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Customer Engagement
4 Dysfunctional Beliefs of Quarterly Business Reviews
When it comes to Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) most teams…
April 19, 2021/by Alex RaymondTips for Getting Off to a Good Start with Your New Strategic Accounts
For better or worse accounts get shaken up at the beginning of…
April 12, 2021/by Alex ThrasherCreating Personalized Touchpoints With Strategic Accounts When Meeting in Person Isn’t an Option
The last year has forced most of us to get very comfortable conducting…
April 5, 2021/by Jennifer PinterThe Best Way to Gauge Key Account Manager Performance
Key Account Managers are tasked with ongoing, dynamic business…
March 29, 2021/by Alex RaymondDo Your Key Account Managers Really Know Their Most Important Accounts?
I have sat in and reviewed hundreds of account plans from key…
March 22, 2021/by Alex RaymondThree Tips For Key Account Managers To Impress in Your Next One-On-One
If you were working in sales last year you sure earned your paycheck.…
March 15, 2021/by Jennifer PinterHow Analytics is Improving Strategic Account Management
Psychology 101 tells us that responding with reinforcement when…
March 8, 2021/by Jennifer PinterThe Psychology of the Change Curve – The Top 3 Mistakes Account Management Leaders Make When Implementing New Strategies
Change is difficult whether it is personal or work-related. Organizations…
March 1, 2021/by Margot HowardInterview Questions to Help You Identify The Best Account Management Talent
Poor hiring decisions can be quite expensive. The costs involved…
February 22, 2021/by Jennifer PinterWhy Your QBRs aren’t as Effective As They Could Be
Only 29% of B2B customers are fully engaged and the other 71%…
February 15, 2021/by Alex RaymondThree Books Every Strategic Account Manager Should Read in 2021
2021 began, for most of us, as a year that didn’t feel very…
February 8, 2021/by Jennifer PinterIntroducing KAMGenius – the Best Tool for Account Managers to Grow in Their Career
If you have been following me for some time, you know I always…
February 1, 2021/by Alex RaymondCategories
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4 Dysfunctional Beliefs of Quarterly Business Reviews
/in Key Account Management /by Alex RaymondWhen it comes to Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) most teams are not taking full advantage of the opportunity these meetings present. The opportunity to work with, have a conversation with and build a joint vision of the future with their key customers. Most people are not putting their best foot forward to engage the customer or get what they really want out of these quarterly reviews. As a result, they’re leaving themselves open to risk.
Kapta did some research by speaking with senior executives in various industries. We asked them what they think about the QBR meetings their vendors are doing with them, how it’s going, and what they’d change about these reviews. We found that only 28% of your customers think QBRs are a valuable use of their time. The other 72% told us it’s a waste of time, these meetings are too long, too much information is presented, and the meetings are too tactical. Based on our conversations with these customer executives, they said that vendors talk a lot but don’t listen, don’t do their homework, and don’t ask the right questions. They also questioned the structure, frequency, and format of these meetings.
So, to really excel as account managers and be the trusted advisors or strategic partners you want to be with your customers, you’ve got to bridge this gap. You need to understand why there is a disconnect causing you not to be aligned with your customers. To do so you must change your mind by not using the wrong mental models within your QBRs. You have a set of false assumptions or dysfunctional beliefs about QBRs. They’re outdated and need to be updated so they’re aligned with current customer expectations of how you engage with them, work with them, and build partnerships with them. Let’s look at four dysfunctional beliefs around QBRs, how we can reframe them, and what actions we can take to change them.
Dysfunctional Belief #1: A QBR is a presentation
If you believe this you think you’ve got to show up with X number of PowerPoint slides, walk through all the slides one by one with the customer, and present all the information. You may also think you need to include things in your presentation like a photo of your office building, a product roadmap, or org charts. This only serves to crowd out the message you’re trying to deliver while causing you to simply show up and throw up during the QBR.
Reframe this belief so you think of a QBR as a fantastic opportunity to connect with your customers for a conversation about what matters most to them. So, you’re not showing up, just presenting, going through slides, and overwhelming your customers with data. You need to think of quarterly reviews as a huge opportunity where teams from both sides get together. A chance to talk, share ideas about what could be happening in the future, how things are going, and all the things that matter to the customer in a detailed conversation.
Actions to take to move away from this dysfunctional belief include rethinking how you spend your time with the customer. Whether you have 30, 60, or 90 minutes for the meeting, you want to make sure you’re making the best of that time. Start by having an agenda. Then share your agenda and slide decks with your customer 48 hours ahead of the meeting. This helps the customer prepare for a meaningful conversation. Then you and your team need to write down your questions as well. You can use the time to do a Voice of Customer (VOC) interview and learn more about your customer’s goals, needs, and initiatives so you can align behind them effectively. This is using the time in a more effective and strategic way.
Dysfunctional Belief #2: I have to do all the work myself
You may believe that as the account manager or CSM you need to do all the work yourself since it’s your account. You feel that you need to work with the customer, build the presentation, put on a show during the review, do all the talking, and run the meeting all by yourself.
Reframe this belief by thinking about the QBR as an opportunity to co-create or partner with your customer to create a meaningful conversation.
Actions to take to move away from this dysfunctional belief include getting your client more involved in preparing for the meeting. Ask for their input on the agenda. Have them contribute data and insights. Ask them to co-run the meeting with you to encourage a balanced conversation with both sides speaking equal amounts of time. The result is deeper engagement during a meeting that’s more productive and meaningful for all involved.
Dysfunctional Belief #3: QBRs are about playing defense
Believing this means you think you need to justify your existence to your customer because you’re a lowly vendor compared to your huge key account customer. And you feel you have to show up and do the QBRs to remind your customers of who you are, so you remain relevant to them, and so they don’t drop you. This means you don’t have a proactive offensive plan and wind up feeling reactive, leading to less effective results.
Reframe this belief by remembering that you’re a strategic partner for your clients, you’ve earned a seat at the table. They’re working with you and your company for your insights, expertise, and the value you provide. You help them meet their goals and focus on bigger picture items. So, don’t be defensive when it comes to QBRs. Be proactive about how you work with customers. Don’t play not to lose—play to win.
Actions to take to move away from this dysfunctional belief include going into the QBR ready to share points of view, big ideas, insights, benchmarks, and comparisons—all the things your customers hired you for. And remember the sales adage that ‘you get sent to who you sound like.’ So, in these meetings with executives on the customer’s side, talk like an executive. Be strategic by talking about big ideas. Lead the brainstorm, really showing up as a strategic partner or trusted advisor to your customer. When you do this, you’ll no longer feel the need to play defense.
Dysfunctional Belief #4: QBRs are backward-looking
You may believe that QBRs are called reviews because they are designed to look back at what has happened during the last 90 days, but they are so much more than that.
Reframe this belief by remembering that QBRs are an opportunity for a conversation co-created with your customer from a strategic place. So, these meetings can be future-focused as well and what transpired during the past quarter can be the starting point for that conversation about what’s next or where we go from here.
Actions to take to move away from this dysfunctional belief include preparing forward-looking, open-ended strategic questions to prompt great discussion while preparing for these meetings. These questions should be about working and partnering on mutual goals, ideas, and milestones. And getting a commitment from both sides as to who’s doing which activities to work toward these shared targets.
Conclusion
Reframing these dysfunctional beliefs will lead to better QBRs and the following results:
Kapta has all the tools to help facilitate the QBR preparation process. Interested in making QBR preparation easier? Learn more in our KAMGenius online training course.
Tips for Getting Off to a Good Start with Your New Strategic Accounts
/in Account Management, Customer Engagement, Key Account Management, Strategic Account Management /by Alex ThrasherFor better or worse accounts get shaken up at the beginning of the new year. You might be left to build new relationships at important companies that you don’t have a relationship with or even worse, customers that didn’t have a strong relationship with their previous account manager. How can you get off on the right foot with your POC and build engagement with your new accounts?
Meeting Existing Customers for the First Time
Many key account managers will jump on the phone for the first time with a new account and put the ownness on their customers to update them on the account status and history. While open-ended questions are an important part of the sales process, doing this with a transitioning contact or account can make you look unprepared and unknowledgeable. Not a great place to start. In a perfect world, the previous account manager would have left detailed notes in salesforce, formally transitioned the account to you, and been on great terms with the customer. However, as any account manager knows – this isn’t always the case.
Whether your account is disengaged, unhappy, or excited to meet you, properly preparing for your first meeting with thoughtful questions can make all the difference in starting out on the right foot or even be the first step to turning around an account headed towards churn.
When the Account Notes are Bare Bones…
Meeting an account for the first time without solid account notes is a difficult situation to be in. Unfortunately, most account managers will find themselves here on more than one occasion. That doesn’t mean that your first meeting can’t be productive or thoughtful. Account managers in this predicament should do their homework to show their customers they are committed to their success.
Suggestions for Research
Talk Track with Customers
Start, Stop, Continue
Have a frank start, stop, continue conversation with your customer. This is a quick, sometimes delicate, 15-minute conversation – no need to belabor anything or talk bad about a past account manager who worked with your account last year. These conversations can be great discovery calls that can drive engagement and help you figure out where things might be falling off track, or where conversations should pivot down the road.
Start:
What topics were missing from meetings that the customer wants to include? What actions were missing that they want you to do for them? This conversation should have a value-driven lens and can help you understand where the customer’s priorities are and how they like to work with their account manager.
Stop:
What did they dislike about the partnership that they wanted to stop? Make sure to ask discovery questions to get to the real root of the problem with these. For instance, let’s say your customer tells you they want to stop having weekly check-in calls and only meet once a month because they are busy, and the calls aren’t helpful. Dig into that further! Are the topics covered not relevant? What would make those calls more valuable to them?
Continue:
What did they like about working with their last account manager that they would like you to continue to do? You can dig into these suggestions further by asking goal-oriented questions. For example, if a customer said that quarterly product roadmap meetings are something, they want to continue you can ask them how roadmap meetings help them accomplish their goal of X?
These questions are a great way to spark account management discovery and give you some thoughtful fodder to drive account plans and your communication strategy.
Conclusion:
Customers are easier to lose and harder to engage than ever. Starting off on the right foot with your accounts and demonstrating you are a thoughtful, trusted advisor can make all the difference in keeping your customers happy and successful.
Want to learn more account management best practices? Take our online account management training course.
Creating Personalized Touchpoints With Strategic Accounts When Meeting in Person Isn’t an Option
/in Customer Engagement /by Jennifer PinterThe last year has forced most of us to get very comfortable conducting business in ways outside of our norm. In fact, many experts agree that certain workplace trends will be changed forever: things like travel and flexibility in where we work from, for example, are likely to be reshaped permanently. And while there’s plenty to miss about the days of interacting in-person, the new normal of virtual meetings and gathering remotely may actually allow us to connect face-to-face more, which, if approached with the right strategy, could be a boon to customer relationship building.
With people more willing than ever to meet via video conference, there’s a lot you can do to keep customer relationships strong despite the distance. So while in-person meetings remain on hold (and “Zoom fatigue” is certainly real), it’s nevertheless possible to create personalized touchpoints among your high-value accounts. Here are some ideas to keep virtual meetings fresh and keep engagement high among your strategic accounts, even as we continue to work remotely.
Relationships Are King
Let us take a step back to say what can’t be said enough: B2B relationships are fragile. It was true pre-pandemic, and it will remain true as long as customers continue to have more choices and more power (which it seems they do, by the day). The greatest tool at an account manager’s disposal is their own human ability to connect with their customer—and not just names and titles. A successful account manager will actively work to understand the customer’s needs, and to ultimately build a relationship that’s unique to them.
Know Your Customer
When building customer relationships, the goal is to create a partnership that puts YOU at the top of the client’s call list. Take an honest account of your existing client relationships: has your work together been on autopilot? Do you understand your client’s unique objectives and do you actively work with those objectives in mind? If you can’t definitively say that those are the kinds of customer relationships you have now, there are things you can do to start moving in that direction—today.
It’s easy to put off big conversations for a future date, but “back to normal”, whatever that will mean, is still far away; now is the time to schedule a face-to-face video call to dive deeper into your customer’s needs, expectations and goals. Better yet, use
Kapta’s Voice of Customer tools to help you jump start the process, and learn to exceed your customer’s expectations and become a trusted advisor.
Keep It Consistent
Relationship building and Voice of Customer exercises are not a one-time act. Continuous relationship management involves staying in regular contact, perpetually anticipating a customer’s needs, and devising ongoing strategies to solve the customer’s problems. To say it’s a lot of work is an understatement. But it’s critical that key account managers not let this be a time that communication drops. Video calls and virtual conferencing have become the norm; it’s time to think about creative ways that these now mainstream channels of communication can work for you.
Go Beyond “Checking in” and Add Value
Ok, ok, I get it—despite the optimistic picture I’ve painted, at the end of the day, all of what’s being suggested here requires yet…another…video…call. But if relationships are king, then communication is queen, and for important or longer conversations, as well as general getting-to-know-you chit-chat, a video call is still better than an email or phone call. In addition to the practices listed above, here are some ways to keep customer interactions engaging, and to add value every time you meet.
1) “Coffee Chats”
Try to remember the last time a “coffee” meeting turned up on your calendar…now imagine seeing that invitation showing up today! At the very least, your attention would be piqued, right? A reimagined, virtual take on the coffee chat is a creative way to surprise and delight your clients.
Have your account representatives electronically send $10 Starbucks gift cards (or Dunkin, or whatever the locally convenient java option is) to customers before a sync-up or account review. This is also an impactful way to introduce yourself to a new contact or business team. And hey, maybe you’ll all get a laugh out of the not-so-distant throwback to the coffee chats of yore.
2) Celebratory Donuts
Donuts are cake, and cake means celebration. So what better way to mark the completion of a major project or a successful quarterly review than with donuts? Send your client contacts an electronic gift card or QR code to order donuts for themselves, or take it a step further and have donuts delivered.
3) $20 Charity Donations
Up the ante by incentivising your clients through charity. Create a promotion around a desired touchpoint—for example, a top-of-the-quarter kickoff call to discuss the year’s successes so far and areas of focus for the coming months—and offer to make a donation to the charity of choice for any clients who agree to join. This gives you the opportunity to engage in a key conversation, and provides an added feel-good factor for your client, too.
Conclusion
Working remote and keeping distanced has taken customer relationship building from what was already a heavy lift, and made it, at times, seem impossible. But it’s well worth exploring how our “new normal”—and the necessity of over-communicating, to compensate for distance—can be used creatively. To see how Kapta can help support, accelerate and mentor your efforts, schedule a personal demo today.