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
Why Customer Engagement is Everything Right Now
Customer engagement is always important, which is why we write…
June 29, 2020/by Alex RaymondHow Key Account Management Software Can Make You a More Effective Client Services Director
By the time you’re the Director of Client Services for an organization,…
June 22, 2020/by Kelly SharpKey Account Management and Account Based Engagement: A Seamless Customer Journey
Customers are demanding more and more personalization. This is…
June 15, 2020/by Alex RaymondYour Key Account Management Tech Stack (and Tech Hacks)
There are 3 pillars to building a truly customer-centric Key…
June 8, 2020/by Ben BlaskoKey Account Management for Cross-Functional Teams: Building Engagement with Internal Teams
Key Account Managers are the quarterback of their team—and…
June 1, 2020/by Kelly SharpWhat Your Clients Really Want – and How Key Account Management Delivers
In 2018, CSO Insights, the research division of the Miller Heiman…
May 25, 2020/by Alex RaymondKey Account Management for Software Companies: How KAM Can Help you “Land & Expand”
B2B software companies often use a “Land and Expand” model,…
May 18, 2020/by Alex RaymondMoneyball for Account Managers: What the Stats Say (and What They Mean)
We talk about customer engagement all the time. And we’re not…
May 11, 2020/by Kelly SharpSlow Growth? Try Key Account Management.
If you’re banging your head against the wall trying to figure…
May 4, 2020/by Alex RaymondHow B2B Companies Put Customers First
We know from talking to B2B companies across all kinds of industries…
April 27, 2020/by Kelly SharpBehaviors of Successful Key Account Managers
Ideally, everyone at your company is focused on delivering for…
April 20, 2020/by Alex RaymondKey Account Management for Services Companies
Key Account Management is the art of engaging with high-value…
April 13, 2020/by Kelly SharpCategories
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3 Reasons to Update Your Customer Org Charts
/in Customer Engagement /by Kelly SharpBe honest: When was the last time you took a long look at your customers’ org chart? We’ve seen too many B2B companies establish customer org charts early in the relationship — and then never look at them again.
On the surface, org charts may seem like busy work. But they’re the kind of work you need to do consistently to build customer engagement. Org charts are an exercise in stakeholder mapping, which you need for:
In this post, we’ll take a closer look at all the reasons listed above, and cover a few best practices for stakeholder mapping through detailed org charts.
Influence
According to an in-depth analysis of buyers and sellers in the B2B world, an average of 6-7 decision makers influence every B2B purchase. So it’s simply not enough to have one or two strong contacts within your customers’ organizations — you need to develop a coalition of champions from across the organization.
Your coalition will be different depending on the services you provide. If you sell software, for example, you need buy-in not only from day-to-day users, but also from procurement, the C-suite, and internal IT, to name a few. Your org chart will help you visualize the relationships within the organization, so you can cultivate the right client relationships along the way. In this sense, your customers’ org charts help you build your own, by making sure you have the right team in place to meet the variant needs of individual decision-makers, influencers, champions, and implementation partners in your customer’s organization.
Org charts cement your influence by making sure you invite the right stakeholders to the right checkpoints at the right time. In doing so, you’re increasing your reach within an organization while also helping your direct contacts manage their internal partners, whether it’s their leadership or their key collaborators.
Intelligence
One of your jobs as a key account manager is to know your clients better than anyone. Org charts can give you all sorts of insights and leads in this pursuit. They do this both by visualizing both vertical and horizontal relationships.
Vertically, org charts show you who reports to whom — and what the pathway for advancement is for individuals within your customer’s organization. This is key for understanding how to make your direct contact’s life easier. For example, when you can see the managers to whom they must demonstrate value, you can help arm your direct contacts with the results and messages they need in order to look good to their leadership — and get buy-in for their projects. (These are your projects, too, so it should be clear why this serves you well.)
Org charts also give you insight into your direct client’s goals — what’s the path forward for them? If you can help your clients not only meet their deadlines and execute their deliverables, but also grow their careers, you’ll have a champion for life — and that champion will be more and more influential as they ascend the ladder.
Org charts are also important for the horizontal picture — how different functions or departments collaborate within the overall structure of the organization. This information again helps you be more proactive for your direct contacts, by helping them manage lateral stakeholders in the organization.
Big picture, the org chart serves as a lens into the organization’s values as a whole, since companies tend to build structures and hierarchies based on their strategic goals and overarching values. They also give you a forward-facing view into where the organization is heading, so you and your team can work proactively to offer proactive, integrated B2B services.
Resilience
If your “in” with a customer rests entirely with one person, and that person leaves, where does that leave you? Worst case scenario, relying too heavily on one client contact can leave you out of a client.
The more integrated you are — which means multifunctional relationships with stakeholders across the horizontal and vertical org chart axes — the more you’ll engage the customer at an enterprise level, building resilience as individuals leave or initiatives come to a close. Enterprise-level engagement tends to unearth new business opportunities at every turn.
Best Practices for Stakeholder Mapping
We say all the time that customer-centricity can’t just be a value you state in a strategy deck somewhere. Customer centricity requires infrastructure.
Org charts are infrastructure for stakeholder mapping. They give you clear horizontal and vertical visualizations for the structure in your clients’ organizations. They give you influence, intelligence, and resilience — and each of those things builds on each other to form broad and deep customer engagement.
So how do you make org charts work for you? The best org charts are:
Conclusion
Org charts may seem like busy work — but in fact, they’re critical work. Org charts help you build influence within your customer’s organization; they give you intelligence you can use to broaden your engagement; and they help you build enterprise-level engagement for greater resilience over time. To see how Kapta can help you create dynamic, detailed, highly visible org charts, schedule a personal demo today.
3 Ways to Calculate an Account Health Score
/in Customer Engagement /by Alex RaymondWhether it’s losing a key account or not meeting internal growth goals, the last thing you need in uncertain times is an unpleasant surprise from a key customer. That means you have to keep your finger on the pulse of your accounts, regularly tracking customer engagement through an account health score.
So how do you do that? In this post, we’ll look at 3 ways to quantify account health, from the fastest but most subjective to the most comprehensive, data-driven, and time-consuming.
However you track account health, keep these best practices in mind:
And remember, the methods below aren’t mutually exclusive. Your ongoing evaluation of account health might include a mix of all 3, supported by your teams and your tech.
Method 1: Ask the Key Account Manager or Customer Success Manager
Pros: This is the quickest, easiest way to get a sense of account health.
Cons: It’s not very precise.
The fastest way to get a high-level read on your accounts is to ask the people who have direct customer contact. This could be key account managers (or strategic account managers, depending on the terminology your organization uses) or customer success managers. You might also reach out to the sales and customer service teams — again, anyone with frequent, direct customer contact should be able to give you, on a scale of 1-100, a general sense of the health of the account.
Since this assessment is already imperfect and subjective, it’s important to provide guidance to anyone who’s evaluating account health in this way. Let them know it’s a scale of 1-100, and you’re looking at the sum total of indicators such as:
Start by asking individual team members to complete their assessment of a specific account. If you see consistent scoring among several individuals, that’s a good sign the scores are stable. If you see widely disparate scores from different customer-facing roles, it’s time to convene everyone to discuss the discrepancies.
Method 2: Look at Leading Indicators
Pros: With the right technology, objective data is readily available
Cons: While this method can show you if you’re doing the right things, it can’t tell you how well you’re doing them (or not)
Adding a measure of leading indicators is a more objective layer to add to your account health assessment. In the context of account health scoring, leading indicators are the behaviors that build customer engagement. These are the default leading indicators we track in Kapta, and include:
Combining Method 1 (personal assessments) with Method 2 (objective leading indicators) is a good way to gut-check both the health of the account and the realism of your people. That’s not to say they’re misleading you when they say their accounts are healthy. It’s just using data the way data was intended: To cross-check intuition against hard numbers. As always, both are important when it comes to understanding the strength of your customer relationships.
Method 3: Leading and Lagging Indicators
Pros: The most comprehensive and accurate view of account health
Cons: Requires long lead time and purpose-built infrastructure
The gold standard for assessing account health is to track both leading and lagging indicators. Lagging indicators go beyond checking the box (are you doing the right things?) to evaluating the output (how well are you doing them?). Lagging indicators are specific to each account, and would include both KPIs for your customers, as well as KPIs for your own organization. In other words, lagging indicators track how successful you have made your customers, and in turn, how much organic growth you’ve driven through your efforts.
With a customer-centric lens on lagging indicators, we’d track things like:
Purpose-built tech platforms for key account management, such as Kapta, can track lagging indicators based on your readiness to do so and the data you’re able to collect frequently, reliably, and accurately. Kapta works with each client to establish and track specific KPIs for their accounts.
Conclusion
Account health scoring is critical for any B2B organization. Of course, it’s not enough to simply track account health — you also need to act on what you learn. If your accounts are scoring high, you need to capitalize on that by learning even more about your customers, and finding new and better ways to meet their needs so you’re not leaving money on the table. If your accounts are scoring mid-range or low, you need an action plan in place to correct the deficit, before it’s a crisis.
When you have a consistent, comprehensive, and accurate view of your accounts, you can make better plans — even in uncertain economic times. To see how Kapta can help you understand, track, and promote account health, schedule a personal demo today.
The Seven Deadly Sins of Key Account Management
/in Key Account Management /by Alex RaymondIt’s easy to spot the biggest sin of all in client management: losing the account. But by the time that happens, it’s already too late. So what behaviors can you look for — and try to avoid — in the meantime?
In this post, we explore the Seven Deadly Sins of Key Account Management. And while that sounds serious, these are actually extremely common mistakes. KAMs who make these mistakes time and time again not only put their customers at risk of churn, but also fail to realize the full potential of the relationships they manage.
1) Being tactical instead of strategic.
Tactical account managers focus on the task at hand, delivering what the customer asked for. And while that’s important, it’s often only table stakes — and it might not be enough to grow the business. Strategic KAMs use every deliverable as an opportunity to ask questions, dive deeper, learn more about the customer, and understand what they are ultimately trying to achieve.
The truth is, sometimes customers don’t know what they want — or, they know what they want, but they don’t know the best way to get there. As a KAM, you want to be a trusted advisor, meaning, you want your customer to call you as soon as they recognize the problem, not necessarily after they’ve determined a solution. To earn that trust, you can’t just deliver — you have to also decode. You have to understand the strategic objectives behind every ask so you can present big ideas to solve them. That’s how you move from being a vendor who executes a tactic to being a trusted advisor who co-develops a strategy. And from a business development standpoint, that’s how you keep new work coming in the door.
The trick here is, sometimes moving from tactical to strategic means pushing back on your clients, or at least, presenting an alternative path forward. Most customers will appreciate the thinking and effort, even if they don’t take your recommendation. As long as you meet the tactical requirement, there’s generally space to explore the strategy more fully, and there’s almost no reason not to do so. At the end of the day, tactical key account managers tend to leave money on the table, whereas strategic KAMs tend to drive organic growth through bigger SOWs.
2) Being reactive instead of proactive.
Reactive KAMs are always going to find themselves dealing with unwelcome surprises. That’s because they’re not staying ahead of the knowledge curve, whether it’s with customers, competitors, or the overall landscape.
Being proactive with customers means staying in constant contact. You have to know if and when their strategic priorities shift; whether and how new leadership affects the plan; and how they’re impacted by shifts in the marketplace. As for the marketplace itself, B2B service providers can’t afford to wait for their customers to come to them with a challenge. They have to be looking down the road at all times, anticipating trends and making timely plans to pivot as necessary.
The current crisis is a good case study for reactivity vs proactivity. For the first few weeks, there was no choice but to react as quickly as possible. However, as we settle into the new normal, it’s time to return to proactivity, helping customers navigate the difficult road ahead with tools such as VOC and SWOT analyses.
3) Being self-centered instead of customer-centric.
Now more than ever, customer-centricity is the way forward. As markets become more crowded and customers demand more and more personalization, B2B clients will get lost in semantics if they try to differentiate themselves on paper alone. The difference has to be in the approach; being more customer-centric makes you more competitive, period.
Many companies understand that in theory, but they have a difficult time operationalizing a customer-centric approach. Building customer engagement requires not only intention, but also infrastructure: A team dedicated to customer engagement. A tech stack oriented towards customer results. And leadership that continuously underscores a customer-first growth track.
It’s important to note: This isn’t altruism. It’s sustainable growth. When your growth goals and strategies are rooted in who the customer is and what they need from you, you may end up with incremental vs explosive growth — but that’s the exact kind of growth that prepares you to weather a storm.
4) Not building account plans.
Henry David Thoreau wrote, “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” We’re no Thoreau, so we say it like this: Your big picture strategies don’t matter if you don’t execute successfully.
A solid account plan is designed to translate pie-in-the-sky aspirations into discrete objectives, milestones, tactics and action items. Account plans help answer the question: “What do we do next?” They build and sustain momentum as you tackle a months- or years-long initiative, keeping teams focused on the big vision even as they are mired in day-to-day execution.
Account planning doesn’t need to be mysterious. The right tech stack includes a KAM platform, which should include an account planning framework, with integrations for Slack and other programs your team uses to get things done. Which leads us to the next KAM sin:
5) Using the wrong systems.
On the one hand, client management has and always will require a human touch, no matter how proficient technology becomes. On the other, if your KAMs aren’t supported by a data-driven, synchronized platform dedicated specifically to KAM, they’re going to miss opportunities — either because they don’t have visibility into key trends, or because they’re bogged down in busy work and can’t put in the right client face time.
We’ve written before about the right tech stack for KAMs. The main thing is to have a platform designed specifically for key account management. Going back to the point above about intention and infrastructure: you need a client management system that includes both a clear internal process and purpose-driven technology to support, accelerate, and amplify that process.
The truth is, your CRM won’t cut it. CRMs are designed to generate and capitalize on leads, but they’re not designed to build customer engagement through ongoing connection, strategic planning, and metrics tracking. If you’re relying on a CRM to build a customer-centric approach to KAM, you’ll be disappointed every time.
6) Not reporting value back.
The day to day work of keeping clients happy is strenuous, and often there’s no time for reflection. But the only way to make sure that work is not in vain is to periodically check in to confirm your clients are actually happy.
Periodic client reviews (note, not quarterly — that’s not frequent enough) are an excellent way to gauge client satisfaction, and they’re also an opportunity to present real results. The value of the work you do shouldn’t be hidden. Make sure your customers can see how you’re helping them reach their strategic goals. This is always important, but it’s especially important in a recession, when customers are watching every dime to make sure they’re getting value from their investments.
In order to report value back, you need a way to track it in real time. That means establishing KPIs for each initiative at the outset, and using your KAM platform to drive automated, real-time reporting.
7) Assuming everyone in the company understands the client.
For small organizations, or startups, where everyone wears many hats and interfaces with the customer at all times, this doesn’t tend to be a huge issue. But the larger you grow, the more you’ll need to divide and conquer to manage operations — and the more you’ll risk losing sight of customer needs.
Take, for example, the pharmaceutical industry. Marketing and sales are separate functions, and often, the sales team rolls their eyes at what comes from the marketing team, because those materials don’t reflect the actual, day-to-day interactions with customers.
To avoid this risk, make sure to be aware of if and when certain teams might not spend enough time with the customer to understand their needs. You don’t need to make every team customer-facing, but you do need to make sure customer-facing teams are in the room when important decisions are made.
Conclusion
Nobody wants to lose business. And everyone wants to grow the business they already have. Despite how clear those goals are, it can be less clear how to achieve them — and all too easy to fall into one of the traps above. To see how Kapta can help support strong KAM performance, schedule a personal demo today.