A Best-Practices Account Management Process Will Drive In-Year Revenue Growth

Why Look at the Account Management Process?

 

As a sales leader, you have a significant role in driving company growth. If you have an even moderate concentration of revenue in a relatively small number of customers, you are likely to benefit from the implementation of an Account Management Process.

Implementing an Account Management Process will enable your team to reduce churn, generate leads for cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, improve long-term pricing, increase renewals, and identify account risk. As the company’s sales leader, you have the ability to transform your company to reach its full potential. And de-risk revenue concentration.

To quickly and effectively prepare for this you must:

• Segment and target the right organizations (it’s not always the ones who give you the most revenue)
• Measure the quality and quantity of the lead flow inside those target Key Accounts
• Determine the correct number of sales reps to cover the accounts and even their needed skills
• Optimize sales territories of accounts
• Measure individual and team sales performance

   

To achieve the above results, the big lift is to implement a best-practices Account Management process. This process differs quite significantly from the Opportunity Management process, which governs the selling efforts aimed at landing new logo customers. And it is the Opportunity Management process that often gets the most attention from sales leaders, even though the revenue/bookings generated from this process account for 15-35% of the total topline. The majority comes from account management. So productivity gains can be realized by focusing management attention there.

One key objective of an improved account management motion is an extension of the customer lifecycle. This can be achieved by driving customer success initiatives, establishing a consistent business review cadence, and deepening client knowledge. Each of these steps enables your sales teams to focus on the business challenges that your customer is trying to solve. Ensure that the customer has been onboarded successfully and maintain the expectation of what it means to do business with your organization.

Reduce Customer Churn to Positively Impact the Customer Lifetime Value

 

Implement an Account Management process to reduce churn by focusing on customer success. This is performed by conducting a concise, onboarding process. The most effective processes include:  

• Detailed Participants
• Responsibilities
• Goals
• Timelines
• Client/Consultant Assignments

   

With alignment between product development and marketing, customers should also be able to access support tools enabling them to customize software or platforms for themselves.

Download the Customer Lifetime Value Calculator here to benchmark your results against companies at the same level in the Revenue Growth Maturity Model.

Unearth Account Opportunity Through Purposeful Business Review Meetings

 

Generating leads inside customers is a core function of the Account Management process. The most effective way to generate leads is by conducting an internal business review meeting to ask customers about the following:

• Business core objectives
• Long-term and short-term aspirations for this partnership
• Measuring success
• Actions needed to ensure success
• Current challenges with the solution

   

By getting answers to these questions from the team, the account manager will be able to not only better serve the customer by matching the solutions being sold to the demands of the business.

Proactively Identify Account Risk

 

By developing an in-depth client knowledge, account managers will be able to identify explicit and implicit account risks. For example, if a current customer is in a consolidating market, there is an inherent risk that the organization could get purchased.

Deep client knowledge will also enable your team to continually reiterate the value proposition to the client.

Determine your churn rate across your customer base. Look at churn by count and by revenue. Cross-cut the numbers by vertical, geo, and segment (e.g., SMB vs. Enterprise). This alone will expose the areas of increased risk. Once you know the weak spots, then calculate customer lifetime value using a formal calculator method. Knowing this value for each cohort will help your team determine the level of investment for each customer.

Build a custom Account Management Process using a template that includes onboarding, business reviews, and client research. Your customer will value your dedication to their success and remain loyal.

Contact us to talk with an expert to assess your current Account Management process. Success is determined by organizations that are able to develop deep relationships with their customers. By reducing churn and expanding the customer lifetime value, this will ultimately lead to enhanced profit.