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
Team 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 RaymondUnderstanding 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 RaymondCategories
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What Your Clients Really Want – and How Key Account Management Delivers
/in Customer Engagement /by Alex RaymondIn 2018, CSO Insights, the research division of the Miller Heiman Group, conducted a Buyer Preferences Survey with 500 B2B buyers working for medium to large-sized companies ($240M USD or greater) who made purchases of $10K or greater. They defined “buyers” broadly, as decision makers in business purchases—not just procurement teams.
What they found was that buyers are changing faster than sellers. Buyers are demanding more and more personalization from sellers; they also have more and more opportunities, through companies like Amazon and Alibaba, to sidestep sellers altogether. In short, as we often say (and we’re not alone): Customers are harder to engage and easier to lose than ever.
It can seem intimidating to try to keep up with something as rapid and unpredictable as technological trends, and the inevitable changes in customer demand. But there’s good news: As much as things change, they also stay the same.
Digging deeper, the survey asked the question: What do customers really want from their sellers? The answers:
Looking at this list, it’s clear: These are the same basic tenants of strong relationships that have informed customer engagement for years. They run deeper than tech and last longer than trends. If you can get good at them, you can weather any change with your customers.
Key account management (KAM) is how you get good at delivering what customers want. At its heart, KAM is the art of building strong relationships through deep customer knowledge, excellent communication, and insightful commentary. And, by definition, it happens post-sale.
In the post below, we’ll offer our take on the list from CSO Insights above, and we’ll talk more about why KAM is the way to deliver what customers really want, so you can build resilience, drive growth, and stay ahead of—rather than just keep up with—buyer change.
1) Understand my business. Know me.
The best way to understand your customers is to engage early and often. In a perfect world, you enter the conversation early in the buying journey, when they are still identifying and clarifying their needs. One great way to do this is through Account-Based Marketing (ABM)—essentially an upstream component of key account management. (See our recent post on why ABM and KAM make a great team.)
But all is not lost if you can’t engage as early as you’d like the buying journey. No matter when you come in, you always have an opportunity to understand your customers better. Chronologically speaking, this starts with doing your homework to understand their business, then asking thought-provoking questions to spark meaningful dialogue. And it never stops—as long as you’re working with a client, you’re doing your research and asking good questions, so you are always up to date on their industry, their company, and their goals.
Let’s start with the homework piece, though it’s fairly self-explanatory. Come to the table prepared and informed so you don’t waste your client’s time asking basic questions. A good example is advertising agencies who work with pharma and medical device companies. Their teams understand complicated disease states and cutting-edge treatments surprisingly well; they can speak with fluency about the cellular mechanism of action of the drugs they work on before they even meet with the client. That way, when they do meet with the client, they can jump right into the specifics, rather than spending hours on the medical backstory.
There’s another side to this coin. Clients like to be the experts in their field. They like to know more than you do. And as the SMEs, they can and should know more than you do. So there’s a balance here: You shouldn’t show up unprepared. But nor should you show up thinking you know everything. Be ready to hear their perspective and expertise. In blunt summary: People like being asked questions. They just don’t like being asked stupid questions.
2) Demonstrate Excellent Communication Skills
Throughout the course of your customer relationship, you’re being judged in every single interaction. We are sorry to say so, but it’s true—and it’s fair. Your customers are paying you, probably large sums of money, so it’s only natural that some part of them is always asking: “Is this worth it?”
Since every interaction contributes to an overall impression of value, it’s important to make every interaction valuable. Luckily, you can apply some basic human skills here, the most important of which is: LISTEN. Easier said than done, we know. If you’re not sure how well you’re listening, try an experiment: For a full month, ask yourself after every client interaction: “Did I learn something, too?” If the answer is more often no than yes, you’re not listening well, and you’re missing opportunities to understand your customer—the first thing they want you to do.
Now that we’ve put all this pressure on you to make every interaction great, let us take some of it away with 3 easy words: Don’t get weird. If you’re hyper-aware of the fact you need to add value, and your focus is adding value for its own sake, you’ll undermine your own efforts. Rather than trying to seem important, spend your time actually making yourself important: Do your homework. Know your stuff. Show up ready to share ideas you’ve thought through carefully, and ready to listen to the ideas of others. When you don’t know the answer, don’t pretend you do.
Clients know when someone is engaged, earnest, and genuinely acting on their behalf; they also know when someone is full of it. Again, we return to what we think is a comforting thought: Everything you need to do to be a good client communicator is grounded in basic human skills: Think before you speak. Listen actively. Don’t BS.
3) Focus on Post-Sale
A sale is like a wedding. Yes, it’s the culmination of months—maybe years—of planning. It’s a big accomplishment; a literal cause for celebration. But it’s only the beginning of a marriage—and that’s where the real work happens. A sale, like a wedding, is not the end. It’s the beginning.
If your company focuses too many resources on winning new customers at the expense of cultivating existing customers, you’re doing both your company and your customers a grave disservice. Existing customers are your company’s most important asset—organic growth tends to be more profitable and more sustainable than winning new business.
Post-sale is what KAM is all about. It’s why KAM should partner with but operate separately from sales. It takes infrastructure—people, process, and technology—to make KAM work, and ensure your company is treating the sale as the start of the customer engagement, and not the end of it.
4) Give me Insights and Perspective
This is where the list culminates. Insight and perspective come from a combination of customer knowledge and long-term, post-sale commitment. And they have to be delivered with good communication.
One form perspective might take is healthy disagreement. Some clients might think they want you to agree with them all the time—and it’s certainly easier in the short-term to do so—but it doesn’t improve the relationship, or the work, in the long run.
In the movie Bohemian Rhapsody, Freddie Mercury returns to his bandmates to plead his case for reunion, after having left to pursue a solo career. “I hired a bunch of guys. I told them exactly what to do. And the problem was, they did it.” Without “push-back, re-writes, and funny looks” from his bandmates, the musical product was not as good.
Clients hire you because you presumably know more than they do about whatever product or service your firm provides. They need you to push them towards better solutions—but they need you to do it skillfully.
Remember: Your job is to make the work better, and your client’s life easier. So if you disagree with an idea of theirs, don’t just point out the problem. Propose potential solutions. Give them options to choose from—one that reflects their idea, and one that reflects your recommendation. Don’t try to force them into your POV; lead them there in a way that respects their own expertise and contributions. And finally, know when to let go and just do it the way they asked.
Of course, “insight and perspective” isn’t always oppositional. You’ll have plenty of opportunities to build on your customer’s ideas. And you’ll reveal opportunities for upselling. When it’s done right, upselling doesn’t even feel like “selling,” in the traditional sense—it feels more like offering a proactive and fitting solution to a client problem. Upselling works seamlessly when it’s a genuine reflection of your customer’s needs, rather than your own need to meet a quota or number.
How KAM Helps You Deliver on What Customers Want
Key Account Management starts exactly where this list did: Understanding your customer. Pushing beyond the marketing data to know them personally: What are they trying to achieve? How do they expect you to help? How can you exceed these expectations?
Knowledge is the foundation of strong customer engagement, as well as the foundation for strong key account management. KAM software can help, with Voice of Customer tools, SWOT analysis templates, dynamic org charts, and detailed profiles of key customer contacts. Kapta has all those tools, prompting various kinds of customer questions and interactions designed to dig deeper than a traditional CRM.
Key Account Management is also inherently focused on post-sale—something more buyers wish more companies could be. In fact, KAM is your post-sale customer engagement method. And KAM software understands that. KAM software isn’t about lead generation. It’s about ongoing strategic client management.
Conclusion
When you use key account management to deliver what customers want, you build relationships that withstand changes in the market, in technology, and even in customers themselves. Why? Because rather than just keeping up with trends, you’re going a level deeper, fulfilling what customers really want from their 3rd-party partners: Knowledge, communication, commitment, and perspective.
To see how Kapta can help you deliver on what customers really want, schedule your personalized demo today.
Key Account Management for Software Companies: How KAM Can Help you “Land & Expand”
/in Key Account Management /by Alex RaymondB2B software companies often use a “Land and Expand” model, meaning: You land a customer with a small deal (such as a single department or team), and grow by expanding your footprint within the organization. Over time you add more users, more teams, more business units; you may also increase utilization of premium products and features within your platform.
The model is sound in theory, but it only works in practice if you’re able to drive real customer engagement and satisfaction from the outset. Because contrary to what some people believe, software does not sell itself. There are plenty of barriers to adoption and full utilization, even within an existing account: cost, effort, general resistance to change, to name a few.
And it’s not enough to look at subscription renewals alone. They’re a good short-term indicator of success, but they don’t tell you much about real engagement.
Here’s an analogy: You buy a monthly gym membership. You go twice a week for the first month, but by month 3, you’ve tapered off. For a while, you keep paying for the membership, because you’d like to use it more, and you know in theory the gym is a good thing. But eventually, you’re going to take a hard look at numbers and realize: You’re not getting a hundred dollars a month of value from this subscription. (In fact, you basically went on a $300 treadmill run back in April.) Once this knowledge hits, you’ll cancel your membership.
As a software company whose model is rooted in subscriptions, you have to look beyond the monthly or even yearly renewals, to the strength of the relationship: Between you and your customer. Between your customer and your product. Between your company and your customer’s company.
Making “land and expand” work for you takes more than salesmanship and subscriptions. It takes Key Account Management. It takes making the shift from a product vendor, desperately trying to renew subscriptions while also chasing new accounts, to a strategic account manager, engaging deeply with existing, key customers to cement the relationship and drive steady, organic, profitable growth.
Here’s an overview of Our KAM Process. In the post below, we’ll look at how this process can apply to software companies in particular:
Know Your Customer’s Goals
It’s not enough to make the initial sale and walk away, hoping the software will expand its own footprint within one customer’s organization while you go off and make new sales. You have to stop and truly engage with your customer, working to reveal concentric circles of knowledge, from the current users to the organization as a whole. Here are just some examples of questions you could ask:
The list goes on. Our goal here isn’t to list every question you should be asking, but to give you a sense of the types of questions you should be asking, namely: questions whose answers reveal opportunities to add value. The more you know, the more you can introduce proactive solutions that advance your customer’s interests beyond the basics of what your product can do. And that’s the first step to real engagement.
Here’s a great example. Let’s say your product helps finance and accounting teams. Table stakes for success is that you actually help them perform their finance and accounting functions more smoothly/accurately/efficiently. But let’s say you probe deeper, and learn that the finance team wants to play a more active role in strategic planning for the company as a whole. This is a key customer insight—and it should inform the way you act on your customer’s behalf. Let’s see how this plays out in the “act” phase below.
Act on Your Customer’s Behalf
Once you understand your customer’s goals, processes, and organizational dynamic, you can start to propose action plans to help them work even more efficiently and effectively. You can make sure they’re getting everything they can from your product—using the right features in the right way, integrating with compatible products, and creating good workflows.
After spending some time with them, you might notice redundancies or manual errors in their current workflow, which you know your product could fix. Be proactive in suggesting and training around workflow adaptations that will save them time and effort, while helping them make the most of their investment in your product. Now you’ve really got their attention, and shown value beyond the product itself.
Based on this success, their leadership expresses interest in your product. Now you go back to your insight from above: You know the finance team wants a bigger seat at the table. So you offer to put together a case study that not only makes your product look great, but also makes the finance team look great. You highlight their visionary leadership and change management. You show the efficiencies they’ve created and the insights they’ve generated for the business as a whole. You show how you’ve freed up some of their time for more value-added tasks, such as contributing to strategic plans.
Through your actions, you’ve done more than sell your product into another business unit; you’ve made your clients look smart and successful, while helping them achieve an even bigger scale goal. Now you’re more than a vendor. You’re on your way to becoming a strategic partner.
Measure What Matters
In addition to intangible (but powerful) value adds like the example above, it’s important to show your customers real numbers. Because just like you with your gym membership, someone is going to look at the books every year and consider the line-item cost of your product subscription. How do you make sure they keep that line item in their budget—and better yet, increase it?
The answer is, you have to show them numbers. And these numbers have to be tied to their goals, not yours. This takes us all the way back to the “Know” part of the process, when you identified concentric goals, starting with your “landing” team and expanding out to the organization as a whole. The better you were at clarifying and quantifying those goals, the more you can build in relevant success metrics along the way. And the more you do that, the more quickly and clearly you can demonstrate how your product is making a positive impact on their organization.
The real key here is to push yourself into the customer’s perspective. It’s easy to measure things that matter to you: New users, product utilization, subscription renewals. (And yes, of course, you should measure those things.) But it takes more effort to track the numbers that matter to your customers: Time spent on manual tasks. Time to revenue. Revenue growth. Reduction in overhead. Ease of security and compliance. Risk management. And more.
Make sure what you measure matters to your customer, and make sure you can present data in a way that makes it clear your product is worth the investment they’ve made in it. The encouraging irony is that by keeping your goals secondary to theirs, you’ll actually improve your chances at hitting your own numbers in the end.
How Tech Can Help
Key Account Management is the key to unlocking the full potential of any customer relationship—especially in a land and expand model. Software companies should not take for granted that software will sell itself; nor should they be so laser focused on periodic renewals that they forget to examine the relationships behind them.
And if anyone can appreciate the value of purpose-built technology in supporting successful behaviors, it’s a software company. The right KAM software can help prompt and measure customer engagement, while giving you the tools to build meaningful action plans from your customer’s goals. KAM software can collate data from several sources, giving you real-time insights into how you’re tracking against your customer’s success metrics. And KAM software can turn that tracking into relevant, specific, meaningful data visualizations for your client and your C-suite.
Conclusion
Key Account Management is an indispensable tool for B2B software companies working with a “land and expand” model. KAM helps you reveal your customer’s big picture goals, and make your product—and partnership—an indispensable part of their process.
To see how Kapta is the KAM software for B2B software companies, schedule your personal demo today.
Moneyball for Account Managers: What the Stats Say (and What They Mean)
/in Key Account Management /by Kelly SharpWe talk about customer engagement all the time. And we’re not the only ones.
A recent Gallup poll advocates making customer engagement your competitive edge, demonstrating through their extensive B2B research that:
In the post below, we’ll take a closer look at each of these stats, exploring what the numbers say and what they mean for you—along with a closer look at how your company can be one of the B2B providers who cracks the customer engagement code.
Engagement vs Satisfaction = Emotional vs Rational
What the numbers say: According to Gallup, only 29% of customers are fully engaged, meaning they have formed an emotional connection with your brand, rather than a strictly rational one. The flip side? Nearly 70% of your customers already have one foot out the door.
What the numbers mean: If only 29% of B2B customers are truly engaged, that means there’s likely an opportunity for you to assess your own customer engagement, and find opportunities to strengthen your KAM function in order to close the gap.
A closer look: Rational connections are table stakes. For example, you’re a software company, and your software works. It has a user-friendly interface, great features, and requires little to no troubleshooting. Great. You’ve set yourself up for satisfied customers who can make a rational argument for your product.
Engagement is the next level, and that takes an emotional connection. Many B2C companies do this with incredible (and expensive!) advertising campaigns. But in a B2B environment, the best way to form emotional connections is the old-fashioned way: Through relationships.
Key Account Managers, aka client service or client relationships managers, are the team in charge of owning and developing meaningful client engagement. They do this first by taking the time to truly understand their customers: What are they trying to achieve, both personally and professionally? Then they translate this knowledge into action plans that make a real impact on their customer’s business.
Let’s take the software company example again. Rational connections happen when the software works. Emotional connections happen when the partnership with the software company makes a significant impact on the customer’s business as a whole. Their KAM at the software company helps them assess their process and infrastructure, implement the software in a way that drives efficiency and communication, and drives growth along strategic goals for the entire organization. Now, your brand has made life easier. It’s made teams look good to their colleagues. It’s made users’ daily lives less stressful and more rewarding. They don’t know what they’d do without you. That’s an emotional connection—and that’s an engaged customer.
Impact is Everything
What the numbers say: Customer impact is the number one driver of customer engagement; companies who drive customer impact have 72% more engaged customers.
What the numbers mean: It’s not enough to know what your customers want—you have to help them get there. And that means putting your customer’s goals first, rather than your own. In our experience, very few companies actually do this—and that’s probably why only 29% of B2B customers are truly engaged with their vendors.
A closer look: In a competitive, high-pressure environment, it’s easy to default to a laser focus on your own quotas and goals. It takes discipline, skill, and a clear alternative process to operationalize a more forward-thinking approach: One that starts with customer goals, and builds out an internal business model (and growth plan) from there. We’ve written before about what it means to truly put customers first, and why it doesn’t mean sacrificing your own goals, but rather, the opposite: When you build a model based on making an impact for customers, you underscore your own success in a sustainable, resilient, and compelling way.
Of course, before you can put customer goals first, you have to know what they are. Then you have to have an account planning methodology that works backwards from customer goals, not just your own. The right KAM software can help codify and solidify processes around customer engagement and impact, supporting a team of key account managers who are ready to make a difference for your customers.
Key Account Managers are the Key
What the numbers say: 40% of B2B customers who are very satisfied with their AM are fully engaged—but this drops to 13% if they’re not.
What the numbers mean: Key account managers are the key to customer engagement. Invest in them by hiring the right people and supporting them with the right process and technology.
A closer look: In lieu of B2C’s Hollywood-style advertising, B2B companies have a different, more powerful tool for creating emotional engagement with their brand: Their people. As Gallup writes, “Authentic customer-centricity is accomplished only in the presence of advisory account relationships.”
Building a team of effective KAMs starts with your hiring practices. Rather than recruit people who are good at “sales,” in the traditional sense, or even customer service in the limited sense, recruit and hire people with a more nuanced and comprehensive skill set: One that can build, grow, and maintain relationships.
Start by scanning resumes for the right experience—managing strategic, complicated accounts, where the key to success wasn’t just selling a product and walking away, but using the product as a vehicle for building a strategic partnership. Focus less on title (though it’s important) and more on the organization and client roster to get a sense of what kinds of customers they’ve served. In the interview, gauge the candidate’s listening skills. Are they as good at listening to you as they are at selling themselves? Did they do their research to understand what your organization is trying to accomplish through hiring for this position? Are they asking questions about broader strategic objectives? If they are, that’s a great sign: A candidate who is already making an effort to understand you and your organization will likely do the same for customers.
In addition to hiring the right team of KAMs, it’s important to support them with a clear process and purpose-built technology. This helps them be more successful in their jobs, which in turn, as the stat above demonstrates, helps customers feel more engaged with your company.
Kapta Can Help
In order to successfully build customer engagement, KAMs need the right support. They need time and space for client communication. They need a clear internal process to guide their activities and performance reviews. And they need purpose-built technology to support and accelerate their efforts.
That’s where Kapta comes in. Kapta offers tools to help KAMs dive deep, understanding what their customers’ goals, expectations, and obstacles so they can start to develop and deliver proactive solutions. Kapta’s Action Planning tool is designed to translate big picture customer goals into meaningful action plans that make an impact for customers. And Kapta’s real-time tracking and measurement tools give you the data you need to constantly assess your value for customers.
Key account managers are the key to building B2B customer engagement. To see how Kapta helps support them in their role, schedule your personalized demo today.