While you probably have essential KPIs for your accounts to make sure that you’re hitting your personal sales, profit, and usage targets, have you ever considered your key accounts’ KPIs? How do they track their success with your products and services? It might not seem important on the surface, but by better understanding how your customers measure success, you can be a better manager for their account.
We like to think of it in relation to sports; you can’t know how far you need to go to score points if you don’t know where the goal post is. Luckily you are a key account manager in 2018 and not decades ago because there are a variety of digital tools and platforms to help you uncover and manage your customer’s goals and expectations.
These are a few reasons why it is crucial you track your customer’s outcomes as a key account manager to ensure your relationship with them is successful for the long term.
Remember, Key Account Management is About Joint Success
In your relationships with customers, continuous success is about providing a win-win solution for both your key accounts and your organization. If you only focus on the success your company is achieving, you could lose sight of the bigger picture. As a key account manager, you should know exactly how your customers are tracking their success. By better understanding their KPIs you can adjust your measures of success to match theirs so while you’re putting points on the scoreboard, your clients are as well.
How Do They Define Success?
“Success” might seem like a pretty self-defined term, but in reality, each account will define their success differently. For this reason, you should be using a robust account management platform with the tools you need to ‘close the loop.’ In our experience working with key account managers, when it comes to tracking and measuring customer success, they aren’t effectively communicating with them about their expectations and desired outcomes. Even if they do, they don’t know how to use this information to adjust their relationship building strategies.
Kapta is much different than your traditional CRM and has built-in tools specifically geared toward key account managers to make their relationships simple to manage and grow. After your VOC interviews, you can input their answers into the program and accurately adjust your personal KPIs to match the customer’s. Over time, you’ll be able to see the progress that the account has made to ensure that your services are helping the customer achieve their desired success.
See how Kapta can help in your customer success tracking by requesting your free demo today.
You Are Their Trusted Advisor
To successfully fill the role of trusted advisor, you need to know where the goal posts are in regards to their success indicators. You can know all of the ins and the outs of their organizations products and services, but without understanding how they use your products and services, it can be hard to provide them with the advice they need to find success.
We find that it’s best to get down to the nitty-gritty details of their success tracking by asking detailed questions during your Voice of Customer interviews. Perhaps the most important question that you can ask either at the beginning of the relationship or after a few months working with the account is “What are your goals?”
You want to understand not only their long-term goals but also their short-term milestones as well. Because short-term goals will change throughout the year, by having a better grasp of the things they would like to accomplish in the coming months, you’ll be able to make better estimates in the ways they measure success with your company.
Why Are They Working with You?
Of all of the businesses filling your niche, why did they choose you? What made your company stand out from the rest, encouraging them to choose you as their trusted business advisor? If you can find the answer to this question, you’ll learn more about attributes or products that make your business stand out from the rest.
We recommend you refer to your SWOT analysis in which you identified your strengths as a key account manager. If you haven’t completed a review of your role, it is highly suggested that you do. By putting thought into your real strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, you can better determine the traits that make you a tremendous key account manager.
Clients choose their service providers for a variety of reasons, whether it be the ease of use, the return on their investment, or merely the outstanding customer support they experience. To get a better understanding of what your clients use to track their success, start by looking at the traits that you demonstrate to the account.
You Only Succeed if Your Customers Succeed
Key account management isn’t about a quick sale; it’s about building and maintaining a long-term relationship that provides mutual success for each party in the relationship. We’ve covered that the definition of “success” can be different for everyone, and each client will have their own unique desired outcomes from using your services or products. The key to being a successful key account manager is to give them the tools, advice, and expertise they need to achieve their goals and objectives.
The first step to achieving this positive outcome is to start putting more emphasis on the ways they will measure their own success. It can seem challenging at first, but by listening more carefully to their goals and concerns, you should be able to piece together the KPIs and success-trackers they use on their end of the relationship.
Once you’ve determined their primary KPIs, input them into Kapta and easily track them over time to make sure that you are consistently not only meeting but exceeding their expectations! You’ll notice a significant difference in your success with key accounts, and your clients will thank you for your diligence in ensuring their continuous success.
