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 Ad Agencies are Investing in Key Account Management
Key Account Management is the art of engaging with high-value…
February 17, 2020/by Kelly SharpPerformance Reviews for Key Account Managers
When it’s time to do a performance review for your key account…
February 10, 2020/by Lesley PoladskyMake Your Account Reviews Count: Your guide to leading account reviews that drive client satisfaction and open the door to organic growth
Don’t just check the box. Move the needle.
Account reviews…
February 3, 2020/by Alex RaymondAccount reviews…
When Things Go Wrong: Client Communication in a Crisis
Customer engagement is easy when things go well. And of course,…
January 27, 2020/by Lesley PoladskyTeam 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 RaymondCategories
Tags
ABM
Account-based Customer Success
account management
account management process
account management skills
account management software
account management team
account manager skills
account planning
account plans
change management
coaching
continuous relationship management
CRM
CSO Insights
customer goals
customer outcomes
customer relationships
customer success
HBR
KAM
KAMCon
KAM process
KAM skills
KAM software
key account management
Key Account Management Best Practice
key account management skills
Key Account Management Tools
Key Account Managers
key accounts
Miller Heiman
proactive account management
QBR
QBRs
Quarterly Business Reviews
recession
relationship mapping
Strategic Account Management
Strategic Account Managers
strategic planning
SWOT
upsell
VOC
Voice of Customer
Subscribe to the Kapta newsletter
Contact Us
Kapta, Inc.
885 Arapahoe Avenue
Boulder, CO 80302
+1 303 495 6201
[email protected]
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.
Defining the New Normal: Updating your Voice of Customer in the Time of COVID
/in Key Account Management /by Kelly SharpThe COVID crisis has forced many organizations to operate reactionally since early this year. And while the crisis is by no means over, it has become the new normal in some ways. Which means it’s time to pause, take a breath, and make the transition from reactive to proactive thinking.
Last week, we talked about updated SWOT analyses for you and your customers—understanding how COVID has presented external opportunities and threats, and using those as a lens to examine strengths and weaknesses within yours and your customers’ organizations.
This week, we’re tackling Voice of Customer in the time of COVID—specifically, how to check in with your clients to make sure you understand how the crisis is impacting them, and what you can do to help them weather the storm. (Because remember, if they do, you do, too.)
Voice of Customer Refresher
Voice of Customer (VOC) is a term that describes your customer’s feedback about their experiences with and expectations for your products or services. It focuses on customer needs, expectations, understandings, and product improvement.
At the end of the day, it’s a fancy way of saying you need to check in with your customers to make sure the relationship is meeting their needs and expectations. The very act of asking can promote customer engagement— and listening and following through/delivering on the needs you uncover is where you really seal the deal.
Voice of Customer interviews can be conducted in one of 2 main ways: A survey or a face-to-face interview. Each has their place. A well-designed survey can take 5-10 minutes of a customer’s day and answer a lot of quick questions. Surveys can be a good way to collect similar information from several customers, generating quantitative trends across a whole portfolio of business. They can even be a good way to prepare for an interview, getting some logistical questions out of the way so you have the information you need to dive deep into more qualitative, nuanced questions.
Face-to-face interviews—whether as focus groups or 1:1 meetings—are the best way to answer questions that aren’t easily answered in multiple choice or yes/no formats. They bring a personal touch and demonstrate a high level of commitment on your part. They also present the chance to read between the lines—to see where a client hesitates or lights up, nods their head or loses interest. And in the time of COVID, we think interviews are the way to go. Zoom fatigue aside, people are missing social connections, and this is a great way to get face time the best way we can right now.
COVID: VOC Questions
1) How are you doing?
We hope this is obvious, but it’s important to start by understanding the way the pandemic itself has affected your customers on a personal level. Some people are fine—their jobs are secure, their families are safe. Some people are facing real economic or personal uncertainty; others are parenting 2 small children without childcare while still trying to keep up with work. Still others have been ill themselves, or have, worst case, lost family members. It’s been a hard year for everyone and it’s important to understand the mental space your customers are in before you dive straight into business talk.
Understanding how COVID affects your clients personally is important because (a) your customers are human beings, not just walking revenue potential, and (b) you don’t want to barrel in like a bull in a china shop, acting tone deaf and trying to push, say, additional business risk on a person who doesn’t even feel like they can safely go to the grocery store. Pause and listen, read the room, and proceed from there.
2) What are the key business challenges you’re facing?
In addition to personal impact, it’s key to assess the economic impact on your customers—and of course, their customers. If your customer works in the travel and hospitality industry, you have hopefully already had several conversations about how to pivot in this crisis.
Even for industries where the impact is positive—for example, if your customers work in telecommunications—the crisis will necessarily have changed the challenges they face. Maybe in lieu of revenue dips, they’re facing the need to expand capacity quickly. Maybe they need to ensure PPE for public-facing teams. Whatever their struggles, you’ll understand them better if you ask proactively.
3) What potential changes are you considering to your business model or strategic plan?
The only way you can plan for your customers is to know what they’re planning themselves. If they already have a strong plan in place, you can proactively help execute. If they don’t know the path forward, your team can dive in, offering valuable outside perspective and ideas. Just make sure to ask, so you don’t come back to them with 3 great ideas they’ve already thought of themselves.
4) How can we help?
Again, Voice of Customer is primarily about understanding your customer’s goals and expectations, to make sure you’re proactively engaging customers and strengthening the relationship. Just like anything, the best way to find out what they need from you is to ask.
Conclusion
COVID is changing everything—but that doesn’t mean the same systematic approach to customer engagement won’t serve you now. In fact, the practice of active engagement is even more important—more than ever, you can’t assume you know what your customers need. If everything’s changing for them, it’s changing for you as the entity that serves them.
So take a breath, step into the new normal, and revisit your VOC. Whether you use a survey or an interview or a combination of both, they’ll appreciate your proactivity, and you’ll come out of it with clear strategic objectives for the year ahead. To see how Kapta can help you stay on top of your VOC work, in a crisis and beyond, schedule a personal demo today.