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
Understanding Customer Engagement: What Does it Mean for You?
When we talk about Kapta, we talk about a tool and a process…
January 6, 2020/by Alex RaymondYour New Year’s Resolutions: What Makes Change Management Work?
Change is constant. But there’s no time like the New Year to…
December 30, 2019/by Lesley PoladskyIntroducing KAM To-Go
We often hear from organizations who need to establish a process…
December 23, 2019/by Alex RaymondHow Are You Communicating with Customers?
Good client relationships demand consistent, intentional communication.…
December 16, 2019/by Alex RaymondCRM and Kapta: Making the Most of Both Platforms
Many of our customers use Salesforce and/or other CRM tools for…
December 9, 2019/by Lesley PoladskyOur KAM Process: Deep Dive into MEASURE
Our KAM ProcessTM is a proven methodology for building customer…
December 2, 2019/by Alex RaymondOur KAM Process: Deep Dive into ACT
Our KAM ProcessTM is a proven methodology for building customer…
November 25, 2019/by Lesley PoladskyOur KAM Process: Deep Dive into KNOW
Last week, we wrote a high-level summary of Our KAM ProcessTM,…
November 18, 2019/by Alex RaymondOur KAM Process: Your Roadmap for Building Customer Engagement
We’ve talked to a lot of companies about Key Account Management,…
November 11, 2019/by Lesley PoladskyKAMCon 2019: Highlights and Takeaways from Attendees
It’s been about a month since KAMCon 2019, and we’re still…
November 4, 2019/by Alex RaymondChange Management Best Practices for Key Account Managers
Change is a part of life and while some organizations might hope…
October 28, 2019/by Alex RaymondHow to Communicate with Your Customers to Maximum Effect
During our KAMCon event last week, there was lots of talk about…
October 21, 2019/by Alex RaymondCategories
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Customer Service vs Customer Centricity
/in Customer Engagement /by Kelly SharpAt Kapta, we believe strongly in the power of a customer-centric approach. Our product and process are designed to support our customers as they put their customers first—because that’s what drives shared success. But we’re not a customer service software solution, and here’s why: Customer service isn’t the same as customer-centricity.
Read on to learn more about the distinctions between the two, and how Kapta can help B2B companies truly put their customers first.
A Matter of Depth
There are really 3 layers to your customer approach.
This article is a good breakdown of the difference between customer service and customer-centricity, as demonstrated in a B2C context. Below, we’ll talk about how these principles apply in B2B.
Applying Customer Principles to B2B
It’s easy to see how these layers of customer approach apply in a B2C context. We’re all someone’s customer—we use our phones to book and change travel (customer experience) and we end up on the phone with customer service agents when we need additional help.
But how do these 3 layers of customer approach apply in a B2B context? Let’s look:
How Kapta Can Help
To take a fundamentally customer-centric approach to doing business, you can’t just say it’s important and hope your team does it somehow. You need to be intentional, and you need to build infrastructure.
First, you need a dedicated key account management team. It takes a lot of time to be available to key customers, not only responding quickly to their needs, but also anticipating them by virtue of understanding who they are and what they’re trying to achieve. It takes time to stay connected to the client’s industry, recognizing challenges and competitive threats even before they do, and working proactively to help them prepare. In short, it takes time to be customer centric, and KAMs can’t be successful if they don’t have the time to spend with customers.
Second, you need a clear process that puts customers first. Our KAM Process is built around the fundamentals of customer centricity: Know your customer, act in their best interests, and measure your impact. Once you establish an internal process, you can hold your teams accountable to those expectations.
And finally, you need technology. Not only can Kapta automate some of the more tedious aspects of client management, but it can also extract data from multiple sources to give you powerful, real-time understanding of how well you’re helping your customers achieve their goals. Because it’s built around a process, Kapta also prompts the behaviors that drive customer centricity—checking in with clients, building action plans around their strategic objectives, and measuring what matters to them.
Conclusion
Customer-centricity is the goal. And key account management is the path. Kapta is key account management software, guided by Our KAM Process, so you have the structural support you need to operationalize a customer-centric mindset.
Schedule a personal demo today to talk through your current approach to customers, and how we can help you transform exceptional customer service into an exceptionally customer-centric approach to your entire business.
Identifying Key Accounts
/in Customer Engagement /by Lesley PoladskyIf you’re new to Key Account Management, one of the first steps you’ll need to take is to identify which accounts are Key Accounts—in other words, to segment your customer base.
Segmentation is critical because KAM should be distinct from sales. Key Account Management requires dedicated resources in the form of people, process, and technology. A traditional sales approach supported by CRM is not enough to realize the full potential of Key Accounts.
In this post, we’ll talk more about how to identify 2-3 key customers for your KAM pilot program. You’ll want to look at all your customers through 3 filters:
Filter 1: Profitability vs Revenue
Start by gathering basic information on all your accounts. You’ll need to know:
The goal here (as is probably obvious) is to determine profitability vs revenue. Revenue is distracting—it can make an account seem like a key account, when in fact, the actual cost of serving that client means they aren’t really a source of sustainable growth. Remember, the kind of relationship you’re building through key account management is a 2-way street: You want strategic, sustainable partnerships. If you’re constantly eating costs or discounting services to keep a cranky client happy, maybe they aren’t a key account after all—even if surface-level billing suggests they are.
That said, it’s important to ask: Is the reason they’re cranky because you haven’t been able to give them the attention they deserve? Maybe their main contact at your organization is working on 5 other projects, and simply doesn’t have the bandwidth to understand this customer’s needs and expectations. If you think a dedicated Account Manager with time and space to listen to their feedback and proactively address their satisfaction might turn this customer around and increase profitability, keep them on the list of potential Key Accounts.
Filter 2: Strategic vs Transactional
Once you’ve gathered all your accounts, you’ll want to flag them as either strategic or transactional.
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. Use your judgement to determine the trajectory of your customers.
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—it’s just that they don’t really need Key Account Management.
Filter 3: Your Own Growth Strategy
Once you’ve analyzed your client base, it’s time to look at your own growth strategy. What are you trying to achieve over the next 5 years? What kinds of products and services are you most interested in providing? What is your own growth strategy?
When you find a customer with potential to grow using the kinds of products and services you’re most interested in providing, you know you’ve found an interesting match. Because we believe strongly that a customer-centric approach is the way to achieve stability and success over the long term—but that doesn’t mean your own interests don’t matter. In fact, your customers will be much more engaged if you are, too. Customer-centricity is not pure altruism—it’s an approach that builds mutual success (the best kind).
Seek out customers whose needs, goals, and strategy align with your own, so you set both parties up for success. You’ll be able to pursue work that’s engaging and meaningful for your team, and they’ll perform better as a result. Their improved performance leads to meaningful gains for your customer, which creates ongoing room for growth in the partnership itself.
Don’t Get Distracted
A common mistake in identifying key accounts is to focus on revenue alone. As we’ve outlined above, the goal is to identify customers who are clearly worth a long-term investment. They offer room to grow, in line with your own growth strategy, and plenty of ongoing opportunities for interesting, mutually beneficial work.
It takes good judgement and team input to identify those customers, and it means looking beyond the dollar signs on the surface. It also takes discipline to invest resources in those customers, rather than spreading your team too thin chasing shiny new clients and contracts.
Start Your Pilot
Implementing a KAM program is just like any exercise in change management: You need to start small, with easy wins. Challenge yourself to select 2-3 Key Accounts to begin with, and really focus on making those work. Even if your portfolio analysis identified 5-10 Key Accounts, start small and scale up, so you have success stories to build buy-in as you expand. You’ll also learn what’s working and what’s not, and you can apply what you’ve learned to hone your process as you add more accounts to the Key Account group.
Remember: Good Key Account Management takes more than intention. It takes infrastructure. You need a person or a team whose job it is to manage the clients you’ve selected. They need an established process to follow. And they need technology to support them in their efforts.
An easy mistake to make is this: You’ve done your portfolio analysis. You’ve selected your 2-3 accounts. But you’re wary of investing too much, so you ask someone whose plate is already full to do some KAM on top of what they’re already doing. You’re vague about what that means, and you don’t offer any tech support.
We’ve seen this before, and it doesn’t work. The goal of KAM is to build strong, lasting relationships—if you’re not putting in the effort, your clients will know it, and they won’t, either. And it will be business as usual, without having really given KAM a try.
Conclusion
If you’re ready to start Key Account Management in your organization, Kapta can help. Our KAM Process gives you a roadmap for Key Account Management, supported by our intuitive technology. And our services are designed to help you make a smooth transition.
We can assess your current situation and make a rollout plan that works for you. Schedule a personal demo today to talk through your company’s goals, the accounts you think might be a good fit for a pilot, and any questions you have about how Kapta can help.
Key Account Management in 2020: Why It Matters More Than Ever
/in Customer Engagement /by Alex RaymondCustomers have always been important to business—and they’ve always been demanding. But we believe, in 2020, that customers are harder to engage and easier to lose than ever.
On top of that, economists agree: There’s a recession looming on the horizon, with the potential to hit this year or next.
Between the customer landscape and the economic outlook, it’s more important than ever to solidify your relationships. To do so, you need more than a shift in your mindset—you need a change in your approach. Keep reading to learn more about the current state of customer expectations, and how KAM can help you build resiliency for the year—and the decade—to come.
The Customer Landscape
It’s easy for B2B companies to forget that their clients are people, too. It’s a mistake we all make: we get caught up in our niche, diving into the specifics of our industry, and we forget that every client we do business with has a smartphone in their pocket. They go home after work and stream content. They conduct their lives as everyday consumers, with cars and gym memberships and streaming subscriptions and social media accounts.
So what does this mean for you? It means you can’t just look at trends in your industry to understand who your clients are and what they expect from you. You have to place your clients in the broader context of the world, remembering that they’re influenced by the same disruptive forces that affect us all. Whether they recognize it or not, the forces surrounding them in their personal lives very much so shape their professional expectations—even if it seems like your B2B service is a far cry from everyday consumerism.
Here are a few examples, intentionally using “we” because the point is: Whatever our titles may be, in whatever industry we chose, we are all modern consumers, and that means:
Think about your own experience in the world. The speed you’re accustomed to. The outlets for dissatisfaction and the constant availability of other options. Think about how personalized even seemingly agnostic platforms can be—after all, your social media feed is unique to you. The news you see was picked for you; the photos you see were selected for you; the ads you watch were chosen for you.
Now remember your customers are also, all of them, people in the world. So even if you live in a B2B world, you are still dealing with people whose baseline expectations are for personalized, exceptional products and services. And if you’re not providing them, they’re going somewhere else.
The Economic Landscape
In a survey of 226 economists published by the National Association for Business Economics in August 2019, 72% of the respondents said they believe the U.S. will enter its next recession in 2020 or 2021.
So there you have it. Recessions aren’t unique to 2020, but they’re a sobering reminder that exponential growth has its limits. When the going gets tough, and people start guarding their pocketbooks, you’re not going to want to be a salesperson, or even a vendor. You’re going to want to be a strategic, trusted advisor. A partner who’s added enough value along the way that nobody can bear to lose you. If you haven’t gotten there yet, now is the time.
How KAM Can Help
So how do you build resiliency when your customers will always demand more? When they are bombarded by your competitors? When they’re facing the same economic downturn you are?
The answer is: You put your customers first. You put yourself in their shoes and do everything you can to understand the challenges they face, and then you build your business around addressing those challenges. You make yourself indispensable.
What you don’t do is get distracted. You don’t frantically try to win new business while letting your existing accounts suffer. You don’t knee-jerk respond to competitive threats without stepping back and staying true to your strategy. And you don’t try to use a CRM to build meaningful customer relationships.
Customer-centricity takes more than intention: It takes infrastructure. We tell our own customers they need a dedicated team of client management specialists. They need an established internal process. And they need purpose-built technology. When your people, process, and technology are all centered on customer improvement, you start to build the kind of rock-solid relationships that withstand increasing customer demand, competitive threats, and even economic recessions.
Conclusion
Customer-centricity is the goal. And key account management is the path. Kapta is key account management software, guided by Our KAM Process, so you have the structural support you need to operationalize a customer-centric mindset, and build resiliency for the decade to come.
Schedule a personal demo today to talk through your current approach to customers, and how we can help you succeed in 2020 and beyond.