a strategic relationship? Or a transactional one?
Strategic accounts are those with real growth potential. Maybe they’re a government entity, a large corporation, or a fast-growing company. Their needs are recurring and complex, and you know there’s more business to be had at that organization, both in terms of volume and diversity. In addition, what they need to succeed aligns with what you offer—in other words, your goals are compatible, and you’re both set up for a successful partnership.
A transactional account is one where they really only need one product or service from you, and there’s not much room to grow. There’s nothing wrong with transactional clients, especially if that’s your business model. And in that case, your CRM tool may be completely sufficient.
But the only way to fully unlock the potential of strategic customers is through skilled relationship management. Some companies call this Key Account Management (KAM); others call it Strategic Account Management (SAM). At firms like marketing agencies, where every account is a key account, they just call it account management or client management. For the sake of this post, we’ll call it KAM, and summarize it as a process designed to foster long-term, mutually successful partnerships with strategic clients. It’s also a process that requires purpose-built technology.
Generating Leads vs Building Relationships
Traditional CRMs are a sales tool at heart. They excel at tracking transactional behaviors, such as:
For a sales team whose focus is drumming up new business, a CRM is a useful tool. However, for a key account management team whose focus is working closely with 1 or 2 high-value accounts, a CRM falls short.
Dedicated KAM software, in contrast, can help you:
And here’s the even better thing: when you know your customers, act on their behalf, and demonstrate value by measuring what matters to them, you’ll find yourself growing the business through contract renewals and SOW increases. Not only that, but your reputation as a partner will travel beyond your current clients, opening the door to new business. In other words, by focusing on key account management, and truly delivering for your clients, you’ll create compelling case studies for new business pitches, too.
Data vs Insights
Because of all the transactions it tracks, a CRM is a vast repository of numbers. But are they the numbers you need? Again, a customer-centric approach to key account management means everything you do, and therefore everything you measure, ladders up to a customer goal.
Whereas a CRM requires you to dig through multiple data sets to find the answers you’re looking for, Kapta organizes metrics and reporting around customer goals, so you’re only ever a few clicks away from a relevant, meaningful report that speaks directly to a particular client, account, or deliverable.
Quality vs Quantity
At the end of the day, customer engagement is about a dynamic, 2-way relationship in which both parties feel successful. It takes consistent, meaningful conversations and skillful relationship management. And while no software can track all the nuances of human interactions, KAM software is set up to prompt and support the kinds of behaviors that lead to strong relationships: Maintaining contact, asking the right questions, capturing the answers, and turning them into meaningful action items that you track diligently.
In contrast, CRM is designed to monitor more superficial customer touchpoints. There’s no clear way to track the quality of your interactions, including what you promised and how you plan to deliver.
Conclusion
If you truly want to put customers first, your CRM is not enough. Kapta is key account management software, guided by Our KAM Process, to help you operationalize a customer-centric mindset.
Schedule a personal demo today to talk through your current approach to customers, and how we can help you build strategic, insightful, quality relationships with customers who’ll stay with you for the long run.